The book offers an analysis on the interconnection between gender hierarchy and Muslim and Arab bashing, especially the relative ease with which anti-Arab racist statements and actions are made without fear of retribution or sanctions over hate speech. Contributors discuss colonial feminism, which draws on Orientalist discourses to dehumanize Arab women and to justify US and Israeli state violence and war against Arabs and Muslims in general, and Palestinians in particular. For example, some contributors hold US hegemonic liberal feminisms accountable for reifying colonial feminist discourses and practices. As our volume illustrates, there is an urgent need to put a stop to what liberal and colonial feminists view as the “inherent cultural” or “religious” practices in our communities. Several contributors criticized superficial analyses that view the category Arab feminism as an oxymoron—as if Arabness or Muslimness were incompatible with feminism, or as if Arabs were “inherently” or genetically incapable of understanding, advocating, or fighting for an end to gender and sexual oppression.
Some contributors challenge dominant paradigms in Arab American studies that exclude the experiences of Arab Jews. Others call into question masculinist frameworks that suggest that the larger society only suffers from racism while Arab and Muslim American communities suffer from sexism, as if our communities were living in a vacuum or as if the larger society were immune to gender and sexual oppressions. We argue instead that racism and sexism, as well as other forms of structural inequalities, exist in both the larger society and in our communities; that they are dialectically connected; and that they reinforce and strengthen each other. Therefore, we propose in the book that our responses to and struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia must be crafted in a nuanced manner that does not prioritize one liberation struggle over another nor engage in a marathon of victimhood.
Many of our contributors enlist a historically specific analysis of anti-Arab racism, highlighting the targeting and smearing of Arab and Arab American feminists who publicly support justice for Palestine. Others focus on the racial ambiguity of Arab Americans beyond their official classification as white and our own identification (and treatment) as communities of color. Another group of contributors historicize the centrality of homophobia to anti-Arab racism, exemplified by the torture in Abu Ghraib. (The most recent ads on the buses of the MTA in New York and MUNI in San Francisco represent a renewed effort to smear Arabs and Muslims by invoking homophobia.) The volume makes clear that the co-editors and contributors alike share a commitment to struggle against homophobia and the marginalization of queer and transgender people within dominant Arab and Arab American spaces and discourses.
Although this volume is titled Arab and Arab American Feminisms, many of us who have contributed to the book do not comfortably identify with the term “feminism”; we rather use it as shorthand for a commitment to gender justice, including an end to gender inequality, homophobia, and transphobia. We further note that not all struggles for gender justice are the same: some tend to be hierarchical; some privilege struggles against sexism over struggles for feminist, queer, and transgender justice; others position gender justice in tension with and opposition to other forms of justice. This book coalesces around a specific political vision. We imagine a radical feminist politics that insists on the simultaneity of racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and self-determination for colonized women, men, queer, and transgender people “over here” and “over there.” In fact, we place “over here” and “over there” in quotes to signal this transnational feminist vision—a vision that acknowledges the gendered ways in which the US is already “over there” and events taking place in our homelands very much permeate our lives in the US In fact, it makes more sense to say “over here” and “over here.” This transnational feminist vision inspires us to imagine and think about social justice in ways that take seriously the impact of US Empire on the lives of people living within the US and the countries that the US is invading—and to work towards alternatives to exclusionary hetero-masculinist, xenophobic, and class-blind politics. More here.