English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

At the onset, the visual imagery on the book’s cover (a caricatured drawing of two Egyptian women, one baladi and one afrangi), taken from the Egyptian magazine Al-Ithnayn published in 1934, speaks volumes but not to the volume at hand. The title to the magazine illustration is Beauty of Today and Beauty of the Past. Without analytic commentary justifying the adoption of this image, the irony in the message of the picture’s title and the juxtaposition of local imageries in the picture is lost. Keeping the 1934 reading of the image, “past versus present beauty,” without analyzing its intersection with Egyptian cultural notions of baladi versus afrangi women (on this see Early 1993) is a missed opportunity to seek insights through visual and ethnographic analysis. The reader now sees only an exotic image used to sell another book on Middle East women. There is clearly a deluge of publications on Middle East women claiming a “feminist” genre many put together in haste, often using non-analytic, discourse-focused polemics, and a Women’s Studies’ eclectic orientation a common genre that tends to ignore disciplinary canons of inquiry and violate both people’s culture and disciplinary method. In her Introduction (pp. 3 31), Abu-Lughod presents “three issues” addressed by the book: “First is the way that in the postcolonial world women have become potent symbols of identity and visions of society and the nation.” (p. 3). “Second is the way that women themselves actively participate in these debates and social struggles, with feminism an inescapable term of reference” (p. 3). “Third are the complex ways that the West embraced, repudiated, and translated, are implicated in contemporary gender politics” (p. 3). Earlier in the Preface (pp. vii ix) the Editor had mentioned certain other features (which is confusing) that are viewed as shared by the contributing authors of the collection. Four are mentioned: 1) questioning the dichotomy tradition/modernity and its assumed association with domestic/public roles respectively, 2) questioning the equating of modernity with progress, emancipation and empowerment of women, 3) “taking seriously” the relationship of Europe to Middle Eastern projects of remaking women, 4) using a broad definition of feminism one that is not confined to women’s movements and liberation from patriarchy that includes the wide range of projects having women as their objects,

journal of political ecology

Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East by edited by Lila Abu-Lughod. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1998). Review Essay by Fadwa El Guindi