This paper explores the possibilities for coalition between Arab feminists across borders. It focuses on Arab feminist discourses emergent out of two contexts: the diasporas of empire (Arab feminisms in the U.S.) and Arab revolutions and the preceding histories that spun them into motion (feminisms of the Arab region). The paper will consider how these conditions have inspired parallel and differing feminist analyses of state violence, militarism, and racism. Ultimately, this paper asks, what might transnational solidarity between homelands and diasporas look like? Are feminist struggles of the Arab region and its diasporas moving parts of the same imperial present, taking place within the same spatial-temporal context? What are the points of tension, power, privilege, and contradiction? And what can these issues tell us about the shifting constructions of Arab American Feminist Studies, and Arab American identity more generally?

Taking anthropology as an especially illuminative case study, this paper examines how national and global politics have both drawn scholars to study the Middle East and created gendered and racialized minefields in their academic lives. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with over one hundred Middle East anthropologists of varying backgrounds and generations, it tracks the intersection of politics and identity over time in a discipline that views itself as particularly sensitive to positionality. By the 21st century, Middle East anthropology included greater numbers of female and Middle Eastern scholars than ever before, yet the field remains largely white and the region remains understudied within anthropology despite being a focus of the so-called War on Terror. These tensions make anthropology a revealing example of larger trends related to gender and race/ethnicity in the broader interdisciplinary field of Middle East studies. The paper first explores the ways that gender and race/ethnicity influence how scholars are drawn to Middle East anthropology at different historical moments, and suggests that knowledge production is political from its inception in a future academic’s social life. U.S. foreign policy in the region, as linked to domestic racial and gender hierarchies, shapes the experiences of women and Middle Eastern – especially Arab and Arab-American – scholars, in graduate school and on the job market, often in negative ways that must be navigated through complex practices of self-protection and even self-censorship. These issues persist in various forms throughout these scholars’ professional careers, including in their teaching and public lectures. In addition to confronting both overt racism and sexism, often based on stereotypes about the Middle East, female and region-related scholars must deal with a range of microaggressions. These scholars also face greater monitoring of their teaching and more intense political pushback related to Palestine. Indeed, while any scholar who teaches or speaks about Palestine or Palestinian communities may face political pushback, female and Arab-American scholars in particular are most likely to encounter hostility and attack. The paper concludes with some reflections on how the situation in anthropology might be replicated, or even magnified, in other disciplines.

Both popular and academic discussions of female homosociality in Iran generally fall into two opposing camps: liberal feminist cries to end what is often called “segregation,” or Islamic feminist stances highlighting how women actively use Islam as a tool to achieve their political goals in Iran. Frequently these conversations focus on the most visible forms of legally-mandated homosociality, such as public buses or security lines, but what do spaces which offer a different sense of privacy in public offer women in Iran? This paper will explore the affective circulations of pleasure and its social and political possibilities through a comparative analysis of communal dressing rooms and public baths - both female homosocial spaces with communal nudity. Drawing on research done in Iran 2010 – 2013, this paper will explore what a transnational feminist lens offers in an analysis of these homosocial spaces. While liberal and Islamic feminists focus heavily on policy, religion and their interrelations in Iran, a transnational feminist perspective examining female homosocial space will flesh out how everyday women experience the banality of homosociality, and what the political potential of this could be. This paper questions how we may read pleasure and its political possibilities in the everyday, and what the usefulness of the banality of female homosocial nudity is in these spaces. The transnational feminist work of both Minoo Moallem and Chandra Mohanty will provide the framework for my analysis of female homosociality. Henri Lefebvre’s method of "rhythmanalysis" (tracing patterns and movements through/in a space that are constantly producing the space as well as those within it) will be employed to analyze these female homosocial spaces and understand what engagement with them may offer. Affect work by Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi will guide my tracing of affect in these spaces and the centering of the physical body as a site to read the impacts of these spaces. Using Afsaneh Najmabadi’s formulations of historical female homosocial spaces, and Lynn Nelson’s theorization of “epistemological communities,” I will argue for the current importance of female homosocial spaces with communal nudity as sites where one may experience and enjoy the everyday/banal aspects of pleasure. Examining public baths and communal dressing rooms in bra shops, this paper interrogates the possibilities of everyday interactions in homosocial space within a transnational feminist framework. Engaging the different spatial layouts of baths and dressing rooms, I consider what these spaces offer women who engage them.

This paper will explore the discursive and theoretical relationships between queer theory, transnational feminism, and Palestine studies. As a scholar working on Palestinian-American cinema, transnational feminist theory has been integral to my examination of the gendered dimensions of visual and discursive representation in the US context. However I am not interested in theorizing “Palestinian-American” as a hybrid identity category because I believe doing so relegates Palestinian-Americans to the space of “neither/nor” and “other,” which provides further justification for Palestinian-American marginalization from both US and Palestinian cultures, societies, and political processes. This paper is concerned with understanding the power relations of such a category, specifically the simultaneous privileges that are granted and dispossessions that are justified when it comes to “Palestinian American” as a category of identity and geopolitical positionality. As such, I take up the term “queer” to unpack the intersections Palestinian-American identity and understand the transnational condition of the Palestinian diaspora in relation to both US and Palestinian culture and politics. Why are the borders of queer theory so heavily policed regarding questions of transnationalism and intersectionality? What are the concerns and possibilities within the field of Palestine studies regarding queer theory? From its use as derogatory slang to its development into an theoretical field of inquiry, the term “queer” has changed over time to encompass not only the categories of gender and sexuality, but especially within the context of the US academy, is now a marker of a certain kind of radical leftist politics concerned with intersecting issues of race, ability, immigration status, financial in/security, and state violence. But before queer became a set of cultural politics, it was a marker of difference. Scholars such as Theresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick have laid important groundwork for theorizing queer in terms of gender and sexual difference. Others, such as Roderick Ferguson, Cathy Cohen, Jasbir Puar, and Grace Hong have leveraged women of color and Third World feminist theory to developed the field of queer of color critique to account for other dimensions of “non-normativity” within the US context, such as race, immigration status, nationality, and class. In this paper I argue for an understanding of queer as a set of leftist cultural politics that center gender, sexual, and racial justice. Such an understanding opens up possibilities for solidarity and coalition building across and between the United States and Palestine under the umbrella of queer politics.