Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation Available to Purchase

Women and Gender in Iraq is an obligatory read for understanding Iraq’s current wave of civil unrest. Yet, if one is to argue that Zahra Ali roots her book on women and gender studies, its readership certainly trespasses feminist traditional audiences. Her research informs political scientists, economists, humanitarian and development practitioners, and local and international activists of the centrality of gender in women’s lives but also, fundamentally, Iraqi politics and nation-building processes. Ali’s unique contribution is to fill the gap in and take issue against research and disciplines that have long relegated the women or gender question to a lesser analytic category or that have simplified and undertheorized its importance. At the theoretical level she situates herself in a growing trend of “contextualising notions of women’s rights and feminism, secular and religious, and conservative and progressive” (289) within the historical and political events that first prompted them, thus enriching a...