Skip to main content
University of California Press

Embodying Geopolitics

Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon

by Nicola Pratt (Author)
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Oct 2020
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780520957657
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 4 maps
Endowments:

About the Book

When women took to the streets during the mass protests of the Arab Spring, the subject of feminism in the Middle East and North Africa returned to the international spotlight. In the subsequent years, countless commentators treated the region’s gender inequality as a consequence of fundamentally cultural or religious problems. In so doing, they overlooked the specifically political nature of these women’s activism. Moving beyond such culturalist accounts, this book turns to the relations of power in regional and international politics to understand women’s struggles for their rights. 

Based on over a hundred extensive personal narratives from women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Nicola Pratt traces women’s activism from national independence through to the Arab uprisings, arguing that activist women are critical geopolitical actors. Weaving together these personal accounts with the ongoing legacies of colonialism, Embodying Geopolitics demonstrates how the production and regulation of gender is integrally bound up with the exercise and organization of geopolitical power, with consequences for women’s activism and its effects.
 

About the Author

Nicola Pratt is Associate Professor of International Politics of the Middle East at the University of Warwick. She is the coauthor of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq and author of Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Embodying Geopolitics in the Middle East and North Africa 
1 • Female Respectability and Embodied National Sovereignty
2 • The 1967 Defeat and Its Aftermath: The Breakdown of the Gender Order and the Expansion of Women’s Activism
3 • The Gendered Effects of Political Repression and Violence in the 1970s and 1980s
4 • The Political Economy and Geopolitics of Women’s Activism after the Cold War
5 • Women’s Rights as Geopolitical Discourse: The Struggle over Geography in the Post–Cold War Period
6 • The Struggle over Gender at the Heart of the Arab Uprisings
7 • The Gendered Geopolitics of Fear and Counterrevolution
Conclusion

Notes 
List of Interviewees
List of Organizations
References
Index

Reviews

"A compelling portrait of women working inside, outside, and against systems of power."
Foreign Affairs
"Pratt’s book has many strengths. The span of history it covers makes it an ambitious project, but Pratt deftly highlights the most analytically relevant features of each time period under consideration. . . . [And] leaves the reader simultaneously optimistic about the future of women’s activism in the region while also aware and wary of
the major challenges that women continue to face."
Middle East Journal

"Groundbreaking research."

Arab Studies Quarterly
"With these women activists’ surprising narratives, Nicola Pratt gives us fresh analyses of the complex genderings undergirding nationalism, state building, and thus international politics. Especially eye-opening are her gritty accounts of women’s politicization in the wake of Arab states’ 1967 wartime defeat."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging Persistent Patriarchy

"This is an exceptional book that makes an important and original contribution to the study of the geopolitics of the MENA region. Effectively using the rich resource of activist women’s narratives, Nicola Pratt brings fresh, authoritative, and contextualized understandings of its gendered and spatialized power relations."—Charles Tripp, author of The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East

"This is a much needed book by one of the most astute analysts of Middle Eastern women's politics. Richly textured, covering a broad historic sweep, and boasting a symphony of Arab women's voices, Pratt shows us the long arc of Arab women's activism over generations. The Arab women activists featured in this thought-provoking book are not only deeply aware of and critical towards the context of their own struggle but also of how their activism plays out in the geopolitical milieu that inevitably shapes Middle Eastern politics. By refusing to uncouple the domestic and the transnational, the local and the global, and by giving a sense of the genealogy and depth of feminisms in the region, Embodying Geopolitics provides deeply valuable insights into the lives and praxis of Arab women in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon."—Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula

"Innovative, creative, authentic, and grounded in careful engagement with relevant critical and feminist interventions across anthropology, political science, and geography, this book is a tour de force and a joy to read—it is as insightful as it is important."—Laura J. Shepherd, editor of Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations

"The rich fieldwork and analytical rigor with which Pratt contextualizes women activists make for an especially engaging read."—Sune Haugbølle, author of War and Memory in Lebanon

Awards

  • Susan Strange Best Book Prize 2021 2021, British International Studies Association