Gendered orientalism and the agency of Syrian, Muslim women refugees

Orientalist discourses have long recirculated the idea that Muslim women are oppressed victims of Islam; an idea that has denigrated Muslims and positioned white, Christians as superior. For Muslim women refugees specifically, the gendered orientalist discourse of victimization has reappeared on both sides of the debate on Syrian refugee resettlement in the US and Europe. Within anti-resettlement circles, the narrative of Muslim women as oppressed victims has been leveraged as a reason to stop their resettlement, because their lifestyles and values are framed as incompatible with liberal, Western societies. Pro-resettlement circles, on the other hand, often position Muslim women’s victimization as a reason to save them by resettling them. In other words, the same cultural essentialism that positions Muslim women as victims has been used to reject and to support Muslim refugee resettlement. Yet the representations of Syrian Muslim women as oppressed victims of Islam exist in stark contrast to the strong, capable, and resilient Syrian women refugees scattered across SWANA, Europe, the US, and elsewhere. Building from postcolonial, feminist literature, in this paper I first focus on the intersections of the gendered orientalism and refugee resettlement discourses, underscoring the commonality of the victim discourse on both sides of the Syrian refugee resettlement debate. I then shift to highlight the disconnect between the victim representation and the life and experiences of Syrian women refugees. This later point draws from my research on Syrian Muslim women refugees in Jordan who have managed seemingly insurmountable obstacles with strength and determination; and they have done so in part through their faith. I situate my discussion of their strength within literature on Islamic feminism and Muslim women’s agency

Cartographic constructions of the Middle East

Maps have an inherent power to help create the places they are presumed to describe and represent. The construction and representation of the Middle East, like any place, is inextricably linked to map use, both formally in international agreements and the drawing of borders, and informally as a framework for imagining, coding, and naturalizing space and place. Through a critical examination of the cartographic use and treatment of the Middle East in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Arab World, my dissertation focuses on how the geographical form of the Middle East, and the vocabulary that is used to refer to it, was created, adopted, and at times contested. First, I analyzed World War I archival maps that were pivotal in parceling the Ottoman Empire and creating the state system that today comprises and greatly defines the Middle East. Once this new world order was outlined in European halls and palaces, another cartographic process was also necessary in order to make these divisions observable and valid. Mass produced maps played an essential role (though there were of course other processes occurring too) in representing and thus naturalizing the Middle East as a real place with specific social and cultural characteristics. In order to provide a comparison to the dominant Western conceptions of the Middle East, and to better understand how the world order created after World War I is understood from within the region, I examined a wide variety of maps and atlases produced within the Arab World. I conclude that the construction of the Middle East is deeply embedded in imperialist, Orientalist, and traditional geopolitical discourses, and though the region has been naturalized in the West, it has little meaning and recognition for its own inhabitants within the Arab World