Feminist Studies

Preface

Drawing on historical examples from the Islamic Middle East and specifically Iran, as well as significations of the veil in Western Europe from the seventeenth century onward, Najmabadi reveals the ways in which veiling was indelibly caught up in the broader shifts in understanding, for example, from a focus on male bodies to female bodies through a shift in preoccupation and public debate about the beard to a debate focusing on the veil. Not only do we need to pay attention to these shifts ...

Gender and Secularism of Modernity: How Can a Muslim Woman Be French?

The current debates in and about the veil in Europe carry with them not only the terms of the emergence of political Islam in the past several decades, but also this historical memory and that of the earlier cultural encounters and colonial wars between Europe and the domains now named the Middle East and North Africa. While I do not mean to collapse these projects into a singular entity, the historical legacy of fixing the meaning of a Muslim woman's veil as the sign of her gender oppressio...

Feminist Scholarship and the Internationalization of Women's Studies

In the context of feminist scholarship and women's studies departments, the convergence of Second Wave feminism with the universalistic impulses of modernity and modernization as articulated in the formulation of "sisterhood is global" or patriarchy as a universal system of gender hierarchy has created space for conceptualizing internationalization as the expansion of Eurocentric and U.S.-based feminisms.1 In this case, internationalization has never been about any kind of exchange or flow of...

Gender and Survival: A Jewish Family in Occupied France, 1940-1944

After the war, his Jewish commitment was largely pushed under the carpet by his close family, who had become Communist Party members, and also by the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme which viewed human rights as the sole driving force of his life.

Homecoming

Tenses herself silent and motionless until the moment her body floats out the bedroom window to the tree in front of the house where he is waiting. Stomping, shuffling, tapping, swishing, marching, left-right-left, heel-to-toe, four-four, six-eight, eleven-and-a-half, a multiplicity of sound patterns communicating wishes, warnings, secrets. From time to time an impulse seized her to jump into the water, to sink into the waves of unfamiliar black hair that surrounded her, but she did not rel...

One Ring Circus/Altar Call

where the circus had pitched its tent.

Our Lady of Sorrows

Memorial Park had a carousel and a snack bar; it was where all the kids hung out if they weren't going to the mall and her father was sure to look in both places. Then, a picture popped into her head of the little embryo sprouting its stumpy arms and legs like a bean and its shoot.

We Are (Not All) Homophobes: A Report From Poland

The aim of the present report is to provide facts, ideas, and images that will enable an outside observer to make sense of developments in Poland and to move beyond the familiar refrain, "Poland-is-Catholic-no-wonder-it-is-homophobic."