Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

The corpus of miriam cooke’s writing defines new frontiers in scholarship on women’s writings on war and violence, Islamic feminism, and the dissident politics of art and literature. cooke engages with double critique that writes against Orientalism and Islamophobia as well as indigenous forms of repression and injustice. Her emphasis is on the intersections of power and poetics, highlighting the aesthetics of political critique. Her work identifies the persistent agency of women writers and artist-activists in times of hopelessness and turbulence. Her scholarship, deeply grounded in several countries in the Arab world, generates questions about gender, politics, and everyday experiences in Turkey, where I have been conducting research since the 1990s. Women have been at the forefront of contestations over the terms of inclusion and exclusion in Turkey. They challenge prevailing hegemonies, provoked partly by the targeting of women’s bodies, dress, and subject positions by differently situated ideological groups, secular...