The paper studies Egyptian nationalist pedagogy of sexual and reproductive health targeted toward women in the inter-revolutionary period with an emphasis on the decade before the July Revolution of 1952. Mainly drawing on Egyptian health periodicals for a lay audience, the paper delineates the framework of the nationalist discourse on sex and reproduction which did not change much over the interwar period despite recurring political turmoil, economic crises and the growing sense of disillusion since 1919, but continued serving for the new regime of the Free Officers. The effendi medics equipped with modern medical training believed that the sex education was crucial for creating a new generation. Through publications, they indoctrinated the Egyptians of marriageable age with what they considered as scientific knowledge in the hope of preparing future parents physically and psychologically healthy and capable of producing and raising healthy sons. They utilized Western medicine as a “technology” in the process of self-fashioning. Unlike social sciences, the authority and scientificity of modern Western medicine was seldom questioned by educated Egyptians. But did the selected medical knowledge affect the life of the layman in a way that was not in the Egyptian nationalists' conscious design? Focusing on the medical and cultural discourses on venereal disease and pregnancy, the paper examines how the readers were instructed to diagnose themselves by observing their own bodies and how the objects of the clinical gaze transformed into subjects and came to assume responsibility for taking care of their own bodies for the sake of the nation. The paper argues that the modern Egyptian women were not left to freely assume the role of “the managers of the house,” but rather were unwittingly subjected to a closer scrutiny of the male gaze over their privacies, which was justified by modern medicine.

The body of literature on the Armenian Genocide is primarily by and about men, their struggles and their experiences. Few studies have focused on the survival experiences of females, despite the fact that a higher percentage of Genocide survivors were women and girls. The focus of this study is to highlight the experiences of women, and the role women played in their personal survival as well as that of their loved ones. Acknowledging that men and women experienced the Genocide differently, a gender-related analysis is used to highlight these differences. Data for this paper are drawn from in-depth interviews of Genocide survivors conducted from 1970 to 2000. Using a gender lens, 185 survivor accounts were coded and analyzed. Ringelheim’s (1985) framework for analyzing gender differences was used to catalog the ways women were treated and the ways they responded during the Genocide. Specifically, women’s stories were grouped into two categories: 1) women’s vulnerabilities (“what was done to them”) and 2) women’s resources (“what they did”). Women’s vulnerabilities differed from those of men due to biological reasons. In particular, women’s sexuality and their reproductive capabilities made them especially vulnerable. First, pregnancy and childbirth during the Genocide made Armenian women even more vulnerable to attack. Second, Armenian women were particularly defenseless against sexual assault. Third, women were kidnapped, and often forced to marry their kidnappers. Women’s resources included survival strategies based on traditional gender roles, as well as behaviors inconsistent with socially prescribed roles. Women drew on their past experiences and socialization to ensure their survival by creating strong bonds with other relatives, choosing to marry Turks, ensuring their children’s survival by leaving them in the care of others (strangers, missionaries, trusted neighbors), and using skills acquired in their gender-specific roles to provide for their families. Additionally, the trauma of the Genocide forced behaviors that were inconsistent with traditional gender roles such as detaching from children and engaging in resistance. Some mothers abandoned their children and walked away, while others sold their children for food. Women who engaged in acts of resistance resisted assimilation by refusing to marry Turks and/or convert to Islam, assisted volunteer soldiers and hid weapons, and provided assistance to rescue others. This paper will attempt to draw attention to the role of gender during the Armenian Genocide. The unique suffering experienced by women, and their strategies for survival will be highlighted.

If the writing of history is ultimately a prize for the victors, what can the ways in which people deicide to remember events and individuals tell us? Is memory merely a passive firing of synapses or is it a conscious creation and deliberate political act? What does memory, be it in the form of photographs, speeches, ceremonies, popular recollection, et cetera mean in the context of intense social trauma? This paper explores these questions, examining responses to the assassination of Lebanese President and Lebanese Forces militia leader Bashir Jemmayil and the death of Basel al Asad, scion of the Syrian ruling family. Drawing on a range of Arabic and French textual, audio and especially visual primary sources, this paper analyzes how these historical figures are reimagined and reinvented through both popular and official acts of producing memory. Totems of remembrance - images, statues, films - interact with one another in both a visual conversation and competition for authority. Similarly, speeches and eulogies address not only mourners but an audience across history, jockeying in an unending contest for historical legitimacy. Furthermore, the differences between official and popular memory of the same subject by members of the same group illustrate the extent to which memory is used to contest history. These sources, even (indeed especially) the swaggering and confident propaganda, betray insecurities and intense sociopolitical anxieties that are at the heart of impulses to create memory. Moreover, this paper examines how sociocultural constructs of religious ceremony, masculinity, and social class nuance the creation of memory. Despite the vast differences between the affected groups in question - middle class Maronite Lebanon and the Alawite-dominated Syrian state - both consciously deployed invented memories of their respective leaders in response to similar types of political and social anxiety. In this way, this paper re-articulates the experience of trauma from the lens of victimhood, relocating the agency to the deliberate and active creation of memory. It views those experiencing trauma not merely as passive victims but as historical actors deciding how they will remember their suffering and, importantly, how they might use these memories to their advantage.

This paper examines the itinerary of a few members of Algeria women’s national handball team under the Boumediène regime. Under Boumediène, the state’s position towards women was substantially conservative. Yet, if social conservatism prevailed, it was also during that period that the state introduced and encouraged – and made compulsory – physical education for boys and girls in the state school system, as well as promoting female participation in sports at the competitive level. Despite the state’s promotion of female participation in sports, women’s sports – which were under full control of the regime - developed slowly. Amongst the different sporting practices, women’s handball quickly emerged in Algeria. Through a study of a few women athletes, this paper looks at the entry of women into sports in Algeria and at its impact on women’s lives. What obstacles did female athletes face? To what extent have sports empowered women? To what extent have sports – and the development in Algeria of women’s handball in particular - reinforced the gender divide and the reproduction of gender stereotypes? These are some questions that this paper will attempt to answer. This paper argues that while sports offered significant opportunities for Algerian women, state institutions also exploited female sports to reinforce the notion of sexual difference and of gender stereotypes. In addition, this paper argues that – by using female sports to inform about gender and sexuality - female sports were exploited to define Algeria’s identity and construct the Algerian nation under Boumediène.

The demographic foundations of our lives are deep and broad. Vital events impact all facets of human society, including if/when/whom we marry and sometimes divorce, the onset and pace of childbearing, and ultimately why and when we die. I take up questions of class, kinship and gender with the aim of understanding how reproductive inequalities are structured locally and across transnational boundaries. An ethnographic and demographic study of Bedouin women’s reproduction in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon provides a new basis for understanding health inequality. Focusing on the demographic experiences of nomadic/seminomadic pastoral peoples in the Arab world marginalized from the dominant political economic structures of the nation-state provides a broader analytical lens from which to examine questions about the global “demographic divide”—the gulf in birth and death rates between rich and poor within and among countries. The contemporary population paradigm views social inequality through a narrow and distorted prism of fertility. High fertility in Arab-Islamic countries is frequently “diagnosed” as symptomatic of Arab “backwardness,” poverty and the alleged patriarchal subjugation of women. Given that one of the main hallmarks of modernity is the small nuclear family, the high fertility of Bedouin women in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan—among the highest fertility levels known to humanity at over nine children per woman—marks them as “premodern”. However, as I show in my work, high Bekaa Bedouin fertility is historically found in conjunction with moderate mortality, high nutritional status, and an overall lack of gender and class-like or occupational disparities in health. There is a high degree of social and demographic equality within Bekaa Bedouin society and other egalitarian communities that rely on kinship ties, sharing, and reciprocity. Class relations and class-specific demographic differentials are apparent at different scales—between Bedouins and Lebanese land-owning peasants in the region with Bedouins having higher fertility and mortality—prompting us to pay closer attention to the contingencies of geography and history when examining rich/poor divides. A central pillar of reproductive justice involves bridging class, race and gender divides, but must do so in ways that are not oppressive to nonwhite women in the Global South and metropole. The condemnation of high birth rates disparages the reproduction of poor rural women of color and perpetuates what bell hooks has dubbed “white capitalist patriarchy.”