Review Editor’s Note

Abstract

It gives me great pleasure to join JMEWS, the journal of gender in the Middle East, as the editor of the reviews section. I am especially thankful to the editorial team for their invitation to this position and to Didem Havlioglu as my predecessor.The books, films, papers, conferences, and various scholarly debates reviewed in this section are not limited to the work that explicitly focuses on gender. For several decades, our predecessors have contributed to the literature on Middle Eastern studies with their interventions on how seemingly gender-neutral institutions such as the nation-state, secularism, modernity, and religion are, in fact, built on gender norms and patriarchal values. How should we evaluate works that dismiss gender dynamics? What are the political and scholarly implications of any analysis that denies gender operations—when we read a work or listen to a panel that, let’s say, focuses on a form of Islamic piety in which the research was conducted with all-male interlocutors and no reflection on, let alone analysis of, the masculinity of piety at stake? Such screening and critical evaluation of works that do not immediately focus on gender to see whether and how those works are able to contemplate gender operations will be one of the objects of this section in the following years. Such reviews are also valuable to continue and advance the scholarship that various JMEWS authors and their predecessors have started. Fatemeh Sadeghi’s review of Jamie Allinson’s Age of Counter-revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East and Orkide Izci’s review of Deniz Yonucu’s Police, Provocation, and Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul in this issue are both authored with this gender critique in mind.I also would like to encourage graduate students and early-career scholars to use the reviews pages as an opportunity to articulate their critical positions on both published and unpublished work, such as public lectures, seminars, and various conference presentations. I am dedicated to encouraging emerging scholars in the field to own their voices and believe that authoring reviews can provide an exciting venue for this.