Pioneering treatment of an under-researched area of Arab history and society

The secret history of the rebellious Frenchwomen who were exiled to colonial Louisiana and found power in the Mississippi Valley In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women. Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi. Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women introduces us to the Gulf South’s Founding Mothers.

Though women had been involved in war efforts in every conflict in American history, more women participated in the Gulf War than in any war before it. When the Gulf War began in 1990, women in the military were still not allowed to fight on the front lines, in positions that directly engaged the enemy, but the roles they held still proved challenging and dangerous. This engrossing book tells the stories of the women who fought bravely in the air, on land, at sea, and in enemy camps as prisoners of war, as well as honors those who gave their lives for their country.

"A powerful, gripping, and disturbing story of passion and betrayal, survival and vengeance, compulsion and resilience, told in arresting images and fragmented, dreamlike narrative."--Teresa de Lauretis, professor of History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz "This amalgam of life history, creative non-fiction, psychoanalytic treatise and fictionalized memoirs is a welcome addition to queer literature."--Gloria Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands Gulf Dreams is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood.

Family, Body, Sexuality and Health is Volume III of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures. In almost 200 well written entries it covers the broad field of family, body, sexuality and health and Islamic cultures.

This volume explores the dialogue between Arab media and global developments in the information age, looking at the influence of new technologies in Arab societies and the evolving role of Arab women in ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. By gathering together contributions from both Arab and non-Arab scholars alike, a timely and important collection is presented that sheds new light on the growing involvement, role and image of Arab women in the media.

An irreversible transformation is taking place in the lives of many thousands of university educated professional women in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Drawing on eight years' participative research and extensive secondary sources, Nick Forster introduces the first extensive study to document this development in the Middle East. This book documents the emerging economic and political power of women, and how they are beginning to challenge ancient and deeply-held beliefs about the 'correct' roles of men and women in conservative Islamic societies, and in public and private sector organisations. It also describes the vital role that women could play in the economic development and diversification of these countries, and the broader MENA region, in the future. It is an essential read for professionals, scholars and students, in fields as diverse as economic development, international management, gender studies, and Middle Eastern studies.

Occupational segregation is a pressing issue in business and can be detrimental to women in the workforce. With the this segregation growing, there is now an urgent need to increase the presence of women in the business market. Arab Women and Their Evolving Roles in the Global Business Landscape is a pivotal reference source for the latest research findings on the Arab culture and how the global culture impacts Arab women in the business market. Featuring extensive coverage on relevant areas such as work and family balance, gender stereotypes, and the glass ceiling, this publication is an ideal resource for legislators and policymakers, economic developers, corporate practitioners, educational faculties, and students of all disciplines who are looking to change the way gender is viewed in the workforce.

This book addresses east-west understandings of Arab women as portrayed through translated media. The vast majority of media studies on Arab women are western-based. They study the effect of western stereotypes in western media depictions of Arab women. There is a vast scholarly literature tracing western stereotypes of Arab women from medieval times to the present. From 1800, the dominant western stereotype of Arab women depicts them as passive and oppressed. Thirty years of social science media research in the west has shown that media images of Arab women reinforce this two hundred year old stereotype. Much of this research has studied silent "image bites" of Arab women, where women are pictured in veils and their own voices are replaced by western captions or voice-overs. This book sets out to answer this question. To answer it, we contracted with a global news translation service from the Middle East to collect and translate a sample of 22 months of new summaries from 103 Arab media sources belonging to 22 Arab countries. Filtering the summaries that contained one or more female keywords (e.g., woman, mother, aunt, sister, she) yielded 2, 061 summaries between September 2005 and June of 2007. Using the 2,061 summaries as input data, a coding scheme was developed for "active" and "passive" female behaviors based on verb-phrase analysis and conventions of English-language news-reporting.

This volume examines the role of Arab women in Arab Spring and their contribution to the ongoing process of change sweeping the region. The book begins with an examination of the process of democratization and its impediments in the Arab World since the Second World War. It then looks at the conditions that led to the upsurge of the so-called Arab Spring. Finally, it underscores women’s role as participants, organizers, leaders, but also as victims. The main thesis of the book is that while Arab women were an integral part of the revolutionary efforts within the Arab Spring paradigm, they did not benefit from their sacrifices. Although they continue to be part of the process of change, their gains, rights and scope for participation are still limited. If the expansion of women’s participation and the scope of their rights do not seem to be a priority for revolutionary forces, women have made remarkable achievements, especially in some Arab Spring countries such as Yemen and Libya. The book includes case studies of some Arab Spring countries and other countries influenced by developments: Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. It calls on revolutionary and reformist forces to give special attention to issues related to Arab women, as they are an indispensable pillar in the process of reform, development, peace and stability in the Middle East.