Feminist Dilemmas: How To Talk About Gender-Based Violence In Relation To The Middle East

Nadje Al-Ali

This talks charts Professor Al-Ali’s trajectories and dilemmas as a feminist activist/academic researching, writing and talking about gender based violence (GBV) with reference in to the Middle East. She draws on research and activism in relation to Iraq, Turkey as well as Lebanon to map the discursive, political and empirical challenges and complexities linked to scholarship and activism that is grounded in both feminist and anti-racist/anti-Islamophobic politics. The political and academic aim to challenge essentialised ideas of Middle Eastern exceptionalism and conflated notions of Muslim, Arab/Middle Eastern culture has clearly been an on-going and familiar motivation for many academics/activists researching and writing on women and gender issues. Prof Al-Ali will reflect on her increasing discomfort with narratives about GBV that focus solely on the impact of external factors, mainly framed with reference to imperialism and neo-liberalism, instead of recognising not simply complicity but pro-active involvement of various local and regional actors. Drawing on her previous work on Iraq, and my more recent work on the Kurdish women's movement and queer feminist activism in Lebanon, she will share the dilemmas and tensions of involved in a transnational feminist knowledge production and activism.

About the Speaker

Nadje Al-Ali is Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Studies (CGS), SOAS University of London. She is currently chair of CGS but will leave SOAS to take up a new position in anthropology with reference to the Middle East at Brown University in January. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism; transnational migration and diaspora moblization; war, conflict and peace; as well as art; cultural studies; mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books); New Approaches to Migration (ed., Routledge, 2002, with Khalid Koser); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar entitled We are Iraqis: Aesthetics; Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press) won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction. Her more recent research and publications focus on the Turkish-Kurdish conflict and the Kurdish women’s movement. Professor Al-Ali was President of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) from 2009-2011. She has been a member of the Feminist Review Collective, and is on the editorial board of Kohl: a journal of body and gender research. She was involved in several projects with Iraqi academics and women’s rights activists with the aim to facilitate the introduction of women and gender studies and increase evidence-based research capacity in Iraq.