Postgraduate Module Descriptor

ARAM225: Gender and Politics in the Middle East

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Aims

This module aims to enable you to analyse ‘the politics of gender’ across diverse contexts in the Middle East and North Africa. You will learn to analyse the relationship between gender and politics on multiple levels, from individual subjects, to communities and societies, to states and governance, to transnational trends and processes; the course will additionally equip you to identify how these levels are necessarily connected. The course aims to promote politically active learning through engagement with topical events and project-based assessment

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here - you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills1. Discern the various ways in which gender roles, relations and norms are constructed, reproduced and challenged in the Middle East.
2. Identify and critically assess the changing social, political, cultural and economic contexts that shape gender in the Middle East.
3. Evaluate critically different theoretical and methodological approaches employed in the study of gender and sexuality in the Middle East.
Discipline-Specific Skills4. Analyse and assess academic texts and prevailing cultural notions critically.
5. Distinguish between a range of methodological approaches as well as variety of genres, i.e. anthropological and sociological texts, (auto)biographical writings and fiction.
6. Demonstrate an awareness of, and be sensitised to, the various processes by which gender (i.e. femaleness and maleness) is socially and culturally constructed in different contexts.
Personal and Key Skills7. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment.
8. Critically examine and review existing literature.
9. Engage in independent study and group work, including the presentation of material for group discussion.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Abdo, Nahla, Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship, 2011.

Abu-Lughod, Lila (ed.), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, 1998  

Al-Ali, Nadje, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, 2007.

Al-Ali, Nadje & Nicola Pratt, Women & War in the Middle East, 2009.

Charrad, Mounira, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East. Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Joseph, Suad (ed.) Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self and Identity, 1999.

Kanaaneh, Rhoda, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, 2002.

Kandiyoti, Deniz (ed.) Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, 1996

Kandiyoti, Deniz (ed.), Women, Islam and the State, 1991.

Khalil, Andrea (ed.), Gender, Women and the Arab Spring, 2014.

Ouzgane, Lahoucine (ed.) Islamic Masculinities, 2006.

Puar, Jasbir, Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times, 2007.

Singerman, Diane, Avenues of Participation: Family Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo, 1997.