Middle Eastern Studies, Feminism, and Globalization

Author(s): Minoo Moallem

Source: Signs, Vol. 26, No. 4, Globalization and Gender (Summer, 2001), pp. 1265-1268
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175367
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 Minoo Moallem

Middle Eastern Studies, Feminism, and Globalization

We invited Minoo Moallem and Ella Shohat to contribute comments on

feminist issues in relation to the Middle East. Trained as a sociologist,
Moallem writes on feminist theory, globalization, and Iranian cultural
politics and diasporas. Shohat writes on colonial and postcolonial
discourses, transnational cultural politics, and multicultural feminist theory.
We asked them to comment, in particular, on the limits and possibilities of
area studies in relation to the study of gender and globalization.

odernist temporal and spatial metaphors describing globalization as

progress, growth, and development put in place a dichotomous logic
that persistently distinguishes between good and evil, civilized and
barbaric, Orient and Occident, and us and them. While colonial modernity
has invested in such notions in its quest for cultural and political hegemony
in the Middle East, various identity-based oppositional movements - from
nationalism to fundamentalism - have found, in their reclaiming of origi-
nality and tradition, new meanings in renouncing a dichotomous thinking.
Both colonial and anti- or postcolonial logics have relied on particular dis-
cursive notions of gender, race, class, and culture. For feminist scholars
such as myself, entering the field of globalization has meant entering the
discursive world of colonial modernity and the postcolonial staging of such
formations as gender, sexuality, race, class, and culture not only in the
Middle East but extraregionally vis-a-vis geographical and symbolic loca-
tion. Such entrance has to do with my own location in Iran and my subse-
quent dislocation in the Iranian diaspora, which has also been the condi-
tion of the possibility/impossibility of fitting or unfitting myself into the
territorial and symbolic borders of knowledge production in academia.
Middle Eastern studies does not engage in a dialogue with three tradi-
tions of scholarship: colonial and postcolonial studies, transnational femi-
nist theory, and transnational cultural studies. While the "Middle East" is
at the core of Edward Said's (1978) investigation of Orientalism in both

I want to thank Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan for inviting me to contribute to this
issue of Signs.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2001, vol. 26, no. 4]
? 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2001/2604-0014$02.00

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1266 I Comments

the colonial and postcolonial eras, the field of Middle Eastern studies is
still dominated by a fixation on, in the words of Immanuel Wallerstein,
"the historically frozen Oriental high civilizations" (1997, 198) and by a
focus on the political, cultural, and economic divisions of nation-states.
Only in the last two decades, in the shadow of the "threatening" pres-
ence of "Islamic fundamentalists" and "Muslim immigrants" and out of
"security" concerns of Western societies, has there emerged a literature on
the issues of new forms of globalization and the Middle East. In addition,
the lack of engagement by Middle Eastern scholars with transnational con-
structions of gender, sexuality, class, and race has been central to the per-
petuation of masculinist and Orientalist traditions of knowledge forma-
tions in the field. Furthermore, while Middle Eastern feminist scholarship
has expanded, it has remained divorced from an engagement with colonial
modernity and its racial and sexual formations, thus contributing to both
"heteronormative" and "ethnocentric" traditions of knowledge production
as well as the reproduction of those dichotomous notions of tradition and
modernity that create legitimacy for a "feminist civilizing mission."
Ella Shohat's (1992) "rethinking of Jews and Muslims" was, in my view,
an important step in bringing the Middle East back into the historical con-
text of older forms of globalization. She showed significant connections
between the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Europe and the estab-
lishment of the New World within which we became part of the West's
"others?' While I am not trying to use this connection to create a new
origin myth, I find this theoretical move extremely helpful to understand-
ing not only the geopolitical positioning of the Middle East and the field
of Middle Eastern studies but also the political and theoretical silence of
scholars and policy makers (with a very few exceptions) over the connec-
tion between new forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism in Europe
and North America and the older discourses of anti-Semitism. Why is there
a rupture between these two discourses? What does such logic perpetuate
or disguise? Why is it threatening to think of these two discourses in rela-
tion to each other? What prevents us from thinking of these two discourses
as interconnected? Why is it important for feminist scholars to make these
kinds of linkages? Why is it difficult to look at the intertextual borrowings
of these two discourses as well as their connection to other discourses that
link heteronormativity, humanism, and liberalism in colonial modernity?
I am appalled by the absence in Middle Eastern studies of any substan-
tial literature on gender and globalization, of work that goes beyond the
tropes of Muslim women as victims. I am appalled not to find any signifi-
cant writing on the interconnection between the political economy of pe-
troleum in the Middle East and the formation of particular forms of gender

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 S I G N S Summer 2001 I 1267

identities, especially the redefinition of masculinity in terms of warfare and

martyrdom. I am exhausted by the persistent isolation and marginalization
of gender and sexuality in Middle Eastern studies. As feminist scholars,
we need to identify such blind spots that "add" gender to Middle East-
ern studies but confine its analysis to a vision of an overarching victim-
producing patriarchy as defined by Islamic religion and the barbarism of
so-called oriental societies.
For me, it is only both through an interdisciplinary move and by bring-
ing culture back into the context of political economy that one could make
significant connections between gender and globalization in the Middle
East. I align myself with those feminist theories that throw Middle Eastern
studies into crisis by challenging masculinist disciplinary practices, and at
the same time I support the work in Middle Eastern studies that throws
global feminism into crisis by emphasizing the historical specificity of the
region in general and each locality in particular. Furthermore, I endorse
those colonial and postcolonial studies that throw both feminism and
Middle Eastern studies into crisis by investigating the construction of loca-
tion and dislocation, homelands and host societies, and by examining those
historical conditions that produce, in Parama Roy's words, "natives as self-
reflexive subjects, who know themselves as others (the colonizers) know
them" (1998, 39). Thus I again raise the question of why it is possible-
or at least not impossible--to talk about the "woman problem" in Iran
without investigating the "Persian problem," or vice versa? What does it
mean to deal with one without engaging with the other? Why is it that
an increasing body of literature in postcolonial and transnational feminist
scholarship deals with other areas such as East Asia, South Asia, and Latin
America, yet still there is no significant intellectual and scholarly exchange
between these areas and the Middle East? How many conferences, journals,
and publications have tried to engage these questions in other geographic
and disciplinary areas yet have crossed these geographical and disciplinary
boundaries? What is it that makes it impossible for Middle Eastern scholars
to engage a number of other relevant interdisciplinary fields of scholarship,
including Asian studies, Asian-American studies, ethnic studies, or Ameri-
can studies? What is the role of masculinist nationalism in such mappings
and remappings? Are we determined either to identify with the region or
to distance ourselves from it? Under what circumstances are we able to
claim that we belong to other significant locations that enable new theoret-
ical and political connections?

Women's Studies Department

San Francisco State University

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1268 I Contllents

References

Roy, Parama. 1998. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial
India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Shohat, Ella. 1992. "Rethinking Jews and Muslims. Quincentennial Reflections."
Middle East Report 22(5):25-29.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1997. "The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area
Studies." In The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the
Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky et al., 195-231. New York: New Press.

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