Lila Abu-Lughod Research Articles

“Imperial solidarity”: do queer and trans Afghan Muslims need “saving”?

ABSTRACT In August 2021, immediately after the abrupt withdrawal of the United States (US) from Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban, “saving” Afghan women and queer and trans Afghans was highlighted as a global humanitarian responsibility, from Canada to the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, France and the US. Echoing Lila Abu-Lughod’s famous question “Do Muslim women need saving?,” in this article, I ask: do queer and trans Afghan Muslims need “saving”? Through an in-depth “de/colonial” ethnographic study with queer and trans Afghan Muslims in Afghanistan and the US, I develop the concept of “imperial solidarity,” which refers to “savior” regimes of Eurocentric, white, liberal, middle-class, and queer and trans unities and sympathies that establish certain forms of queer and trans ties across borders while serving the imperial project of “divide and rule,” invasion and withdrawal, Islamophobia and homophobia, and save and kill. I argue that imperial solidarity situates the West as morally superior and Islam as anti-queer and trans, which then contributes to an already rising Islamophobia. Another political implication of imperial solidarity with which this article engages is queer and trans Afghan Muslims’ troubled sense of (be)longing, both within Muslim communities and broader queer and trans communities.

The Banality of Disruption: Diagnosing Order

In a seminal essay, Lila Abu-Lughod addresses “The Romance of Resistance,” suggesting that widespread scholarly interest in unlikely and quotidian forms of resistance is romanticizing. Rather than identifying resistance as proof of the ineffectiveness of systems of power, she contends that scholars might more productively consider how resistance is embedded in, and can serve as a diagnostic of, power. Writing in a Foucauldian vein, she reminds “where there is resistance, there is power.” If Abu-Lughod cautions against romanticizing resistance, in this response I take up a similarly critical stance toward disruption. Following Abu-Lughod's formula and drawing on my own experience as an ethnographer of music and sound in Turkish modernity, I suggest that where there is disruption, there is order, and that disruption might therefore become a site for diagnosis of order.

Active Compassion

In the United States and elsewhere, Zen (Chan) has often been positioned as coupled to, if not synonymous with, Japanese and other martial arts. This essay is a critical exploration of the Buddhist concepts of emptiness and no-self as they relate to Zen and martial arts, drawing upon Lila Abu-Lughod’s “ethnographies of the particular” to articulate the author’s own experience as a Jujutsu instructor and Buddhist practitioner. It offers several modes of understanding the ways in which Zen and the martial arts may be simultaneously incompatible with and reaffirming of one another, concluding with a re-envisioning of how the two diverse traditions may be woven together to benefit self and others in what the essay calls “active compassion.”

Trad nationalist a/effects

Trad nationalist a/effects

Saving the Modern Woman

AbstractThis article looks at how specific gendered practices and ideas about female bodies were instrumentalized in the struggle for political authority during Egypt’s transitional period between 2011 and 2013. It argues that in the aftermath of the uprising, when Islamists won the parliamentary and presidential elections in Egypt, the figure of the “modern” woman gained renewed political significance. By exploring Egyptian English-language women’s lifestyle magazines, the article illustrates how socioeconomically privileged, Cairo-based women crafted “modern” female bodies and engaged in what Lila Abu-Lughod calls the “politics of modernity.” By delving into the world of Cairo’s wealthy and fashionable producers of lifestyle magazines, the article shows how specific bodily techniques and vocabularies of neoliberal feminism helped construct the idea of a “modern” woman. The “modern” female body then provided a location from which other bodies, considered traditional or not yet modern, could be judged. During Egypt’s transitional period, it was not the victimized Muslim woman who needed to be saved but the modern woman who felt that her lifestyle was under attack from Islamists. Based on an analysis of visual images and discourses, the article provides a contemporary example of the use of “modern” gendered subjecthood in creating hierarchies between women.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Representations of Muslim Women after 9/11 and the Enduring Entanglements of “Writing Against”

In the fall of 2021, I taught a graduate seminar entitled Women and Gender in the Arab World at Georgetown University. It had been two decades since 9/11 and the start of the “War on Terror,” events that most of my students were not old enough to recall, but which still had, in one way or another, profoundly shaped their interest or experience in the region. In planning the course, I received a syllabus that had been used in past years. The first week was an introduction to the course, and it consisted of two essays intended to frame the state of the field of Middle East women's studies: Lila Abu-Lughod's “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” and Mounira Charrad's “Gender in the Middle East: Islam, State, and Agency.”

The Practitioner's Bookshelf: Review of Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Abstract This review considers Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and reflects on the book’s key implications for human rights practitioners. Through discussions of topical concerns such as veiling, honour crimes and forced marriages, the book critiques the global project of ‘saving’ the Muslim woman in the name of human rights and gender equality. The author reviews the book from the perspective of a human rights educator and a veiled Muslim woman living in the liberal West.

The many and different Muslim women’s voices unheard in Feminist theory

The many and different Muslim women’s voices unheard in Feminist theory

Agency versus Insurgency

Agency versus Insurgency

Phenomenological Variation and Intercultural Transformation: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Abu-Lughod’s Ethnography in Dialogue

"This paper develops phenomenological resources for understanding the nature of intercultural understanding, drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with feminist anthropologist Abu-Lughod. Part One criticizes Western framings of non-Western violence against women that render the experience of non-Western Others inaccessible. Part Two discusses how certain strains in Western feminism reinforce some of these problematic framings. Part Three offers a phenomenological account of our experience of other persons, and Part Four argues that intercultural understanding takes the form of a “variation” between one’s own and the other’s experience. Part Five explores the implications of this phenomenology of cross-cultural understanding for interpreting dynamic cultural transformations, and the politics of violence against women, in an interconnected and unequal world. Keywords: Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Lila Abu-Lughod; critical phenomenology; feminist anthropology; multiculturalism "

Islam and the Epistemic Politics of Gender

Critical reflection on gender as a category of analysis within the study of Islam is a venture fraught with intellectual and cultural challenges. Despite tacit acceptance of the analytical significance of gender, the intersection of these two categories has made for a highly charged field of inquiry, polarizing Muslim and other audiences over its commitments, practices, and impact. The field is also gendered, with most of its scholars being women. This is characteristic of Women and Gender Studies at large and underlies its marginal epistemic and institutional status within various disciplines of the modern academy.[i] While this is also true for the study of Islam and Gender, other factors are also at play: Islam and Gender scholarship is increasingly conducted by women who are Muslim or of Muslim background. This has simultaneously mitigated and reproduced the modes of marginality associated with Women and Gender Studies.[ii] On the one hand, the postcolonial lens adopted in early Islam and Gender scholarship established the salience of this newly emerging field for deconstructing orientalist stereotypes of Muslim women. Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1993), Deniz Kendioyti’s Gendering the Middle East (1996), and Lila Abu-Lughod’s Remaking Women (1998) take full cognizance of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in their critical investigation of essentializations of Islam which turn on gender. Studies recentring foundational texts as the ground for gender equality, like Qur’an and Woman (1992) by Amina Wadud, have provided postcolonial counter-readings in and of themselves. On the other hand, the growing number of Muslim women scholars engaged in the study of Islam and Gender has coincided with the global racialization of Muslim identity and rising Islamophobia since 9/11. This has led to their double penalization within their scholarly and religious communities. In the Western academy, their Muslim identity has been referenced to denigrate their scholarship as insiderist advocacy[iii]—or, in contrast, to celebrate it as a progressive niche of Islam. The reality, however, is closer to being “sequestered into a corner space,” as Julianne Hammer puts it.[iv]

Art, Activism, and the Presence of Memory in Palestine

Abstract In this interview conducted by Lila Abu-Lughod on October 17, 2020, Palestinian artist Rana Bishara discusses the three artworks that appear on the covers of volume 41 of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as numerous other multidisciplinary and multimedia artworks she has made and exhibited from the 1990s to the present, focusing specifically on art as a form of political activism.

Editors' Note

We are living through a grim moment of global convergences, from emerging contagious diseases and the looming threat of catastrophic climate change to insufferable forms of social oppression and authoritarian regimes of surveillance. We invite our readers to contribute reflections, considered scholarly meditations, or short notes “from the field” to help illuminate the ongoing turmoil of world historical crises.Meanwhile, our inaugural issue of 2021 begins with the section “The African-Soviet Modern,” which brings together interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the multiplex connections between Africa and the Soviet Union. Organized by Elizabeth Banks, Robyn d'Avignon, and Asif Siddiqi, the section investigates the distinctive ethos of African-Soviet projects of modernization and modernity that diverged from Western capitalist projects. The essays explore these projects in their own terms rather than as a state socialism destined to fail or a sideshow to particular national or nationalist histories. Andrew Ivaska's study of the circulation of exiles from Mozambique's FRELIMO insurgency, Banks's history of the troubled relationship between Soviet and Mozambiquan women's groups, Siddiqi's examination of Soviet satellite tracking stations in Africa, and Steffi Marung's genealogy of Soviet paradigms of geography and development all point to the distinctive temporalities and the methodological challenges posed by foregrounding underexplored Soviet transregional connectivities.The essays by Owain Lawson and Natalie Koch bring together political geography with environmental histories to investigate the workings of local, regional views of the land—and its rivers and deserts—from Lebanese hydroelectric engineers to Saudi desert dairy farmers in the section titled “The Geopolitics of Nature.” Their focus on the relationship between modern technopolitics and the natural landscape draws attention to the transnational links and international vectors that moved through the concepts and constructions these actors engaged with, from international financiers, urban planners, and development ideologues to desert geographers and agriculturalists.Finally, we end with the section “Political Aesthetics,” which comprises an essay on the affective feminism of contemporary Iranian art by Foad Torshizi and an original interview with the Palestinian artist Rana Bishara. As Lila Abu-Lughod's interview with Bishara makes so clear, regarding art as an active form of reconstitution as much as representation—or as a form of activism in its own right—highlights the aesthetic as much as political possibilities and perceptual movements it activates. Torshizi draws attention to the contemporary artist GhazalehHedayat's haptic visualities as aesthetic movements that interrupt acts of representation. Meanwhile, Bishara brings to life a variety of everyday objects and scenes that animate their embeddedness in contemporary Palestinian life under Israeli occupation and control and yet simultaneously integrate the experiences of dislocation and suffering they aesthetically represent, such as the use of barbed wire (ubiquitous in the landscape of occupied Palestine) wrapped around a melting ice cube in Hunger Strike/Ticking Freedom, which appears on the cover of this issue. As Bishara recalls so evocatively when describing her series Blindfolded Histories, these bittersweet juxtapositions arethemselves political acts as much as aesthetic representations: “Each time a viewer steps into the space,” she states, “there is movement. An emotion is released in this space of frozen moments from the brutal realities of our history.” Indeed, this evocative reanimation of collective memory and loss reminds us all of the power and beauty of art as activism.

The Veil in Western Eyes and the Politics of (Mis)Representation in Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner: A Graphic Novel

This study attempts to explore the (mis)representation of the Afghan women by western feminists with a special reference to Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner: A Graphic Novel. This study entails the use of the concepts of postcolonial feminism as theorized by Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Leila Ahmed and Lila Abu-Lughod as well as postcolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall. Moreover, Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ will be used to unravel how the portrayal of Muslim women in the graphic novel resulted in the ‘Othering’ of third world women, creating a third world difference. As per the alliances of graphic fiction with postmodern critical approaches and different academic disciplines, the study will also explain the significance of all medium specific features of the graphic narrative like page layout, panel design, speech balloons, narratorial captions, and sound effects. The functions of filmic techniques used in graphic narrative like camera angle shots and the mise en scene will be thoroughly examined as well in order to support the main argument of the study – mainly criticizing the negative stereotyping of Muslim women in the selected text.

Female impersonation and gender ambivalence: Does drag challenge gender norms?

This article explores the question of whether drag, in the form of female impersonation, unsettles gender norms. Some scholars and analysts of drag performance, such as Rusty Barrett (1998), James Scott (1990), Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp (2003), argue that drag is a form of resistance to dominant gender norms. I depart from these assertions and maintain that such a perspective overlooks the complexity of drag. While it can be argued that drag highlights the performative attributes of gender (see Butler 1996), drag queens in many ways affirm the stigmatised effeminate stereotype of gay male sexuality. It is thus too simplistic to posit drag performance as either subversive or reaffirming of heteronormative gender models. Building on the insights of scholars such as Judith Butler (1990; 1996), Lila Abu-Lughod (1990), Keith McNeal (1999), Carol-Anne Tyler (2013) and Caitlin Greaf (2015), as well as drawing on some of Andre Charles RuPaul's drag race shows, I argue that drag does not aim to challenge dominant gender norms. Rather, I maintain that drag highlights the inherent ambivalence of gender generated by heteronormativity, simultaneously playing with the inconsistencies between gendered cultural paradigms and actual experience. It is in this interstice that drag performance, as an art of irony and parody, opens up possibilities for gender multiplicity. Keywords: Drag performance, gender ambivalence, gender anxiety, gender norms, gender performance, RuPaul.

Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller

Reviewed by: Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela by Naomi Schiller John W. Sherman Schiller, Naomi. Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. The early historiography on the 1998–2013 Chavista project in Venezuela has been broadly positive, a trend reflected in anthropologist Naomi Schiller’s microstudy of media and the state. The basis of the book is the author’s dissertation research under Bruce Grant at New York University, which included extensive fieldwork. A first stint in Venezuela saw the author observing telenovela-watching women in a small rural town, who cared little about the emerging government of Hugo Chávez; subsequent years were spent with the cadre of Catia TVe, a community television station located in a Caracas barrio that became politically wed to the Chavista project, partly through its interaction with ViVe TV, a much larger, state-funded outlet. [End Page 245] The intellectual recipe for Schiller’s study is the familiar mainstream engaged by so many graduate students in contemporary anthropological and historical studies: large portions of James Scott and state formation theory, a smaller dose of Lila Abu-Lughod and media theory, a sprinkling of Gramsci, and a leavening of optimism about the human condition and prospects for a better world. But within this concoction Schiller’s work is wholly microfocused on the thirty staff and roughly one hundred volunteers at the Catia TVe community center. Organizationally, she walks us through the formation of Catia TVe, which predated Chávez, and the station’s pro-Chávez engagement of the 2006 election. She analyzes class dynamics—Catia TVe staff mostly from the urban working class, their Chavista interlocutors mainly middle class. She addresses gender, finding persistent barriers, despite many positive gains. Theoretically, Schiller primarily wrestles with the meaning and potential for change by way of the state, which is itself constantly morphing and resetting possibilities or imposing new limitations, as in the matter of press freedom, with Chávez’s controversial shutting down of a major commercial outlet in 2007. This book is in the mainstream of current anthropological studies and will undoubtedly be appreciated by many. This reviewer—not so mainstream—finds it far too microfocused, and ill-equipped to answer the deeper and far more pressing macroquestions relating to the obvious failure of Chavismo. In a circa 2015 redux, the author does briefly address this failure, tossing up the old mono-export complaint of bygone dependency theory. If macroeconomics can obliterate all the efforts from below to create a better world, then what is the point of studying those grassroots efforts? If positive change does not last, why is it significant? When academics make the decision to interact only with activists, they prejudice their conclusions in ways that cannot explain other critical sociopolitical phenomena. One such glaring gap is the persistent recovery and reinvention of the Latin American political Right. Where do the Álvaro Uribes and Jair Bolsonaros come from? Venezuela will almost certainly see the ascent of a neoliberal rightist regime soon—how shall we explain it? Personally, I wish that Schiller had stayed with the telenovela-watching women in the small farm town. [End Page 246] John W. Sherman Wright State University Copyright © 2021 Association of Global South Studies, Inc

A política das emoções

Este trabalho analisa o processo de interpenetração entre as esferas pública e privada em dois vídeos do canal Porta dos Fundos no YouTube, Questão de Ordem e Nome na Lista, problematizando a noção de política das emoções através dos vídeos. Para tanto, será feito o diálogo entre uma discussão teórica sobre a evolução das noções de público e privado, através de Richard Sennett (2014) e Sandra Jovchelovitch (2000), a análise dos discursos emocionais como práticas políticas, por meio de Lila Abu- Lughod e Catherine Lutz (1990) e Claudia Rezende e Maria Claudia Coelho (2010) e o humor sobre política feito pelo canal, pela análise destes dois vídeos.

Caught in the Crosshairs

Abstract Directed by Saudi Arabian filmmaker Faiza Ambah, Mariam (2015) portrays the struggles of Mariam, a Muslim French teenager who decides to wear the hijab but must contend with her school’s enforcement of a 2004 French law banning religious symbols from public institutions. Mariam must also deal with her liberal father, who opposes the hijab because of his own internalization of Islamophobic narratives that have become widespread in France. Engaging with feminist and cultural studies by such scholars as Saba Mahmood, Mohja Kahf, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Sara Ahmed, this article offers an analysis of Mariam, focusing on the protagonist’s embodied encounters with her teacher, school principal, father, and fellow students. The article argues that by recounting Mariam’s gendered and racialized struggles with forced unveiling, Ambah shifts the discourse on the head scarf from one that focuses on the perceived oppression of Islam to one that highlights the violence of the secular state.

Tango Dancing with María Lugones

Tango Dancing with María Lugones