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Gendered Space and Middle East Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2014

Aseel Sawalha
Aseel Sawalha*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Fordham University, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: asawalha@fordham.edu
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Extract

Aspects of space and place shape daily life, social structures, politics, and intimate relations among people. In the late 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists—influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre on the meaning of social space—started to highlight the spatial in their analysis of social phenomena. These scholars focused on the production of urban space and asserted that space is dynamic and often shaped by the needs of its users as well as by those who design it. With the exception of Setha Low's work on Latin America, these writings were mostly centered on the United States.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 166 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 26 (1986): 22–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar.

2 For anthropological and geographical writings that theorize space, see Harvey, David, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (1990): 418–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Low, Setha, “Embodied Space(s): Anthropological Theories of Body, Space and Culture,” Space and Culture 6 (2003): 9–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space in Costa Rica,” American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 861–79; Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; and Soja, Edward, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989)Google Scholar.

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4 For scholarly works presenting cases where women are in control of their own spaces and/or access both public and private spaces, see Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Dialects of Women's Empowerment: The International Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report 2005,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 83–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27 (2001): 101–13; Afsaruddin, Asma, Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female “Public” Space in Islamic/ate Societies (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Center for Middle East Studies, 1999)Google Scholar; Ahmed, Leila, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 521–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Kanaaneh, Rhoda, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Khan, Shahnaz, “Muslim Women: Negotiations in the Third Space,” Signs 23 (1998): 463–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Raymond, Andre, “Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views,” British Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (1994): 3–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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