Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist Feminisms (2010)
Dr. Nadine Naber is a scholar activist from Al Salt, Jordan. She conducts research in collaboration with local communities of color, social movements, and policy-based processes.
Dr. Naber received her PhD in Women’s Studies and Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis in 2002. She is currently a Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).
Her work focuses on racial justice and MENA communities; Arab and Muslim feminist and queer activism; activist mothering within the Arab Spring revolutions and U.S. social movements; feminist abolition; feminist-queer of color activism against militarism, war, and colonization; feminist of color coalition/solidarity politics; and activist research methodologies.
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| Filename | orientalist-and-anti-orientalist-feminism.pdf |
| Version | 1 |
| Date added | December 28, 2023 |
| Downloaded | 1 time |
| Category | Book Chapters |
| sub-title | Beyond Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist Feminisms |
| authors | Nadine Naber |
| publication | Syracuse University Press |
Published in Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds. Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011.
ABSTRACT: In this essay, Nadine Naber interrogates the ways that Arab diasporas remake “Arab culture” in the United States and the significance of this process to the issues of sexism and homophobia. Her analysis focuses on middle-class Arab immigrant discourses and the Arab American social movements to which she has belonged. Naber proposes a feminist approach that locates diasporic notions of “culture” within the historical legacies of European colonialism and Orientalism and the contemporary experiences of displacement, immigration, racism, and assimilation. Here, she argues that “culture” is “political.” This approach considers how issues that are seemingly “internal” to our communities (such as sexism and homophobia) emerge with and through a range of “external” forces. From this standpoint, Naber calls for alternatives to social movement frameworks that subordinate gender or sexuality or both to a private-cultural-communal domain and mark gender and sexuality as secondary to the more pressing issues of our times—such as war and racism. Working beyond the notions of distinct and separate internal-private and external-public domains, she finds a sense of liberation from the fear of “washing our dirty laundry in public” that has haunted many Arab and Arab American feminist projects in the United States.