...Ellen Gruenbaum Sondra Hale’s self-imposed thirty years of silence on female circumcision—broken in 1994 for her Ufahamu article and discussed in her chapter for Obioma Nnaemeka’s Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge (Praeger, 2005)—was grounded in her critique of the “residuals...

... and anthropologists for the questions it poses about the production of subaltern histories. The first five chapters address the cultural production of the Gulf in pre-modern, pre-Islamic societies and the present day. Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi’s chapter analyzes common myths and artifacts...

... investigate femininity in some capacity, though Jarmakani’s chapters on sheikhs attend more to the construction of masculinity. Meanwhile, Al-Samman studies how tropes around Arab femininity are visited and revised in Arab women’s writing. Each text situates close readings within discourses of trauma...

..., Suleiman’s work opens the volume and gives an overview of the history of Arab American women from the 1890s through World War II. Based on extensive research into the writings by and about Arab American women in the early Arab American press, Suleiman’s chapter provides a framework for the rest of the volume...

... of burden. We Have No Microbes Here includes a Preface by the series edi- tors and nine chapters. Th e Preface connects the work to others in the series of Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology. Chapter 1, “Approaches,” places the author and this work in the fi eld of medical anthropology...

... and choices made in national settings. book reviews  mn  143 The book is divided into three main parts. The first includes three chapters addressing Islamic legal thought and ARTs, analyzing, as the editors put it, “How reproduction has been understood...

... published at the time, providing a holistic sense of the modern Iranian literary and artistic milieux. Chapter 1 maps out the definition of sigheh , namely, that it is a “form of concubinage,” shorter than a formal marriage contract, in which the couple negotiates “the length, monetary exchange...

... of female agency and an impressive precedent for recognizing bilateral descent in Sunni and Shiʿi societies. Alongside the introduction and the epilogue, the volume is organized into three main parts, each comprising two chapters. Gabbay’s study first examines the Sunni and Shiʿi texts belonging...

... treatment of female figures, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. In an introductory chapter, five chapters devoted to different sorts of women in the collective biographies—a “unique literary genre” (1) that compiles and organizes entries on individuals—and a brief thematic conclusion, Roded...

.... The text thus also contributes significantly to scholarship on the contemporary Arabic novel by treating works that remain largely unfamiliar in the West. The book consists of an Introduction, four chapters, and an After- 118  mn  JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES  7:2 word...

... and on studies of her, contextualized with examples from European and Islamicate literatures. It also introduces different concepts of gender analysis, such as marginality, performativity, and the subject position, using Mihrî Hatun as an example. The remainder of the book consists of six chapters divided...

... of the social and historical conditions of the jurists and might take up the book’s arguments with reference to recent anthropological work on Islamic law and public reasoning in the present day. In chapter 6 Sadeghi discusses the historical development of Hanafi legal reasoning and looks particularly...

... the colonizer and colonized, between classes, and over the national body politic. The book comprises an introduction, five empirical chapters, and a conclusion. Kozma first situates the focus of her analysis—the discourses, practices, and conflicts surrounding the state regulation of prostitution—in terms...

... methods, also draws on political science and history. While the book unfolds chronologically, one is tempted to reverse the order of the chapters, as this would illuminate the root causes of the civil protests in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and many other squares around Iraq since 2011, unrest that picked...

... of Middle East women’s studies  8:2 that coincided with its further gendering as displaced, mostly female, Shi‘a villagers replaced a declining Maronite workforce. Chapter 5 lays bare the state’s own gender bias regarding women’s “suitability for mechanized labor” (117...

... in terms of the decrease in homophobia, but chapters in this collection show that in a greater sampling it is clear that ethnic, sexual, and religious stigmas are still alive in the formation and reformation of masculinities, even at times in the millennial generation. The remaining five chapters do...

... corporeal norms. The production of the national dancer, Meftahi argues, has necessarily involved othering performers and genres deemed antithetical to the dominant ideologies of particular historical junctures. Chapter 1 introduces the key movement traditions of Iran and surveys the performance forms...

... İlkkaracan’s Introduction addresses local perceptions of gender and sexuality, providing much needed insight into the Middle Eastern nations’ diverse and varied con- structions of gender and sexuality. In Chapter 2 of the collection, Sherifa Zuhur offers an extensive and intensive...

... core interlocutors gradually emerge as complex individuals who actively negotiate their present lives and futures. Each of the five chapters following the introduction begins with and is structured around analysis of meaningful “moments,” a methodological approach that enables the author to account...

... divideddivided intointo fi veve chap-chap- ters in addition to the Introduction and Conclusion. Chapter one, titled “Women of the Republic and Islam: Between the Private and the Po- litical,” examines the consequences of being an Islamist woman in the Turkish context. Women who had long...