This article explores American Palestinian women’s discursive strategies and identity politics by which they take control of their marital choices. Through the analysis of sixteen in-depth interviews with second-generation Palestinian women and personal observations within the community, the article shows that nationalist and religious discourses produced by the historical contexts respectively stimulated (semi)arranged in-group marriages in the 1990s and self-initiated exogamous marriages as of the early 2000s. Among the group, Islam has become the primary form of identification, and religious discourse has been circulating within Islamic institutions post-1980s. Based on this transformation, the study draws on the strategic use of religious sentiments and Islamic discourse and argues that women’s prioritization of Islamic identity has increased their agency in spouse selection and marriage process. Women’s negotiations within an Islamic framework also expose the ways Muslim women counter and redefine gender roles by fortifying their religious beliefs and reinterpreting Islamic doctrine.

journal article

LitStream Collection

The Ritual FusionIndividuality, Tradition, and Sensory Memory in Iranian Women’s Islamic Gatherings in Los Angeles

Rezaei, Afsane

2022 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

doi: 10.1215/15525864-9767856

This article explores domestic religious practices of Iranian Muslim women in Los Angeles. In the diasporic context, Iranian women’s voluntary engagement in vernacular Islamic practices is often associated with an unreflexive pursuit of religion and lack of agency or with complicity with the Islamic Republic’s conservative brand of Shiism. To examine the complexities of such practices in the United States, this research relies on the ethnography of a monthly domestic gathering in LA that offers a hybrid blend of multiple devotional and social genres. The article demonstrates that the event’s performative and affective characteristics cater to a range of individual framings of the shared ritual and allow for complex and multilayered modes of engaging with the practice of faith. Further, it argues that vernacular Islamic practices in the diaspora are not always tied to individuals’ expression of religious conviction and pursuit of piety. By depicting the material and sensory aspects of the space, the article suggests that such rituals can serve as sites for engaging in a mode of diasporic nostalgia that does not commonly have a place in Iranian communities’ nostalgic narratives of the homeland.

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LitStream Collection

Politics of Location in PersepolisThe Social and Literary Construction of the Place, Space, and Belonging for Iranian Women in Persepolis versus Iran

Hamidi, Yalda N.

2022 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

doi: 10.1215/15525864-9767870

This article offers a transnational feminist reading of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis based on the genealogy of politics of location. Articulated by Adrienne Rich in 1984 and criticized and evolved by Karen Caplan, the concept of politics of location provides a framework for rereading the graphic novel that highlights intersectional aspects of identities that appeared in the text. Through this lens this article looks at how Satrapi ties her personal story to the story of other Iranian women and at the nuances of the identities she represents to her Western readers. Notably, the article examines the politics of writing trauma, gender, and race into the text and analyzes the picture of other Iranian women through the mirror of Satrapi’s graphic novel. It argues that in writing Persepolis, Satrapi has made an undeniable contribution to challenging the dominant narratives of nationhood and female citizenship by documenting the trauma of the Iranian Left in the history of the nation. However, because of her specific color-blind politics of race and antireligious politics of gender, her work overlooks some groups of Iranian women’s existence and experiences. Thus this article argues against reading and teaching Persepolis as representative of Iranian women or a universal version of Third World feminism.

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LitStream Collection

The Painful Road to Freedom in Maram al-Masri’s Elle Va Nue la Liberté (Freedom Walks Naked)

Mehta, Brinda J.

2022 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

doi: 10.1215/15525864-9767884

This essay examines the poetry of the Francophone author Maram al-Masri, a diasporic feminist poet from Syria who has lived in exile in Paris since 1992. Elle va nue la liberté is an indictment of the regime of Bashar al-Assad and an ode to the creative resilience of ordinary people during the Syrian revolution (2011). This essay demonstrates how al-Masri’s poetry grafts landscapes of pain and resistance in a poetics of the gut that bears witness to horror, trauma, and resistance. It focuses on the trope of blood writing, documentary poetry or poésie-vérité, and the poet’s sense of exile in France.

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LitStream Collection

Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul

Kocamaner, Hikmet

2022 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

doi: 10.1215/15525864-9767898

journal article

LitStream Collection

Lebanese Women at the Crossroads: Caught between Sect and Nation

Broderick, Kylie

2022 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

doi: 10.1215/15525864-9767912