Under the British Mandate over Palestine, the British assumed the responsibility of tutoring the Palestinian nationalists toward the achievement of higher civilization, and as such, the British played the dual role of colonizer-patriarch. Yet there was something peculiar about the relationship between British officials and Palestinian nationalists. While many British officials depicted Palestinian nationalists (symbols of Palestinian virility) as indolent, disorganized, and immature, they also endowed nationalists with endearing qualities that may seem perplexing at first. But when examined in terms of the British colonizer-patriarch approach, it becomes evident that these male British officials forged a dialectical relationship between themselves and the Palestinian nationalists whereby the latter were made the necessary “other” in a predetermined show of male-dominated civilization. In effect, this emasculation would serve to prolong the British Mandate over Palestine under the premise that the Palestinian nationalists, in fact unfit to lead their people due to moral and virile inadequacy, were still in need of British assistance. As gender historians will argue, the deployment of femininities and masculinities in colonial discourse has been a means through which colonizers have endeavored to impose and maintain control over indigenous populations. So the question arises: to what extent can gender be incorporated into the relationship between male British colonial officers and male Palestinian nationalists in the first years of the Mandate? Through an examination of six British officials' memoirs from this period (1918-1925), and one Palestinian nationalist's memoir, I contend that this relationship was shaped by implicit (and occasionally explicit) prejudgments of masculinity and morality that would consequently serve to: 1) bolster the colonizers’ notions of heightened British virility (and therefore, civilization), and 2) crystallize the colonial legacy of establishing a permanently disproportionate relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. Therefore, with the inclusion of gender, and in the case of Palestine, imaginings of masculinity that were manifested in British ideals of leadership and camaraderie, this research offers an intriguing lens with which to reexamine this period in colonial history.

This paper argues that the mythical, historical origins of the litham, the male mouth veil of the Saharan Lamtuna (present-day Twareg), was constructed in medieval Arabic and Berber sources in response to the political and religious ambitions of the Lamtuna Almoravids after their conversion to Islam. Using both the conventional Arabic geographers, Ibn Hawqal, Al-Bakri, Ibn Al-Athir as well as Almohad and Almoravid sources, including Ibn Tumart’s ‘A’azz ma Yutlab, this paper demonstrates how the mouth veil was described as either unislamic and feminine by Ibn Tumart, enemy of the Almoravids, or a symbol of pre-Islamic faith as in the Hulal al Maushiyya, an anonymous fourteenth century text sympathetic to the Almoravids. The Hulal al Maushiyya indentifies the Litham wearers as descendants of Himyar, an exiled Yemeni tribe that professed that “Ahmad is the Messenger of Allah” centuries before the coming of Muhammad. They wore the veil, according this story, to avoid capture. The veil was thus not a symbol of unislamic gender confusion but a gift from Allah, and a symbol of Allah’s special protection over them. Ibn Tumart described the veil as licentious and proof that the Almoravids were illegitimate. In contrast to both of these stories, Ibn Hawqal, who provides one of the earliest accounts of the veil, described a much more practical reason for the male mouth veil: it kept the sand and dust out. This paper will ground the story of the litham in the context of medieval Maghrebi history and medieval sources. While most studies have focused on the veil as a feminine object and the subject of a contested women's history. The veil is symbol of either empowerment or of submission depending on perspective. This paper will describe and explain the contested history of the veil as a male symbol, as a symbol of masculinity, or femininity, of Islamic legitmacy, or lack thereof, and of power - or submission.

My research project is concerned with queer subjectivities and the development of cybertechnologies in the UAE. My use of the term “queer subjectivities” is meant to encompass the liminality inherent in the expression of transgender politics, as opposed to the fixed, categorical nature of the term “gay identities.” The rise of such subjectivities and their extension into online discursive communities within the region of the Arab Gulf states is undoubtedly linked to the UAE’s concerted investment in the development of information technologies, particularly those pertaining to technologies of control. Using a textual and ethnographic analytical framework, I will combine the analysis of visual and textual material with structured and unstructured interviews I am conducting in the UAE. I will take as my subject what I have termed the national “post-oil generation,” a group which in many ways constitutes the symbolic configuration of the nation-state. With Emiratis outnumbered by expatriates by five to one, and with 34% of the Emirati population under 18, the generation born after the formation of the nation-state in 1971 and the first oil boom (from 1973 to 1982) is compelled to subscribe to notions of “authentic” Emirati national cultural identity. At the same time, they are producing multiple discourses that challenge that very identity. In my work, I focus on this generation’s use of space to engage in the exploration of alternative narratives of queerness.

While constructs of gender impact how women view their social roles in relation to men, they also affect how women perceive the potential for change within these roles. Gender has become a frequent frame for studies of women and women’s roles in society; however, more inclusive gender analyses that engage in the plurality of gender, men’s social roles, and ideas of masculinity are rare. Women’s NGOs are the dominant venues within Egyptian civil society that work with or on behalf of women. Yet despite this exclusive self-definition, these NGOs consistently negotiate the implicit discourse of men’s social roles and masculinity. This paper investigates how and to what capacity within this environment, women’s NGOs serve as vehicles for education, advocacy, and change of gender discourses. The growing group of active women’s NGOs and increasing public dialogue on women’s issues make these NGOs a prime location for an assessment into how gender constructs are understood and challenged. By researching production and negotiation of gender subjectivity within women’s NGOs, the paper addresses two main research questions: How do members of women’s NGOs understand gender, masculinity, and male social roles? How do these interpretations of gender constructs impact the work of these organizations? This study serves as an important contribution to the growing body of literature that holistically engages with gender, bridging the gap between texts on women and texts on men. The paper combines personal interviews with participant-observation at three NGOs, which share common features: being women-focused, secularly based, and with memberships and constituencies that are predominantly upper middle-class. By addressing the above research questions on two levels—discourse and practice—this paper engages the multitude of influences that challenge and impact these organizations’ membership and their understandings of gender. In doing so, the paper argues that understandings of femininity and masculinity must be approached in concert with one another and that the ways through which gender subjectivity is produced in these NGOs affects the goals and objectives of these organizations, informing future shifts in gender constructs.

In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983), Jack Zipes explains that writing a text implies a certain worldview that one attempts to expound; and that writing such a text will either test this view or legitimate it. Most of the stories narrated to children for centuries have propagated the ethics of male-dominated societies; advocating culturally inherited norms that serve patriarchal interests. The narrators of these stories, mostly women, unconsciously perpetuate certain self images, that of the macho boy who doesn't cry because he is a man, and the damsel in distress awaiting the arrival of Prince Charming. Ultimately children grow up enacting these negative self images because they have been deprived of alternative ones; and, as adults, they fail to see the sense of disempowerment that such self-images have imposed upon them, and upon their children thereafter. This paper provides an in-depth study of the Egyptian children stories rewritten by the Gender-Sensitive Fairytales Project of the Women and Memory Foundation, investigating both texts and authorship. Through interviewing the writers, the researcher compares between their own self image, and the one they project through the characters in their stories, many of which attempt to revoke stereotypical gender representations, substituting them with empowering definitions of femininity and masculinity. The paper also examines the impact of conformity across generations by studying the relationship of these female writers to their mothers from whom they have inherited the art of storytelling, and their children for whom they rewrite these empowering stories.