Book Review: ‘Gulf Women’s Lives’

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Updated 03 November 2024
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Book Review: ‘Gulf Women’s Lives’

“Gulf Women’s Lives: Voice, Space, Place,” edited by Emanuela Buscemi, Shahd Al-Shammari and Ildiko Kaposi, explores the experiences of Gulf women through three themes: voice, space and place.

“This timely volume fills in a serious gap in research and contributes to countering stereotypes and prejudices about Muslim and Arab women, specifically those located in the Arabian Gulf,” the 2024 anthology’s blurb promises.

Through a mix of essays, literary analyses and personal narratives written by scholars and practitioners, the majority of whom are from the Gulf, “Gulf Women’s Lives” highlights how the women of the region have carved out their own path, navigating complex gender roles and expectations within public and private spaces, and often challenging traditional stereotypes that depict them as submissive or powerless.

Many stories written in the West about Gulf women paint us all with the same broad brush: we are either sad or mad. This book offers a nuanced view of how Gulf women exercise agency and construct their identities. Its interdisciplinary approach combines sociology, literature, media, law and disability studies. Each chapter is grounded in theoretical discussions about gender and the agency of women within Gulf societies. Kuwaiti artist Thuraya Al-Baqsami’s 1987 artwork, “Waiting,” is featured on the cover.

The first part, “Voices,” features three pieces rich with anecdotes: Al-Shammari’s “From Stigma to Speech: An Autoethnography of Bedouin Culture, Writing and Illness,” Kaposi’s “Women Talking Back: In Conversation with Sekka Magazine’s ‘Managing Storyteller’ Sharifah Alhinai,” and Buscemi’s “Bodies on the Margins: Nonconforming Subjectivities in Gulf Women’s Literature.”

Part two, “Spaces,” features Emirati Noura Al-Obeidli on the challenges facing female Emirati journalists in the newsroom; Nora Jaber’s critical analysis of women’s petitions and gender reforms in Saudi Arabia; and Maryam Al-Muhanadi on divorce among Qatari women.

“Places,” also features three essays, each vital to telling the individual and collective story of women in the Gulf.

The women who contributed to this volume dedicated each page to how women in the Gulf have been asserting themselves — within traditional and modern contexts — and address issues such as activism, mobility and societal expectations.

The book has a slightly academic format but is simple enough to read. The theoretical reflections and conversations challenge us all to go beyond narratives of submissiveness, powerlessness and victimization.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Organic Line’

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Updated 23 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Organic Line’

  • Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge

Author: IRENE SMALL

What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.”

For much of the history of art, Clark’s discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

Updated 22 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

In Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism.
Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism.
One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.
Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

Updated 21 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

Brain research has been accelerating rapidly in recent decades, but the translation of our many discoveries into treatments and cures for brain disorders has not happened as many expected. 

We do not have cures for the vast majority of brain illnesses, from Alzheimer’s to depression, and many medications we do have to treat the brain are derived from drugs produced in the 1950s—before we knew much about the brain at all. 

Tackling brain disorders is clearly one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. What will it take to overcome it? Nicole Rust takes readers along on her personal journey to answer this question.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

Updated 20 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

“The Atlas of Birds” captures the breathtaking diversity of birds, and illuminates their conservation status around the world.

Full-color maps show where birds are found, both by country and terrain, and reveal how an astounding variety of behavioral adaptations—from flight and feeding to nest building and song—have enabled them to thrive in virtually every habitat on Earth.

Maps of individual journeys and global flyways chart the amazing phenomenon of bird migration, while bird classification is explained using maps for each order and many key families.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

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Updated 18 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

  • Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land

Author: ERIN LIN

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In “When the Bombs Stopped,” Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.