Gender and Sexualities in Muslim Cultures

Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 2006

Routledge, 2016

Exploring the multifaceted nature of gender and sexuality within Islamic societies in a trans-disciplinary and trans-regional fashion, this collection addresses the following questions: What are the principal methodologies for studying gender and sexuality in Islam? What is Islamic feminism? How do we understand the role of gender in the Islamic revival movements that have emerged since the last quarter of the twentieth century? How have historical forces and political projects-colonialism, nationalism, and modernity-constituted gender relations? How have sexual ideologies and practices transformed in Muslim majority societies in the modern era? What is the relationship between the global circulation of LGBTQ identities and queer and sexual counter-publics in the Islamic world?

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, 2019

Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures. Beyond Norms and Transgressions from the Abbasids to the Present Day, 2021

In this introduction we set a number of sociological insights when looking at gender normativity in the Middle east, namely 1). The variability of hierarchies shaping norms; (2) the multiplicity of sources of authority on gender and sexuality that always coexist; (3) the existence of realms of activity in which the quest for pleasure seems to take precedence over dominant ethical goal setting, sometimes producing its own framework of normative expectations; and 4) the limits of our capacity as historians and social-science researchers to give a full account of the experience of sexuality. We then present the plan of the books.

This chapter scrutinizes the changing roles of women and gender roles, particularly in the Arab world. It sketches not only how gender relations have been inflected by religion, politics, and colonialism since the early twentieth century, but also the multitude of ways that women in different societies have articulated their autonomy in spheres of work, education, and home life. More assertive expressions of women’s rights have increased over the past two decades through mechanisms such as civil society activism, legislative representation, changing legal codes, and uprisings like the Arab Spring, but indigenous women’s rights movements have existed since colonial times. The chapter also examines state feminism, which has been mobilized for both authoritarian and democratic ends, as well as Islamic feminism, which seeks to advance women’s rights by drawing on understandings of egalitarian practices in early Islam. The discussion finally touches on sexual orientation, in particular how new voices are questioning the historical treatment of queerness while also interrogating the changing nature of sexuality for cultural discourse.

My ethnographic fieldwork conducted with female converts to Islam in France and in Quebec (Canada) shows that, for these women, being Muslim does not necessarily mean wearing clothes with ‘oriental’ designs. Rather, they are starting their own clothing companies so as to produce distinct Muslim-Western fashions that they promote through the Internet. By interpreting Islam in a context where Muslims are a minority religious group, converts construct alternative religious and social representations of Muslim identity that accord with their feminist interpretation of the Qu’ran while simultaneously incorporating the Western background within which they were socialized. In this regard, the strategies that they develop for wearing the veil and for integrating into their environment (family, workplace, etc.) make it clear that fashion, religion and politics are interacting in multiple, creative ways. In this paper, I look at how new Muslim feminist subjectivities are produced and realized through habits of dress, resulting in new representations of the body. I explore this issue by considering dress and hairstyle strategies developed by Muslim converts, in order to examine new perspectives on the place of gender in religion as it relates to particular social contexts.

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2014

This is an important book that closely interrelates feminist theory and practice and monitors courageous acts of feminist resistance across a wide range of countries, mainly in the South. It refuses to fall into the trap that many feminists and especially anti-racists fall into, in which any critique of Muslim practice is considered racist, without the realisation that the very act of homogenising all Muslims and Islamic discourses is a racist reification in itself.

An examination of popular advice literature geared toward Muslims living in the West, such as the type commonly available in U.S. mosques and at online Islamic bookstores, indicates that there exist at least two potentially conflicting narratives regarding the ḥijāb (the veil or headcovering) as a pious practice. The first narrative presents female sexuality as a natural and positive force, as long as it is properly channeled. The ḥijāb, in this narrative, is not meant to categorically repress women's erotic nature, but is a pragmatic social practice meant to avoid eroticism in the public sphere, where it would be a source of temptation and disorder. Often corresponding to this narrative is a notion of (female) sexuality as static, and a gender ideology that deemphasizes difference. A second narrative presents erotic desire and fulfillment as a marker of attachment to the world and an assertion of the ego (nafs), and therefore negative. In this view, the ḥijāb is an ascetic practice, a means by which a woman may discipline her self and develop a greater spiritual-moral faculty. This narrative frames sexuality as malleable, and also tends to emphasize gender difference. This paper seeks to tease out the conflicting models of the erotic that emerge in this genre of writing. It further demonstrates how authorial deviations from a text's core argument regarding veiling and eroticism can reflect an instrumental use of these narratives and models in favor of the predetermined conclusion, which is the obligation to veil, and to which end both models of eroticism and both narratives of veiling are bent.

Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy/Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2020

Davies, Sharyn. Sexuality, Gender Identity and Islam. Gary Mucciaroni (ed). doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1255.

Claremont Journal of Religion , 2015

This paper takes inspiration from critical feminist theory on the body, its social construction, and the modes of its regulation, to argue that Muslim legal rulings regarding female adornment are inextricably grounded in the social location of its progenitors, such that free male bodies and sexual desires are recurrently privileged over and against the bodies and desires of other social groups. At the same time, I argue that these discourses can reinforce feminist claims about the affective power of the gaze in objectifying women as well as support feminist aims of protecting and advancing women’s human dignity.