Bad Girls of the Arab World

by Nadia G Yaqub (Editor), Rula Quawas (Editor)

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.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Middle East

256 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2017

Reviews

[دانية Dania · Rating 2 out of 5]

قرأت هذا الكتاب لذكرى معلمتي المرحومة رلى قواس.
الفصل الذي كتبته الدكتورة رلى قواس يخصني شخصيا كأحدى طالباتها لكن الفصل المتعلق بصناعة صورة الام الفلسطينية "السيئة" خلال الانتفاضة الثانية كان الجزء الاهم بنظري من هذا الكتاب.
قصص نساء من مصر و تونس و ليبيا و سوريا في الربيع العربي ايضا لها حيز في هذا الكتاب حيث كانت أجسادهن وأصواتهن وسائل يرتدينها و تسلط عليهن في احداث الربيع وانتفاضاته.
غابت قصص نضالات اي من نساء العراق واليمن و الخليج العربي عن هذا الكتاب.
بعض الفصول قدمت تحليلا ضحلا او حتى سردا لم أجد فيه ما يثير الاهتمام.

[Isabella]

3/27/2023
This book taught me so much, and also taught me that there is so much left for me to learn. I am interested in learning more about the various authors and women in this book. I wish this would have been included in my curriculum in high school because we usually only learned about feminist movements that centered Europeans or European Americans.

[Isabell Janssen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bad girls happen. Weather they choose to go the ‘bad girl’ route themselves or are forced in to hold this name. But what is a bad girl? And more preferent for this book, what is a bad girl in the Arab world?

In Bad Girls of the Arab World by Nadia G Yaqub (Editor) & Rula Quawas (Editor) you read twelve unique stories of woman who society stamped as ‘bad girls’. A title the brings with it many negative connotations that are hard to shake off.

The works collected address the experiences of women from a range of ages, classes, and educational backgrounds who live in the Arab world and beyond. From personal reflections on transgression to acadamical articles reflecting on ‘bad girls’ and their experiences.

As Laila Al-Atrash mentioned in the afterword: “I wonder how it is that we are still leading, decades later, the same fight against this attack on women and their accomplishments.”

This book will give you a broad view on what a Bad Girl in the Arab World means. It will open to door for future reading if reading about the Arab World is new for you. With many reference to other books, art works and artist this book triggers interest and with its critical undertone and extensive reference list after each chapter give you plenty of further reading materials.

Bad Girls of the Arab World explore a wide selection of female portraits that I found inform, intriguing, saddening, empowering and mind-opening.

[Mills College Library]

305.40917 B132 2017