Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance

Lessons from the Arab world

Ever since the uprisings that swept the Arab world, the role of Arab women in political transformations received unprecedented media attention. The copious commentary, however, has yet to result in any serious study of the gender dynamics of political upheaval.

Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance is the first book to analyse the interplay between moments of sociopolitical transformation, emerging subjectivities and the different modes of women's agency in forging new gender norms in the Arab world. Written by scholars and activists from the countries affected, including Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, this is an important addition to Middle Eastern gender studies.

Maha El Said is a professor at the English Department, Cairo University. She has more than 22 years of experience teaching at Egyptian universities with a special interest in American studies. She was the first to write a book-length dissertation on Arab-American poetry, in 1997. She has published on Arab-American writings, creative writing, popular culture and the impact of new technologies on literature. In 2003-2004 she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she researched the development of the spoken word as political expression.

Lena Meari is an assistant professor at the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department and the Institute of Women's Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her teaching, research interests and writing focus on settler colonialism in Palestine and formations of revolutionary movements, subjectivities, gender relations and development.

Nicola Pratt is reader in the international politics of the Middle East at University of Warwick. She has been researching and writing about Middle East politics since the end of the 1990s and is particularly interested in feminist approaches as well as "politics from below". Her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Third World Quarterly, Review of International Studies and Review of International Political Economy, amongst others. She is author of Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World, co-author (with Nadje Al-Ali) of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq and co-editor (with Sophie Richter-Devroe) of Gender, Governance and International Security and (with Nadje Al-Ali) Women and War in the Middle East. Between 2010 and 2013, she was co-director of the "Reconceptualising Gender: Transnational Perspectives" research network with Birzeit University, Palestine.