Across the United States this Mother’s Day, the right to have control over one’s body is under attack. More than 530 abortion restrictions have been introduced in 42 states. The Supreme Court is on the precipice of...
Cornel West famously said that “justice is what love looks like in public,” yet most public versions of Valentine’s Day eschew this collectivist, politicized understanding, instead constructing love as a supremely individualistic and capitalist enterprise.
The U.S. and Israel have now murdered over 15,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,150 children—most buried alive under the rubble.
Born in Al-Salt, Jordan to Salameh and Najla Al-Naber, Suleiman had 10 siblings, all of whom he held close to his heart. Suleiman was blessed to marry the indomitable Firyal Al-Naber on July 1, 1966 and to have been part of a beautiful community of family and friends...
TedxOakParkWomen
In the summer of 2014, as activists in Ferguson, Missouri, faced the military-grade weapons of four city and state police departments—tear gas, smoke bombs, stun grenades, and tanks—Gazans were confronting Israel’s heavy artillery shelling, massive use of cannons, mortars, and half-ton to one-ton missiles.1 The canisters fired in both Gaza and Ferguson were U.S.-made.2
Mada Masr—As I researched and joined political actions responding to the Muslim ban—the third iteration of which remains permanently in place—I was appalled by the trend of responses lacking any sort of feminist and/or queer analysis. When responses did mention gender, they wittingly or unwittingly reified the dynamic of centralizing forms of gender violence that can be explained through cultural and religious frames while obscuring the realities of gender violence inflicted by the US state and the Muslim ban itself.
Jadaliyya—A year into the United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the Trump Administration travel ban, the impact of this policy that mainly targeted Muslim-majority countries, and the conceptual and abstract terms from which it operates, have yet to be clearly articulated.
In March 2016, a series of statements, news articles, and human rights reports circulated on social media in the global north, calling for an end to the crackdown on feminists in Egypt. These calls emerged in response to news that Mozn Hassan, director of the internationally renowned grassroots feminist organization Nazra for Feminist Studies, had become the focus of an investigation by Egyptian authorities.
In January 2011, Egypt and, indeed, the world witnessed something immense and unprecedented: millions of people from every sector of society took to the streets to overthrow their dictator. As known scholars and activists involved and interested in Egyptian politics, both authors of this essay were approached to comment on the momentous events and/or speak about them at public forums.
Up until the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, several Arab American writers used the trope “invisibility” to refer to the place of Arab Americans within dominant U.S. discourses on race and ethnicity. A common theme in this literature was that while most government definitions classify Arab Americans as “white,” popular U.S. discourses tend to represent “Arabs” as different from and inferior to whites. Exemplifying this perspective, Helen Samhan referred to the racialization of Arab Americans within U.S. government racial schemas as “white, but not quite” (1999); Joanna Kadi argued that Arab Americans are the “most invisible of the invisibles” (1994); Therese Saliba published the essay “Resisting Invisibility: Arab Americans in Academia and Activism” (1999); and Nada Elia used the trope “the white sheep of the family” to analyze the ways in which Arab American women have been positioned among U.S. women of color feminist movements (2002).
As I listened to my mother,1 I recalled several experiences growing up within a bicultural Arab American familial and communal context. Al Amerikan (Americans) were often referred to in derogatory sexualized terms. It was the trash culture—degenerate, morally bankrupt, and not worth investing in. Al Arab (Arabs), on the other hand, were referred to positively and associated with Arab family values and hospitality. Similarly, throughout the period of my ethnographic research among middle-class Arab American family and community networks in San Francisco, California,2 between January 1999 and August 2001, the theme of female sexuality circumscribed the ways my research participants imagined and contested culture, identity, and belonging.
