In/Between Feminism and Foucault: Iraqi Women’s War Blogs and Intellectual Practices of the Self

Abstract

In this article we inquire into the forms of intellectual work that are possible when non-Muslim, non-Arab, western academics (female PhD candidate, male PhD supervisor) seek to work together to analyse the war-blogs of a small number of Iraqi women. We confront the central challenge of how to understand and account for such things as freedom, choice, self, gender, politics and relationships in the stories these women tell about themselves. We discuss how, in working in/between Foucault and feminism, it is possible to establish spaces in which a useful, though provisional and shifting, vocabulary of critique can emerge. Our aim is not to be for or against feminism or Foucault. Our position is that Foucault’s vocabulary of enlightenment and critique provides a means to think and talk about how we approach the task of accounting for the selves that we encounter in Iraqi women’s blogs.