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Bad Girls of the Arab World

Bad Girls of the Arab World

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Women’s transgressive behaviors and perspectives are challenging societal norms in the Arab world, giving rise to anxiety and public debate. Simultaneously, however, other Arab women are unwillingly finding themselves labeled “bad” as authority figures attempt to redirect scrutiny from serious social ills such as patriarchy and economic exploitation, or as they impose new restrictions on women’s behavior in response to uncertainty and change in society. Bad Girls of the Arab World elucidates how both intentional and unintentional transgressions make manifest the social and cultural constructs that define proper and improper behavior, as well as the social and political policing of gender, racial, and class divisions.

The works collected here address the experiences of women from a range of ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who live in the Arab world and beyond. They include short pieces in which the women themselves reflect on their experiences with transgression; academic articles about performance, representation, activism, history, and social conditions; an artistic intervention; and afterwords by the acclaimed novelists Laila al-Atrash and Miral al-Tahawy. The book demonstrates that women’s transgression is both an agent and a symptom of change, a site of both resistance and repression. Showing how transnational forces such as media discourses, mobility and confinement, globalization, and neoliberalism, as well as the legacy of colonialism, shape women’s badness, Bad Girls of the Arab World offers a rich portrait of women’s varied experiences at the boundaries of propriety in the twenty-first century.

ISBN-13: 9781477313367

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Publication Date: 10-13-2017

Pages: 256

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Nadia Yaqub is an associate professor of Arabic language and culture in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Dueling of Weddings in the Galilee.Rula Quawas was a professor of American literature and feminist theory at the University of Jordan. Her books included The Voice of Being Enough: Young Jordanian Women Break Through without Breaking Down.

What People are Saying About This

Frances S. Hasso

This will be a lovely, unusual, and energizing book to teach at the undergraduate level in Middle East and women’s studies courses. There is no other book like it or similar to it.

Table of Contents

  • A Note on Transliteration and Translation
  • Foreword by Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction by Nadia Yaqub
  • Chapter 1. Inciting Critique in the Feminist Classroom (Rula Quawas)
  • Chapter 2. “And Is It Impossible to Be Good Everywhere?” Love and Badness in America and the Arab World (Diya Abdo)
  • Chapter 3. Suspicious Bodies: Madame Bomba Performs against Death in Lebanon (Rima Najdi)
  • Chapter 4. “Jihad Jane” as Good American Patriot and Bad Arab Girl: The Case of Nada Prouty after 9/11 (Randa A. Kayyali)
  • Chapter 5. Paying for Her Father’s Sins: Yasmin as a Daughter of Unknown Lineage (Rawan W. Ibrahim)
  • Chapter 6. The Making of Bad Palestinian Mothers during the Second Intifada (Adania Shibli)
  • Chapter 7. “They Are Not Like Your Daughters or Mine”: Spectacles of Bad Women from the Arab Spring (Amal Amireh)
  • Chapter 8. “Fuck Your Morals”: The Body Activism of Amina Sboui (Anne Marie E. Butler )
  • Chapter 9. Syrian Bad Girl Samar Yazbek: Refusing Burial (Hanadi al-Samman)
  • Chapter 10. Reel Bad Maghrebi Women (Florence Martin and Patricia Caillé)
  • Chapter 11. New Bad Girls of Sudan: Women Singers in the Sudanese Diaspora (Anita H. Fábos)
  • Chapter 12. Being a Revolutionary and Writerly Rebel (Suhair al-Tal)
  • Afterword by Laila al-Atrash
  • Afterword by Miral al-Tahawy
  • Contributors
  • Index