Honor Killings and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies

This Article discusses the regulation and adjudication of honor killings in the Arab world and traces the distributive and disciplinary impact of such regulation/adjudication on Arab men and Arab women\u27s sexuality. In the afterword, the Article outlines the transformative effect of Islamicization of culture in the Arab world in the past twenty years on the practice of honor and killings committed in its name

On Law and the Transition to Market: The Case of Egypt

On the eve of independence from European colonialism, Egypt, like most other developing countries, undertook the project of de-linking itself from colonial economy by initiating domestic industrialization. The economic project known as Import Substitution Industrialization (“ISI”) was designed to liberate Egypt from raw commodity production--specifically, agricultural and mineral--servicing its previous colonial master, Great Britain. The engine of development would be an expanding public sector with nationalization and socialism as leitmotifs. In re-orienting the economy towards industrial production, Egypt hoped that the terms of trade with the international economy would significantly improve, thereby leading to an improvement in the living standards of its population. And, like most other developing countries (with *352 the exception of the East Asian Tigers), Egypt failed. A symptom of its failure was a severe debt crisis that hurled Egypt into the brutal embrace of the International Financial Institutions (“IFIs”): the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (“IMF”). To be rescued from its debt crisis, Egypt had to concede to the neo-liberal economic program of these institutions, otherwise known as the Washington Consensus. The program aimed to improve Egypt\u27s capacity to repay its debts to international creditors by: re-linking it to the global economy via trade liberalization and through the re-regulation of its domestic economy to be more market oriented with the private sector, henceforth, being the engine. And like most other debtor-countries, Egypt had to go through an austerity program to improve its savings

Comparatively Speaking: The Honor of the East and the Passion of the West

In this Article, I will attempt a comparative review by examining in the United States the crime that has the most affinity with the crime of honor in the Arab World: the killing of women in the heat of passion for sexual or intimate reasons, which is seen in the United States as one of many instances in which the more generic crime of passion can occur. For the purposes of this Article, I will use the term crime of passion as it is so specifically defined. The reason for the exercise is to locate precisely the meaning of the proposition historically circulated in the orientalist tradition but also shared by Euro-American popular culture that while the West has passion the East has \u27\u27Honor

Those Awful Tahrir Rapes

This essay highlights the myriad ways in which street sexual harassment of women in Egypt, of which I argue the mass rapes of Tahrir are an egregious instance thereof, disciplines women\u27s bodies. It describes briefly and dismisses the frameworks for understanding those practices proposed by the left, the right and the government. I also describe the role that law, in conjunction with its lax enforcement, plays in intensifying this regulation. The essay uses purposefully the fighting radical feminist pronoun we to describe the predicament. I am an Egyptian women. I consider myself an ally in their attempt to understand, resist and eliminate a practice that has bedeviled their public lives. I am as pissed as they

Janet Halley and the Art of Status Quo Maintenance

Over the past few years, Janet Halley emerged as one of the most avid critics of campus rape feminist activists, activists who push for the reformulation of university investigative rules to shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused. Halley contends that Title IX policies, embedded with affirmative consent, are not only procedurally unsound, but bad for boys, bad for sex, and bad for feminism, charging its agenda with “radical feminism” influences. Halley’s stance on campus rape is consistent with her long-held “queer theory” and its anti-feminist deregulatory drive. In this article, I argue that Halley’s “queer theory,” which she developed by polemically critiquing Catharine Mackinnon’s work, in an attempt to extol “sex positivism” in legal academia with the dignity of “fancy” theory, in effect stands Mackinnon on her head. By inverting Mackinnon’s gender/ sex constructions, Halley’s theory fronts as an idealist proposition indicting feminism with the invention of sexual injury and inspiring women to manipulate innocuous facts into scandalous protest. Flipping Mackinnon’s equality approach when it comes to legal rules takes Halley to the right of “consent” where Mackinnon had gone to its “left.” By mirroring Mackinnon’s critique of “consent,” except from the right, Halley’s theorizing echoes a sexual libertarian agenda without/before feminism. It defends male sexual entitlement avant liberal feminism. Ideologically, such theoretic formulations, along with the bundle of rules they advocate for, are designed to keep pressure on ruling liberal feminism from departing in its understanding of sex from the “pathology” model whereby all men are good except for those who are “pathologically” violent (classical liberalism) in the direction of understanding sexual entitlement as part of the social construction of maleness. By clamoring from the right of liberal feminism, mainstream liberal feminism is kept in check. In order to explain the various elements of Halley’s theories on gender/sex and expose their underlying pre-feminist “classical liberal” orientation, I position her comparatively within the gender/sex theories of the non-liberal academic left: Mackinnon (her antagonist), Duncan Kennedy (her ally), and Judith Butler (her theoretical homebody). I analyze the way these theorists used the theoretical traditions of Marxism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism to posit a relationship between gender and sex: sex is gender simpliciter (Mackinnon), gender is sex simpliciter (Halley), and the split difference between gender and sex (Kennedy). This exercise illuminates the doctrinal approaches of each theory, be it to the left or right of consent. I conclude the article with a succinct critique of Halley’s theoretic excursions and argue Halley is guilty of five themes of “misrecognition:” (A) theoretical, oscillating between an antagonism to the very idea of sexual injury and proposing a neutral proceduralist approach to identifying it; (B) political, targeting radical feminism with her critique while smashing liberal feminism on the way; (C) sociological, reading women’s sexual injury through the eyes of an “uninjurable” promiscuous gay man advocating a radical sexual ideology; (D) ideological, attempting to ally her sexual libertarianism with the left when the ideological universe it travels is “classical liberalism,” definitively, the left’s most pronounced critic; and (E )historical, advocating a “sex positive” agenda in radically sex positivist times

Reactions: Natsu Taylor Saito\u27s \u27Colonial Presumptions: The War on Terror and the Roots of American Exceptionalism\u27

Is the word civilization, evoked by Bush in contemporary times, the direct genealogical descendant of the mission civilatrice evoked by his Anglo Saxon predecessors to justify their onslaught on the native inhabitants of the land they have chosen to settle and appropriate? Is the contemporary project by the current political elites of the US to spread democracy in the Middle East the same as and co-equal with the mission to civilize the beast in the lands where beasts wandered two centuries ago? If the ethno/race of the old mission was Anglo Saxon, what is its contemporary ethnic/race today? Does the election of Obama complicate this question

That Thing that You Do: Comment on Joseph Massad’s \u27Empire of Sexuality\u27

Massad’s thesis is simple, in fact, perfect in its simplicity. Empire is a terrible force that wants to penetrate, overpower and hegemonize. It has a center, a headquarters if you like, the West. It functions with two arms: capitalism (later neoliberal) and Euro-American hegemony. The first arm represents the objective drive of capital that transforms sites and cultures as it spreads the market in the shape of commodity exchange. It has become a universal system, Massad contends, though with varying effects on the center (West) from the periphery (rest). Whereas its march on the former has been totally transformative, in the latter, only so. In the center, not only has capitalism become the dominant mode of production, but it has also, following Foucault, witnessed the emergence knowledges/powers that have instituted categories, binaries, taxonomies, in short, epistemologies that were unknown in the pre-capitalist era. These epistemologies produced new subjects. One of those was the hetero/homo distinction in which people came to know their “hetero/homosexuality” as their most inner truth

Post Secularism and the Woman Question

I will discuss the “woman question in post secularism” by offering my critique of Saba Mahmood’s book “Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject”. But before I do so, let me just state that I am a legal academic and I am not a reader of the field of anthropology. I am unfamiliar with the theoretic jargon of the discipline- even less so of the jargon of the subfield, anthropology of religion from which Politics of Piety hails. Each discipline is autonomous more so fields of study within each discipline. Those fields usually coalesce around a celebrity figure of a theorist who originates a theoretic language that his or her mentees use to signal their affiliation with this field. Critique of the celebrity figures of the field usually occurs by way of addition, modification, and complexification and rarely in the form of radical critique. Radical critique is usually costly for those affiliated with a field because of the way academia is organized. One needs the reference letter, the invitation to a conference, and the book review. This is all to say that Politics of Piety may have already been subject to a great deal of critique-addition/modification/complexification, sadly being an outsider and missing the subtleties of exchange between mentors and mentees within the anthropology of religion, I am unaware of any of it. The book: Politics of Piety was published in 2005 and has had a great and successful career in EuroAmerican academia. One sees it cited everywhere- and I mean everywhere- typically in the context of denouncing Western feminism-sometimes one sees the word “secular” inserted between “Western” and “feminism= or in asserting a counter and different kind of feminism to the Western one. The book, which anthropologizes the piety movement among women in the nineties of the twentieth century, namely, the women of the mosque in Egypt, has never been translated to Arabic. It has been more than a decade since its publication and has had a huge and formative effect on a whole generation of academics in EuroAmerican Academia especially among those interested in the study of Islam and Muslims and yet seems to have had a bare life in the Arab world. It appears that a book that talks about an Arab phenomenon has caused an explosion in the West but has landed a DUD in the Arab world. The question is why

Egyptian Feminism: Trapped in the Identity Debate

This Article argues that if we wish to account for the limited gains made in the area of family law reform in Egypt in the twentieth century, it is crucial to relate the debate on family law with another debate, one revolving around the identity of the Egyptian legal system. Whereas the dispute over family law reform forced decisions on gender and the family, the contest surrounding identity centered on the ongoing and agonized struggle by Egyptians to define the nature of their country\u27s contemporary cultural identity. The question of identity was often framed as a debate over the character of Egyptian law, asking: Should law in Egypt be reconstructed to re-acquire its lost Islamic identity, or should it remain European and secular

The Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt: The Limits of Liberal Political Science and CLS Analysis of Law Elsewhere

On January 25th 2011, following a popular uprising, president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was forced to relinquish power after thirty years of continuous rule. The popular uprising came to be known as the Egyptian revolution of January 25th marking the first time in the modern history of Egypt an authoritarian ruler is forced out of power through the mobilization of Egyptian masses. The popular mobilization came at the heels of several years of “wildcat” workers\u27 strikes affecting various sectors of the economy, public and private, as well as recurring demonstrations spearheaded by the youth of the Egyptian middle class demanding civil and political rights and protesting the intrusive rule of security. This Article discusses the role the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) of Egypt played in framing through its jurisprudence the economic and political picture in the two decades preceding the revolution and that arguably contributed to the precipitation of the events leading up to the revolution