Women and Gender Studies in the Middle East: A conversation with the editors of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies: Sherine Hafez, Soha Bayoumi, and Ellen McLarney

The 2018-19 Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series discusses key debates and new approaches to the theory and study of women, gender and sexuality in the Middle East and Islamic World, and the implications of those on the theory and study of women, gender and sexuality in the Global South. The Spring semester will include a sub-series discussing the work and contributions of the late Professor Saba Mahmood, from the perspectives of leading and upcoming scholars in the field. The seminar meets biweekly on Mondays 3-5 p.m., alternating between a speaker events and collective reading and discussion sessions led by the graduate coordinators and faculty members.

Sherine Hafez  is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and served as President for the Association of Middle East Anthropologists (AMEA).  Hafez’s research focuses on Islamic movements and gender studies in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures. Her new book in press (Indiana University Press) discusses Egypt’s revolutionary women and gendered corporeal resistance in the Middle East.

Hafez is the author of The Terms of Empowerment: Islamic Women Activists in Egypt (2003), which questioned the applicability of empowerment as defined by western liberal discourse to Islamic women’s activism. Her second book, An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion And Secularism In Women’s Islamic Movements (New York University Press, 2011), challenges binary conceptions of women’s subjectivities in Islamic movements by relating the interplay between the complex debates of modernity and postcoloniality to the particular historicity of Islam and secularism. She also co-edited the volume entitled, Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium, (Indiana University Press, 2013). Her articles have appeared in American Ethnologist; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Feminist Review; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and Journal of North African Studies. Hafez lectures on gender, subjectivity, and revolution in the Muslim World and Middle East, Islamic movements, women’s Islamic activism and in the uprisings in the Arab World.

Soha Bayoumi is a Lecturer in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University and the Allston Burr Resident Dean and Assistant Dean of Harvard College. She is the current Co-Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS). Trained in political theory, political philosophy and intellectual history, Soha Bayoumi works on the question of justice at the intersection of political theory, intellectual history, and science, medicine and technology studies. With a focus on medicine and public health, her research addresses the question of health and social justice, biomedical ethics, and the links between medicine and politics, with a geographical focus on the Middle East and a special interest in postcolonial and gender studies. Her research interests focus on medical expertise and how it is deployed in different political contexts. In this framework, she focuses on gender and race as important contributors to the fashioning of the medical profession and as key determinants of health and access to medical care.

In addition to teaching courses on the history of medicine, public health and gender and sexuality, she has also taught courses in European and American intellectual history, as well as the intellectual history of the modern and contemporary Middle East, with a focus on gender and feminist writing and activism. She is currently finishing a book manuscript (co-authored with Sherine Hamdy, UC Irvine) on the role of doctors in the Egyptian uprising, and working on another book project on the question of health and social justice and the social roles of doctors in postcolonial Egypt.

Professor Ellen McLarney is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She is the current Co-Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS). Trained in Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies—at the intersection of cultures, languages, peoples, civilizations, and literatures—with a specific focus on religion and cultural production her research uses a literary hermeneutics to approach current Islamic cultural production that extends far beyond the text, into film, audio, video, radio, television, and the digital world. Her first book Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening analyzed how women revivalists have contributed to shaping an Islamic public sphere through writings on Islamic law, family, motherhood, sexuality, girls’ education, women’s work, and women’s liberation.

Her current project uses a cultural studies approach to analyze the media networks cultivated by Islamic communities and institutions in Latin America, as well as related cultural output—films dubbed into Spanish from Farsi and Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese literature revolving around Islamic themes, transnational connections between Beirut and Brazil in the art world, Latin American political movements that invoke Palestine, and a shared political vocabulary of decolonization, social justice, and liberation theology that articulates not just South-South solidarities, but also the contours of a contemporary Latin American Islam.

 

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS), the Science, Religion and Culture Program (SRC), the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, and the Journal of Middle East Women Studies (JMEWS). This year’s seminar inaugurates the residence of JMEWS at Harvard, which extends from May 2018 to May 2022.