Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures PDF

Author: Gul Ozyegin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1317130510

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A must-read for anyone interested in Muslim cultures, this volume not only explores Muslim identities through the lens of sexuality and gender - their historical and contemporary transformations and local and global articulations - but also interrogates our understanding of what constitutes a ’Muslim’ identity in selected Muslim-majority countries at this pivotal historical moment, characterized by transformative destabilizations in which national, ethnic, and religious boundaries are being re-imagined and re-made. Contributors take on the most fundamental questions at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the body. Several overarching questions frame the volume: How does studying gender and sexuality expand and enrich our understanding of Muslim-majority countries, historically and at present? How does the embodiment of ’Muslim’ identity get reconfigured in the context of twenty-first-century globalism? What analytical questions are raised about ’Islam’ when its diverse meanings and multifaceted expressions are closely examined? What roles do gender and sexuality play in the construction of cultural, religious, nationalistic, communal, and militaristic identities? How have power struggles been signified in and on the bodies of women and sexuality? How have global dynamics, such as the intensification and spread of neoliberal ideologies and policies, affected changing dynamics of gender and sexuality in specific locales? Here global dynamics touch down in diverse contexts, from masculinity crises around war disabilities, transnational marriages, and fathering in Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan; to Muslim femininity narratives around female genital cutting, sexuality in divorce proceedings, and spouse selection; to gender crossing practices as well as protesting bodies, queering voices, and claims of authenticity in literary and political discourse. This book brings exciting research on these and other topics together in one place, allowing the essa

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures PDF

Author: Gul Ozyegin

Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9781472414533

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A must-read for anyone interested in Muslim cultures, this volume not only explores Muslim identities through the lens of sexuality and gender - their historical and contemporary transformations and local and global articulations - but also interrogates our understanding of what constitutes a 'Muslim' identity in selected Muslim-majority countries. Contributors take on the most fundamental questions at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the body.

Sexuality in Muslim Contexts

Sexuality in Muslim Contexts PDF

Author: Anissa Helie

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2012-10-11

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1780322887

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This groundbreaking book explores resistance against the harsh policing of sexuality in some Muslim societies. Many Muslim majority countries still use religious discourse to enforce stigmatization and repression of those, especially women, who do not conform to sexual norms promoted either by the state or by non-state actors. In this context, Islam is often stigmatized in Western discourse for being intrinsically restrictive with respect to women's rights and sexuality. The authors show that conservative Muslim discourse does not necessarily match practices of believers or of citizens and that women's empowerment is facilitated where indigenous and culturally appropriate strategies are developed. Using case studies from Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Israel and India, they argue persuasively that Muslim religious traditions do not necessarily lead to conservative agendas but can promote emancipatory standpoints. An intervention to the construction of 'Muslim women' as uniformly subordinate, this collection spearheads an unprecedented wake of organizing around sexualities in Muslim communities.

Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures

Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures PDF

Author: Aymon Kreil

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 183860409X

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What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This book traces sex and desire in Muslim cultures through a collection of chapters that span the 9th to 21st centuries. Looking at spaces and periods where sexual norms and the categories underpinning them emerge out of multiple subjectivities, the book shows how people constantly negotiate the formulation of norms, their boundaries and their subversion. It demonstrates that the cultural and political meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures - as elsewhere – emerge from very specific social and historical contexts. The first part of the book examines how people constructed, discussed and challenged sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The second part looks at literary and cinematic Arab cultural production as a site for the construction and transgression of gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and binaries. Each of the contributions shows how understanding of sexualities and the subjectivities that evolve from them are rooted in the mutually-constitutive relationships between gender and political power. In identifying the plurality of discourses on desires, the book goes beyond the dichotomy of norm and transgression to glimpse what different sexual norms have meant at different times across the Middle East.

Self-determination and Women's Rights in Muslim Societies

Self-determination and Women's Rights in Muslim Societies PDF

Author: Chitra Raghavan

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1611682800

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Contradicting the views commonly held by westerners, many Muslim countries in fact engage in a wide spectrum of reform, with the status of women as a central dimension. This anthology counters the myth that Islam and feminism are always or necessarily in opposition. A multidisciplinary group of scholars examine ideology, practice, and reform efforts in the areas of marriage, divorce, abortion, violence against women, inheritance, and female circumcision across the Islamic world, illuminating how religious and cultural prescriptions interact with legal norms, affecting change in sometimes surprising ways.

Islamic Homosexualities

Islamic Homosexualities PDF

Author: Stephen O. Murray

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1997-02

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0814774687

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The first anthropological collection that reveals patterns of male and female homosexuality in the Muslim World The dramatic impact of Islamic fundamentalism in recent years has skewed our image of Islamic history and culture. Stereotypes depict Islamic societies as economically backward, hyper-patriarchal, and fanatically religious. But in fact, the Islamic world encompasses a great diversity of cultures and a great deal of variation within those cultures in terms of gender roles and sexuality. The first collection on this topic from a historical and anthropological perspective, Homosexuality in the Muslim World reveals that patterns of male and female homosexuality have existed and often flourished within the Islamic world. Indeed, same-sex relations have, until quite recently, been much more tolerated under Islam than in the Christian West. Based on the latest theoretical perspectives in gender studies, feminism, and gay studies, Homosexuality in the Muslim World includes cultural and historical analyses of the entire Islamic world, not just the so-called Middle East. Essays show both age-stratified patterns of homosexuality, as revealed in the erotic and romantic poetry of medieval poets, and gender-based patterns, in which both men and women might, to varying degrees, choose to live as members of the opposite sex. The contributors draw on historical documents, literary texts, ethnographic observation and direct observation by both Muslim and non-Muslim authors to show the considerable diversity of Islamic societies and the existence of tolerated gender and sexual variances.

Women and Gender in Islam

Women and Gender in Islam PDF

Author: Leila Ahmed

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-03-16

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0300258178

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A classic, pioneering account of the lives of women in Islamic history, republished for a new generation This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book is now reissued as a Veritas paperback, with a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence. “Ahmed’s book is a serious and independent-minded analysis of its subject, the best-informed, most sympathetic and reliable one that exists today.”—Edward W. Said “Destined to become a classic. . . . It gives [Muslim women] back our rightful place, at the center of our histories.”—Rana Kabbani, The Guardian

Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity

Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity PDF

Author: M. Rahman

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-01-30

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1137002964

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This book addresses the increasing role of queer politics within forms of Islamophobia, both by exploring the framing of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues as a key marker of western superiority and by identifying the ways in which Muslim homophobia contributes to this dialectic.

Islamizing Intimacies

Islamizing Intimacies PDF

Author: Nancy J. Smith-Hefner

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2021-05-31

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0824893034

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One of the great transformations presently sweeping the Muslim world involves not just political and economic change but the reshaping of young Muslims’ styles of romance, courtship, and marriage. Nancy J. Smith-Hefner takes up the personal lives and sexual attitudes of educated Muslim Javanese youth in the city of Yogyakarta to explore the dramatic social and ethical changes taking place in Indonesian society. Drawing on more than 250 interviews over a fifteen-year period, her vivid, well-crafted ethnography is full of insights into the real-life struggles of young Muslims and framed by a deep understanding of Indonesia’s wider debates on gender and youth culture. The changes among Muslim youth reflect an ongoing if at times unsteady attempt to balance varied ideals, ethical concerns, and aspirations. On the one hand, growing numbers of young people show a deep and pervasive desire for a more active role in their Islamic faith. On the other, even as they seek a more self-conscious and scripture-based profession of faith, many educated youth aspire to personal relationships similar to those seen among youth elsewhere—a greater measure of informality, openness, and intimacy than was typical for their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Young women in particular seek freedom for self-expression, employment, and social fulfillment outside of the home. Smith-Hefner pays particular attention to their shifting roles and perspectives because it is young women who have been most dramatically affected by the upheavals transforming this Muslim-majority country. Although deeply personal, the changing aspirations of young Muslims have immense implications for social and public life throughout Indonesia. The fruit of a longitudinal study begun shortly after the fall of the authoritarian New Order government and the return to democracy in 1998–1999, the book reflects Smith-Hefner’s nearly forty years of anthropological engagement with the island of Java and her continuing exploration into what it means to be both “modern” and Muslim. The culture of the new Muslim youth, the author shows, through all its nuances and variations, reflects the inexorable abandonment of traditions and practices deemed incompatible with authentic Islam and an ongoing and profound Islamization of intimacies.