This study aims to explore the representations of masculinity in Egyptian media, and the perception of masculinity among their audiences. It is a mixed methods study, beginning with a qualitative pre-study consisting of interviews with Egyptian media professionals and media audiences in order to determine a common narrative in describing masculinity. This is done as a part of a Minor Field Study (MFS), conducted in Egypt during the fall of 2014. Much like in Grounded Theory Method, the initial data collection will lead to a number of indicators, or concepts, that are commonly used to create images of masculinity. After categorizing, these concepts are used in a quantitative content analysis (cluster analysis) designed to test the representations of masculinity in news media. By understanding how masculinity is constructed we come closer to understanding the rising problem of gendered violence that has plagued Egypt since the revolution in 2011. This can be related to previous studies, such as that by the masculinity theorist Michael Kimmel, sociologist Jeff Hearn and criminologist Antony Whitehead. An important aspect of this study is “hegemony”, a concept coined by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and adapted for Masculinity Studies by the sociologist Raewyn Connell. “Hegemonic masculinity” refers to how dominant expressions of “manhood” maintain legitimacy and hierarchial superiority, both over other expressions of masculinity as well as femininities. This study aims to highlight the construction and reinforcement of this hierarchy in an Egyptian media context. It begins with representations in traditional news media, but may also be expanded to include for example social media and entertainment.

This research will look into the situation of the transgender community across several countries in the Arab world with a primary focus on the Gulf Cooperation Council states (the Kingdom of Bahrain, State of Kuwait, the Sultanate of Oman, the State of Qatar, the Kingdom Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) while taking into account some countries in the Levant area of the Arab world such as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Lebanese Republic, and even mentioning the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey, Middle Eastern but non-Arab countries, as a point of comparison. The objective is to study and determine the state of transgender rights and liberties across said region. This will be done by exploring the notable legal, societal and religious aspects regarding transgendered people in the aforementioned countries. The sources used in this research will consist mainly of official state laws, policies and regulations, newspaper articles, health information websites, a survey and excerpts of interviews with transgendered individuals. I will show that transgendered individuals and the very community itself are still largely discriminated against, widely persecuted and misunderstood in the Arab world and continue to face systematic intolerance, prejudice and oppression.

In this paper I present a comprehensive evaluation of the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) policy towards the Kurdish movement, led by the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). I begin the paper by examining the historical background of the Kurdish conflict, which has been integral in defining the framework of the current conflict and negotiations. My policy analysis is concerned with the time period following 1999, when the PKK’s undisputed leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured, which offered new opportunities for a solution. To complete my policy analysis, I use historical sources on the Kurdish conflict within Turkey, information on the AKP’s policy initiatives, such as the Kurdish Opening in 2009, and current news articles on the AKP and PKK. I also use data on Turkish election results in order to establish trends in Kurdish voting patterns and the AKP’s popularity. After evaluating the AKP’s policy towards the Kurds, I present future prospects for a solution. I ultimately posit two conclusions. First, political means are necessary for a solution to the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Since Öcalan’s capture in 1999, the desire for a political solution has been present in both Kurdish and Turkish populations, and the Kurdish movement has largely sought a political solution to its goals. Second, the AKP has been the Kurdish movement’s best option as a partner for peace due to its reformist orientation and its status as the dominant party within the Turkish political system. Although the AKP has implemented various reforms aimed at solving the Kurdish Question, these reforms have rarely gone beyond mere recognition of the Kurdish conflict. Thus, the Kurdish movement is unlikely to realize a lasting peace, thereby threatening domestic and regional stability, until the AKP ceases its practice of subordinating meaningful solutions to the Kurdish Question to other political considerations.

Recent scholarship and journalism on Turkish politics, society, culture, and religion has exhibited an essentialist tendency to divide the nation into polarized camps of Kemalists and Islamic Revivalists. By examining Kemalism and Islamism in Turkey as pervasive historic and national responses to modernity – equally politically, societally, and culturally entrenched – I will demonstrate the ways that (1) pragmatic state building and modernist synthesis have necessitated constant Islamist and Kemalist intersection and dual engagement, rather than dichotomy and laicism and (2) that Atatürk and Islam are both being used as potent symbolic solutions for moral fissures at the forefront of Turkish society today, and often in tandem. The legacies and symbolic meanings of Islam and Atatürk are both used to stress the necessity for a unified society. Turkish politicians and citizens past and present have accommodated and appropriated both legacies and symbols to their own ends, whether Kemalist or Islamist. The crux of necessity for both symbols lies in cultural identity. I do not deny that there is bifurcation between pro-Kemalists and pro-Islamists, but rather that these “camps” do not reject or historically exclude the platforms of the other. Atatürk and subsequent Kemalists include Islam in their ideology and Islamic institutions in their government – harnessing its potency in ways compatible with the regime. Islamists as well embrace Atatürk as the savior of Islam in Turkey in the face of geographic fragmentation and colonization, using his more public and fervent embrace of Islam in the 1920s as a means to legitimize their current political platform.

Egyptians projected the national anxiety resulting from the social and economic unrest of the 1970s as a threat to their masculinity. After the 1973 October War with Israel, Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat started a new economic policy called Al-Infitah “Open-door policy,” which opened Egypt for international private investments, ended Egypt’s close relations with the longtime ally and aid-giver the USSR, and replaced it with the United States. As novels, films, and other cultural productions function as a platform where nationalist ideas formulate, this paper studies the representation of nationalist masculine subject formation in Egyptian cultural productions. During the 1970s, Egyptian cultural productions borrowed the nationalist masculine discourse produced by anti-colonial nationalism, a discourse that responded to colonial orientalist depictions that usually emasculated Egyptians. The cultural producers of the Sadat era appropriated the nationalist masculine discourses by assigning their protagonists the “masculine” role of the penetrator. In the movie Alexandria Why? (1976), the main focus of this paper, the nationalist Egyptian director Youssef Chahine explores the relation between Egyptian nationalism and British colonialism through a sexual relationship between the Egyptian male protagonist and a British soldier. Nationalist notions of masculinity influenced the power dynamics in which the relationship functioned. Even though, the relationship is not hetero-normative, it embraced hetero-normative dynamics, which endorse social and sexual patriarchy. It assigns the penetrator the social privileges of males, leaves the penetrated with a lesser social status, and depicts him as a lesser of a person. Nationalist historiography of modern Egyptian history rarely discusses non-hetero-normative relationships. By focusing on a non-hetero-normative plot, this paper provides a new way of understanding the multiple discourses that shaped nationalist subject formation.

On May 17, 2012 The New York Times’ World News Middle East Section published an article entitled “Rap Group at the Leading Edge of the Egyptian Rebellion.” The article followed Alexandria’s rap group Revolution Records and claimed that rap is “shaping a new identity for Egyptian youth, of defiance and commitment to change.” It was with this idea in mind that I set out to do eight months of fieldwork with rappers in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt from January-August 2013. My informants, however, noted that the political importance of revolutionary Egyptian rap emphasized in Western news outlets is surprising to most Egyptian rappers. Meanwhile, the American, Danish, British, and other Western cultural diplomacy efforts targeting Egypt post-2011 have dealt heavily in rap. Egyptian rappers, meanwhile, are skeptical of the power that international actors attribute to Egyptian rap and note that domestic rap audiences are meager. Even so, a narrative narrowly focused on the revolutionary power of Egyptian rap continues in diplomacy and media production circles. Why has this revolution-via-rap narrative persisted? What is there to lose from admitting that Egyptian revolutionary rap has not been significant in Egyptian politics? These are the questions that I will address in this paper. Drawing heavily on the work of Aidi Hisham, Ted Swedenburg, and Jessica Winegar, I will argue that producing rap-focused cultural diplomacy projects and media specials constitutes a form of neo-Orientalism that reifies a simplistic, factually incorrect public understanding of the Egyptian uprisings. A focus on rappers as ultimate revolutionaries is advantageous to international political interests because it helps foreign governments claim an understanding of the uprisings; This understanding disproportionately credits “disaffected youth.” Despite rappers’ refutation of this misplaced notion which portrays them as heroes and representative voices of the Egyptian uprisings, the benefits that this discourse provides international actors make discursive change unlikely.

In my paper I confront the present humanitarian impasse facing Palestinian rights advocacy in the Occupied Territories - resting between the politics of trauma testimony and the growing critical practice of forensic architecture - through renewed readings of literature based on or set around the conflict, focusing specifically on the novella Returning to Haifa by celebrated Palestinian author, journalist, literary critic and polemicist Ghassan Kanafani. I argue that both humanitarian psychiatry (which focuses on victim testimony, but also imposes the trauma subject onto these victims) and forensic architecture (which abandons testimony in favor of examining built environments in the aftermath of violence in order to detect empirical evidence of rights violations) are inherently problematic by virtue of their elimination of the Palestinian entirely: the first, by denying individual political agency, and the second, by removing the physical body completely. My approach to Kanafani's text constitutes a comparative engagement with trauma studies, spatial theory, and para-literary and history texts in order to emphasize the physicality of traumatic neuroses present in the language of the novella. Reading the representation of the symptomatic aftermath of trauma in tandem with its spatial contingencies may begin to open a space for working through trauma that answers to both sides of this impasse. By performing this kind of analysis we can begin thinking about the site of the body and its relationship to spaces as essential to discussing processes of trauma, whether acting out or working through, that are relevant to both sides of this impasse.

My research is entitled “Identity and Poetry in the Middle East,” and is a deep look inside the connection between the constantly changing identity of Arabs in a volatile political, social, and economic climate, and the expression of these changes through poetry. I first look at poetry through a historical lens, focusing on its connection to Islam and the role of famed poets as powerful societal voices. Then I look at contemporary shifts in poetic style, such as hip-hop, which greatly increased during the Arab Spring, and proved to be an important tool against repressive regimes. I was able to enrich my research by studying abroad in Amman, Jordan for a semester my junior fall. While traveling around this region, I attended poetry events and music concerts, and conducted interviews with local artists who were trying to portray communal frustrations and conflicting identity pressures through their words. First I studied the historical impact of poets in the Middle East. Poets are the most revered artists for Arabs, and the most dangerous mobilizers for regimes. Through their poems, they portray shifts in Arab identity and use their words as rallying cries during revolutions and reflections during communal loss. Next I looked at contemporary poetry. From formal Arabic to dialects, and religious hymns to hip-hop and rap music, poetry has proven to be extremely fluid. It was a primary force during the Arab Spring, and the proliferation of young new hip-hop artists in participating countries were the voices pushing against societal norms that had circumscribed the thoughts and actions of the youth in the Middle East. Overall, my research paints a vivid picture of the role of poetry in the Middle East, while highlighting the shifts in its function over the course of hundreds of years and its inextricable connection between politics, society, and identity.

Kurdish rebellions and political movements in the early 20th century have often been portrayed as the actions of a nationalist opposition. However, by using the myriad British administrative primary sources along with secondary accounts of the period and relying on the works of Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner I argue that prior to the formation of the Mahabad Republic in 1946 in Iran there were no Kurdish movements or institutions that were nationalistic in character and popular in scope. Instead, virtually all Kurdish rebellions before 1946 were violent reactions by local patriarchs against newly imposed state structures. Nationalist political language was certainly present before 1946 and tribal or patrimonial politics are still incredibly important in Southern Kurdistan today, but Mahabad marked a historical turning point that put nationalist ideals at the center of Kurdish popular politics. I will then more briefly outline the history of Iraqi Kurdish politics after 1947 to show the notably increased presence of nationalist sentiment with a reduction of tribalism and regionalism. The legacy of the republic continues through the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), an organization created in Mahabad that dominates Iraqi Kurdish politics to this day.

European accounts have long dominated the way colonial Africa has been portrayed. This research project seeks to offer an alternative portrait of sub-Saharan Africa as seen through the lens of Egyptian travelers and explorers who journeyed into the African interior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The European Scramble for Africa coincided with Egypt’s own bid to carve out an empire in the African hinterland. This venture ended with the death of Egypt’s nascent militarism in 1882, but Egypt continued to claim the Sudan as her own, even while succumbing to British imperialism. This research seeks to document the dynamic power relationship between colonized peoples as one group-the Egyptians-sought to assert themselves over other colonized Africans. This paper draws from the extensive archives of the Egyptian Geographic Society, using both published and unpublished journals, most of which have never been translated into English. The travelers and explorers who contributed to the Society have bequeathed a rich legacy of diaries, journals, maps, and reports, which were produced as part of the Society’s mission to explore, discover, and document Africa. The Society’s extensive photographic collection will feature prominently in the research project, offering insight into how Africans were portrayed and viewed by Egyptians at the time. The sources demonstrate how Egyptian accounts often internalized European notions of the primitive, uninhibited, African ‘Other’, even while Egyptian themselves were portrayed in subjective terms by Europeans.

Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism reveals how Western depictions of the Orient in art, literature, and scholarship have been linked to colonial politics. They have defined a view of the Orient as backward and underdeveloped which has consequently justified its subjection to colonial rule. However, Said’s analysis fails to recognize how indigenous voices perpetuate the Orientalist discourse in Neo-orientalist ways. Building on Said’s work, we aim to explain how native informants, to whom audiences grant a high degree of authenticity, have replaced classical Orientalists in reproducing Western stereotypes. Through discourse analysis, we challenge the implicit authority embedded in a mass culture production (non-fiction documentary) of Muslim women produced for Western audiences after the events of 9/11. Our research focuses on the documentary, Honor Diaries, winner of the 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival’s Interfaith Award for Best Documentary. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the executive producers serves as a central figure in our analysis as a native informant. Her activism and criticism of Islam and Middle Eastern societies has placed her among Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Persons. We analyze the Honor Diaries with three analytical criteria. First, we investigate the film’s tendency to attribute oppression to Islamic religion and culture. Next, we look at the role of the female subject; what she does, what she says, and her positionality in the film’s context. Finally, we analyze the political project behind the film which advocates a ‘universal’ call for the emancipation of Muslim women from their repressive societies. Ultimately, we contend that the native informants’ in Honor Diaries serve to propagate classic Orientalist (mis)perceptions of the East hidden behind humanitarian and Western liberal feminist rhetoric.

In the 1970s, the Sultanate of Oman had the fewest paved roads in the world and was a closed-off economy. Today, it is one of the most progressive Arab states and a robust “late developing county” (LDC). How did Oman achieve such successful economic growth, and what role did Oman's oil deposits play in the development of its political institutions? The existing economics literature on rentier states argues that oil wealth is inversely related to political stability. However, the Sultanate of Oman has developed stable political and economic institutions in addition to having substantial oil deposits. The keys to understanding Oman's trajectory must go beyond a simple negative relationship between resources and political stability. I will explore this issue in two phases. In the first phase of my project, I will use a panel data regression analysis based on publicly available World Bank data to investigate how the economic impacts of oil discoveries and extraction vary as a function of quantifiable political indicators. This quantitative work will place Oman within the context of its peers. In the second phase of my project, I will turn to archival sources at Exeter University’s Arab World Documentation Unit, the India Office Records at the British Library, and the United Kingdom National Archives to document the specific institutional details in the co-evolution of oil and Oman's political economy during the past fifty years. This archival work will shed light on the particular details of Oman's development in the context of the quantitative findings from the first phase.

Islamic society has been wary of accepting gender nonconforming individuals such as transgender people and hijras in South Asia. They face violence, discrimination from families, society, and the government, and rampant poverty within this group. Yet with Sufism as a major tradition in Pakistan, the second largest Islamic state, social tolerance towards the hijra and transgender community has been beginning to manifest in mainstream society. This paper looks at the relationship between Sufi traditions in Pakistan and the rights and status of hijras and transgender people in society. This relation has not been popularly studied as information between the two are limited. However, their recent political gains making noteworthy news shines a light on the progressing conditions of these communities. These conditions are progressing both in Pakistan and in other Islamic communities hosting a noticeable Sufi influence in social and political life. Recognized as a “third gender,” hijras are now able to vote and run for office in Pakistan, and Sufism’s history of accepting gender transgression and the basic teachings of love and tolerance towards all beings facilitates greater rights to gender variant people. Scholars such as Kamran Arif and Gayathri Reddy have discussed the hijra community in Pakistan, bringing a strong source of information on their living and legal conditions. Hijras vary from Western definitions of transgender people in regards to gender identity and expression. The hijra population are those who identify as male, female, or third gender and can identify as transgender, cross-dressers, or eunuchs. The focus of this research rests mainly on how Sufism’s practice of tolerance affects not only Pakistani society as a whole but towards the hijra and transgender communities in regards to both social and political environments.

The Iraq war has significantly shaped the way U.S. foreign policymakers view the world. There have been suggestions that the war was not in fact initiated based on strategic concerns (WMDs) but because then President George W. Bush had the political support to do so, what Ian Lustick has called a "supply-side war." I intend to explore U.S. Foreign Policy towards three Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries before and after 9/11, in an effort to determine whether U.S. Foreign Policy was driven mainly by domestic political factors, or rather by the international strategic interests of the U.S.. The three cases will be Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Each of these countries has had a different kind of relationship with the U.S. and is located in a different part of the MENA region, thus giving my research the breadth that could not be obtained from analyzing any one country, increasing the level of confidence in any pattern identified. My research will be drawn from primary sources—congressional hearing transcripts, presidential memos and speeches, legislative bills—and secondary sources such as academic journal articles and journalism from the years 1990-2013. The government documents will show changes in policy and suggest what drove such changes, while the secondary literature will provide corroboration or challenges to my own analysis. I hypothesize that domestic politics determined the extent of and means by which the strategic interests were carried out, and in some cases were the stronger force behind U.S. Foreign Policy actions rather than the interests at stake.

This research project examines the historical similarities between the Mapuche struggle against Chile and the Palestinian struggle against the state of Israel. It discusses parallels and differences between methods of resistance, political ideology, and experiences of displacement within both groups. The two struggles by the Mapuche and Palestinians are analyzed as a representation of a global phenomenon of intersectionality between ethnic struggles as a result of transnational movement and globalized connections. This research will be significant to create networks of solidarity between these groups by providing academic insight not only on how the struggles relate, but into methods of resistance and political ideology from which they can learn and share with one another. The research method used for this project was predominantly qualitative and I collected data through interviews in Chile, as part of a study abroad trip in Santiago and Araucania. The interviews were conducted with the Palestinian refugee population in the country as well as Chile’s native indigenous community, the Mapuche. The type of respondents interviewed included 1st and 3rd generation Palestinians living in Chile, student activists, community organizers, religious leaders, and Mapuche Loncos (cheifs) and community representatives. The interview data and theoretical framing of this project is further contextualized through an examination of the histories of indigenous struggle of both the Mapuche and the Palestinians up until the 2000s. This project then compares and contrasts modern day issues that both groups have faced in their struggle around three themes: Environmental and social issues including land displacement; political responses to the state; and ideologies of autonomy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the intersectionality of activism between Mapuche and Palestinian activists living as minorities within Chile who are both active in each others cause. A crucial theoretical framing of this project is intersectionality.