The challenge rules are very simple: you set your own reading goals, so long as you read and write about at least one book on the banned list. The list has been updated since I originally posted it last week, and I’ll keep adding to it whenever I learn of new or missing titles (speaking of which, if you see anything missing, let me know).

And if you’ve already written about some of the books in the past, please do me a solid and add your links to the database! I want people to have access to as many opinions about the books as possible.

I hope you decide to join. Spread the word!

Arab and Arab American Feminisms, edited by Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, is a book I wish every feminist/womanist would pick up. Though it is mostly academic in nature, the book is also interspersed with personal anecdotes and poetry that revolve around the book’s focus on Arab and Arab American feminists’ experiences. The book addresses a plethora of issues regarding to Orientalism, sexism, U.S. imperialism, homophobia, and transphobia. Each of the authors illustrate the need for addressing all of these things overlapping, rather than separate, issues. More importantly, though the book embraces the important work done by radical feminists of color, it also turns the feminist “sisterhood is global” motto on its head, positing that “there is no universal woman’s experience.”

The book’s thirty-two essays are split into five sections: Living with/in Empire: Grounded Subjectivities; Defying Categories: Thinking and Living Out of the Box; Activist Communities: Representation, Resistance, and Power; On Our Own Terms: Discourses, Politics, and Feminisms; and Home and Homelands: Memories, Exile, and Belonging. From the outset, the book’s contributors illustrate the dangers of conflating experiences and identities into neat categories. The introduction alone explains just how much the dominant U.S. discourse erases the experiences of those who fall into the categories of “Arab” and “Muslim”:

[This discourse] assumes that all Arabs are Muslim, all Muslims are Arab, and all Muslim Arabs are the same. It obscures the existence of Arabs who are not Muslim (including, but not limited to, Christians and Jews) and Muslims who are not Arab (including Indonesians, Malaysians, Chinese South Asians, Africans, African Americans, and Latinos/as). It also erases the historic and vast ethnic communities who are neither Arab nor Muslim but who live amid and interact with a majority of Arabs or Muslims.

By ignoring this diversity and conflating all of these identities under the umbrella of “Arab” or “Muslim,” it becomes much easier for the mainstream U.S. discourse to espouse detrimental stereotypes. As a result, Arab and Muslim feminists find themselves always starting from scratch. They are frequently met with resistance and end up spending their time and energy on dismantling these stereotypes instead of addressing important issues affecting their communities. Many of the contributors wrote of personal experiences where they were delivering speeches or presenting papers at conferences, only to be met with silence or rude, off-topic comments–often based on stereotypes–during the Q & A session. The frequency of blatantly racist comments in an academic setting was alarming.

Several of the contributors spoke of the way that dominant U.S. discourse and its ensuing stereotypes also affected the way they presented themselves. In “Quandaries of Representation,” Mona El-Ghobashy wrote about the burden of deflecting stereotypes:

[T]here remains a fine line between harmless everyday cultural interactions and the quandary of unwittingly being made to represent and somehow stand in for all Muslim women, everywhere, at all times. The task of representation entails negating the manifold stereotypes that stubbornly cling to Muslim women, a  task I am reluctant to take on…As an identifiable Muslim woman, I often feel torn between countering pernicious stereotypes and resisting the mantle of representation that battling stereotypes entails.

With regards to the stereotypes themselves, Mohja Kahf summed them up nicely in one of my favorite essays in the book, “The Pity Committee and the Careful Reader: How Not to Buy Stereotypes about Muslim Women”:

All this new discourse on Muslim women, on closer glance, is no so new; much of it rehashes an old story: the Muslim woman as Victim, and its flip side, the Escaped Muslim woman. The Victim-Escapee stereotype appears at every level of culture, pop to high. It is hegemonic, which means it is not seen as a stereotype but that The Truth: that Islam is exceptionally, uniquely, ingerently evil to women seems to be one of the received truths of our era, axiomatic. It knows no bounds: left-and right-wingers, feminist and nonfeminists, religious and secular folk in the global Western conversation subscribe to it…The Pity Committee thrives in imperialist contexts, so it is riding high today with the U.S. occupying Iraq and waging war in Afghanistan, its story becoming dearer to its subscribers by the hour.

Though the essay deals mostly with Muslim stereotypes in literature (authors Jean Sasson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Norma Khouri are taken to task for promoting with The Pity Committee’s narrative), Kahf offers valuable advice that can be applied when encountering Muslim stereotypes in the media as well. She states that there are five important actions people take to keep in mind to dismantle these stereotypes: 1) think critically; 2) engage in a dual-fronted critique; 3) find cross-cutting parallels; 4) remember history; and 5) refuse to erase economics. She also makes it clear that fighting against stereotypes is an ongoing process with a rippling effect:

Stereotypes distort us as human beings; they take our energy away from real ethical development…we must not step away from our moral obligation to change the realities of Muslim sexism, just as we must work against endemic sexism in America.

As the book is about issues important Arab and Arab American feminists, mainstream and radical U.S. feminism was often taken to task for its shortcomings, and rightfully so. I cringed as I read about some of the things famous U.S. feminists have said or written in the past. In “The Burden of Representation: When Palestinians Speak Out,” Nada Elia uses an encounter at the 1985 UN International Conference on Women, which took place in Nairobi, to open her essay. Betty Friedan is quoted instructing Nawal El Saadawi, “”Please do not bring up Palestine in your speech. This is a women’s conference, not a political conference.” The quote is a prime example of mainstream feminism’s alienation of women of color–how can a woman of color possibly be expected keep gender and race separate? Elia writes:

The arrogance of an American academic presuming to tell one of the foremost internationally recognized Arab feminist activists what she should and should not talk about is exemplary of the power dynamics in [academic] settings. How would Friedan have reacted if an Arab woman had suggested she “control herself” and refrain from discussing anti-Semitism?

In her fascinating essay, “Palestinian Women’s Disappearing Act: The Suicide Bomber through Western Feminist Eyes,” Amal Amireh takes Andrea Dworkin to task for her essay, “The Women Suicide Bombers.” Not only does Dworkin embrace colonialist narratives, but Amireh argues that Dworkin’s essay implies dangerous narratives about West as well:

The challenge is to avoid narcissistic rescue fantasies, which take us back to colonial narratives; but instead of white men rescuing brown women from brown men, it becomes white women, or even first world women of color, rescuing brown women from brown men…Implicit in this rescue narrative is the assumption that the “West” is free of gender oppression.

For a more recent example of mainstream U.S. feminism doing a disservice to Arab and Muslim women, Amira Jarmakani points to the Feminist Majority Foundation, who had been “advocating on behalf of (but not with) Afghan women since at least the early 1990s.” In her essay, “Arab American Feminisms: Mobilizing the Politics of Invisibility,” Jarmakani examines just what “global feminism” entailed when it came to Afghan women:

In what could be called a form of “global feminism,” the Feminist Majority worked from the position of savior rather than one of solidarity with feminists in Afghanistan, and therefore developed a position easily appropriated in the service of militarism. Importantly, the military-imperialist and feminist-imperialist stances collude to reify stereotypical notions of Arab and Muslim womanhood as monolithically oppressed. They depend on a set of U.S. cultural mythologies about the Arab and Muslim worlds, which are often promulgated through overdetermined signifiers, like the “veil” (the English term collapsing a range of cultural and religious dress expressing modesty, piety, or identity, or all three)…Arab and Muslim female subjectivity is obscured by the mythology of the veil, while the notions of oppression, tradition, and civilization become animated in the service of imperialist or nationalist agendas that render the mythology, if not the women, hypervisible.

The most enlightening aspect of the book for me was how extensively it addressed the problems that Palestinians and Palestinian activists face. The stories by and about Palestinians and their allies stayed with me long after I finished the book. I’m sorry to wave my Ignorant American flag, but while I had some general knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and the brutal treatment suffered by the Palestinians, I don’t think I realized just how clueless I was until I read this book. For instance, I was aware of how staunchly pro-Israel the U.S. is and how anti-Palestine the U.S. media is, but I was completely unaware of how any time Palestinians tried to raise objections/awareness to their struggles, they are charged with Antisemitism and effectively shut down, no matter how valid their complaints are. Therese Saliba addresses this (and much more) in her excellent essay, “”On Rachel Corrie, Palestine, and Feminist Solidarity”:

While Jews have the charged claim to anti-Semitism, Palestinians and Arabs are denied a similarly charged claim to “racism” and left bereft of a charge on which to base their oppression…Moreover, the discourse of “balance” in approaching the conflict assumes both peoples are on equal footing…and that a “balanced approach” is necessary with no critique of power relations.

In “In the Belly of the Beast: Struggling for Nonviolent Belonging,” Zeina Zaatari addresses this silencing in slightly broader terms:

Arabs and Arab Americans and Muslims and Muslim Americans are discriminated against, seen as lesser humans by the dominant society, thus denying us the right to even claim victimization, descrimination, or love and care. We cannot expect things like freedom of speech to cover our speech; it covers only the speech of our offenders. While we are denied access to a platform to speak about discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, racist discourses against us are deemed “sacred” by FOX news and a variety of media outlets…We do not “belong” to this nation, but our oppressors do.

I also deeply appreciated this collection’s inclusion of so many GLBTQ issues. Two of that really stood out for me were “Class Equality, Gender Justice, and Living in Harmony with Mother Earth,” an interview between Nadine Naber and Arab trans activist/writer Joe Kadi, and “The Light in My House” by Imani Yatouba. In his interview, Kadi stresses the importance of intersectionality and working together. Imani’s work is much more personal; she spoke of her experiences as a lesbian, her struggles with infertility, and her experiences as a survivor of sexual abuse. It’s a powerful essay.

In the weeks that have passed since I finished Arab and Arab American Feminisms, I find myself randomly mulling over much of what was written. It’s an incredibly useful resource for all feminists, and I can see it being used in various contexts (I’d love to incorporate Randa Jarrar’s short personal narrative, “You Are a 14-Year-Old Arab Chick Who Just Moved to Texas,” into one of my writing assignments this coming fall). The book also provided me with a list of people whose works I intend to do some further reading on (Edward Said, Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, Jacqi Alexander, Minoo Moallem, June Jordan, Vijay Prashad, and Amal Amireh, in case you’re interested). Without a doubt, there is much to learn from the chorus of voices in this book.

Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging was published on March 7, 2011 by Syracuse University Press. Disclosure: I received an electronic review copy via NetGalley.

Virgen de Guadalupe by Emilia Garcia

In 2006, this next one was chosen to be part of Centro Cultural Aztlan’s Galeria Expresion. The Centro ultimately decided to pull the painting from the exhibit because of its potential for controversy:

Virgin by Anna-Marie Lopez

This is so pretty:

Virgen de Guadalupe by Naia711 at DeviantArt

This is a mixed media quilt:

Our Lady of Tejas (2010) by Sabrina Zarco

Next up, some queer art. Naturally, it caused quite a stir when it debuted:

Mary Magdalene and Virgen de Guadalupe by Alex Donis, from his "My Cathedral" series

And finally, I love this last one…La Virgen is a drag queen:

Virginia Guadalupe by Jim Ru

–Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (51)

You can find the full list here; I’m updating as things get posted.

This will be sticky-posted for the rest of the month.

Since the days of Prohibition, Juarez has been a place for First World visitors to come and indulge in any number of illicit pleasures (alcohol, guns, drugs, sex). It is also the site where global capital has been making a killing to the tune of billions of dollars in annual profit…Because pollution laws are conveniently lax, the factories can emit fumes and dump waste without much concern or coversight. For all these reason, the U.S.-Mexico border has been made into something of an international sacrifice zone.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard about the women who were being sexually violated, horribly mutilated, and discarded like garbage in the desert surrounding Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The femicide that has claimed the lives of hundreds of women–with thousands more unaccounted for–began in 1993, although no one can really know for sure. Looking at several of the time frames listed in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera and doing the math, I was stunned to realize that I’ve been hearing about this femicide for at least fifteen years now. Over the years, I’ve been even more stunned to learn how many people still don’t know that the murders are even taking place.

To give a brief overview: since 1993, hundreds of women have been found in the desert, deserted lots, and landfills, as well as in more public areas. Mexican government officials and various NGOs estimate that around 350-600 murders have occurred, though there’s no way to get an exact figure, especially since thousands of women have disappeared without a trace over the years. The youngest of the (known) victims are five years old and the oldest are in their seventies, but most of the victims are teenagers and young women in their early twenties, many of whom worked in maquiladoras along the border. Before dying, many of the women suffered through various forms of unimaginable cruelty–stabbings, burnings, beatings, rape, genital mutilation, breast mutilation. Because of the nature of the murders, the femicide has often been sensationalized by the media. But as one of the book’s contributors, a forensic psychologist named Candice Skrapec, writes:

[The crime scenes in Juarez] are like what we see in North America in cases involving the sexual violation of the victims…the motive may be less sensational, and, in fact, more like what we are accustomed to seeing: sexual violations of victims for purposes of personal gratification on the part of the offenders who then discard the bodies.

Yet to this day, the crimes continue to go unpunished. As more information about the femicide came to light, the victims were the ones who were initially blamed by the government, police, and the media for their own murders and disappearances; they were rumored to be prostitutes or wild girls who liked to stay out and party, leaving themselves vulnerable to attack.

Many of the victims were young women from rural areas in Mexico who had come to Juarez to find work in the factories; this influx of young women and the increased demand for a female work force challenged traditional gender roles, and the femicide was portrayed by many to be a result of this disruption of patriarchal norms. In the essay titled “Gender, Order, and Femicide,” the authors write:

If, for women, entrance into the paid labor force often meant acquisition of greater independence, increased status within the family, and freedom to socialize outside the home, it also underscored a process that required local and complex negotiations regarding how these changes would be understood and implemented….To the extent, then, that the failure of maquiladora development began to be written in terms of men’s absence from the maquilas, women workers were cast as a problem rather than another exploited group within Mexico’s struggling development plans, and all women became a target for male resentment.

Perhaps because I was born and raised on the Texas-Mexico border, perhaps because, for the entire time I’ve been aware of the femicide, I’ve also been in the age group that most of the murdered and kidnapped young women fall into, I’ve always felt drawn to the horrific events taking place in and around Juarez. One of the first papers I wrote in grad school was an analysis of media representations of the murdered women. I traveled to Juarez for that project (though I had been there before years earlier with my family), walking around and looking at the black crosses painted on pink backgrounds throughout the city in remembrance of the murdered women. In the years since, the only reports of violence in that area that I hear about have been related to drug cartels, and I’ve often wondered what effect this sharp increase in violence has had on the femicide and its (in)visibility to the rest of the world.

When I heard about Making a Killing, I was immediately drawn to it. Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Georgina Guzmán have put together a powerful book. Though it is mostly academic in nature, Making a Killing also has a very human aspect to it that might appeal to non-academic readers.

The book is divided into three parts: “Interventions,” “¡Ni Una Mas!,” and “Testimonios.” Part One provides a socioeconomic examination of the murders. Taking the effects of the global economy, NAFTA, the prevalence of maquiladoras along the border, and the influence of patriarchal ideals into consideration, this section gives readers a closer look many of the key factors that have allowed the femicide to continue. Part Two takes a closer look at the local and global activism that has developed in response to the femicide. The final section of the book gives some of the victims’ mothers a chance to speak out about their personal experiences. In this section, a forensic psychologist, Candice Skrapec, explains the femicide from a forensic perspective. An artist, Rigo Maldonado, closes this section with his testimonio on activism through art.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into detail on each essay in the book, though a full review can easily be written on every one. Instead, I will say that Part Two, ”¡Ni Una Mas!,” especially appealed to me. This section contained many critical readings of feminist and activist responses that have taken place over the years, and it raised many questions about ethics and the “othering” of the victims and their families. In 2004, for instance, a large V-Day march was organized by Eve Ensler. In “The Suffering of the Other,” the authors write:

[W]hen the call for the V-Day march was received, questions circulated in private conversations: What for? Isn’t it too late? Why not last year, when three more victims were found? Why not seven years ago, when we were struggling to prevent more murders? Why after hundreds of victims? Why’s benefiting from this march? Far or unfair, this is how the majority of the local activists felt and how they structured their feelings. The spirit had its reasons…[Several local NGOs] openly appropriated and misued Eve Enslers’ V-Day event in Juarez by erasing the main objective of agloval movement destined to stop violence against women and girls.

The authors, who themselves participated in the march, were also introspective about their involvement in any “othering” that may have occured as a direct result of the march. They raise many important points about privilege and the practices of using a victims’ pain in order to further one’s cause. This quote in particular stood out to me:

Juarense women cannot be seen as a homogenous group of “Third World subalterns.” This (mis)representation has had serious implications in that privileged women in the locality have been uncritically and socially constructed as the benefactors when they, intentionally or not, have perpetuated oppressive practices toward underprivileged women in Ciudad Juarez.

Other essays that were of high interest to me were the ones on the victim-blaming in government femicide awareness campaigns, as well as those that critically examined media representations of the victims. The mothers’testimonios in Part Three were also powerful–and painful–to read.

The only thing I wish the book had included is an update on the current status of things. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t hear about Juarez in the news, but all of those news reports are related to the cartel-related violence that claims the lives of thousands of people in the city each year. Though that, too, is a narrative that cannot and should not be ignored, it seems that reports of femicide-related news have been subsumed by those related to the drug wars. Because of that last fact, I am all the more grateful that this book was published.

Published by University of Texas Press on November 15, 2010
328 pages

Cross-posted from my book blog.

Last week, when the US House of Representatives voted to withhold federal funds from Planned Parenthood, I furiously went on a bit of a tweeting spree, trying to squeeze as much into 140 characters as possible. One of my tweets said: “Don’t know what I wouldve done w/o Planned Parenthood when jobless. Helped me SO MUCH w/svcs I wouldnt b able 2 afford @reg doc #StandWithPP.”

But actually, I know exactly what I would’ve done if I hadn’t been able to see a doctor at Planned Parenthood: On several occasions, I would’ve had to go to an emergency room and wait in sheer agony, at which point I would’ve flat-out lied in response to standard questions about my medical history in order to avoid any possibility of condescension (and an unnecessary pregnancy test).  And then, in the months that followed, I would’ve had to deal with bills that I’m damn sure would have been turned over to a collection agency by now.

You see, I am cursed with semi-frequent UTIs. I haven’t had a nasty one in a long while, but for whatever reason, there was a period when I was living in New York when I was getting them every month or two. To make matters worse, my UTIs tend to be asymptomatic: one minute I’m feeling great, the next minute I’m doubled over in pain and peeing clots of blood. It SUCKS.

It sucks even more when you are completely broke and desperate and internet-less and living thousands of miles from home and have no idea where to find a doctor, and it’s a Friday afternoon and all the doctor’s offices are going to close soon for the weekend anyway. My only other option: go to the emergency room and get hundreds of dollars into debt just for the privilege of peeing into a cup and getting a prescription. I assure you, copious amounts of tears and panic were involved just thinking about that.

Then it hit me: Planned Parenthood can totally help me with this!

But let’s go back a bit: If you were scratching your head earlier when I said that I sometimes lied about my medical history, allow me to explain. Because of a medical issue that I’ve always had to deal with, depending on the situation and the reason I’m at the doctor, withholding certain information is sometimes easier than explaining myself over and over to people who want to tell me what my problem is before actually listening to me. I’ve had awesome doctors and nurses in the past, but I’ve also had to deal with some real shitheads who either judge me or speak down to me like I’m a child. And dealing with a condescending shithead when your crotch and kidneys are on fire? Not cool.

A conversation I’ve had in the past:

Me: I have a UTI.
Doctor: You don’t know that.
Me: I’m peeing blood and I’m prone to getting them. I have a UTI.
Doctor: Well, we’ll see about that.
Me: I know how to read my own body when it comes to this.
Doctor: Are you sure you’re not just on your period?
Me: *glare*

My first experience at Planned Parenthood? The exact opposite of this conversation. I ended up loving my doctor there precisely because she always listened to me, regardless of what my test results and/or (non)symptoms said. I can’t praise her and the staff there enough. Once (also on a Friday afternoon), when they were too swamped to take me, they called around to several other clinics in the area until they found someone who could see me that day. It turns out that the staff at the other clinic stayed a little later just for me. I have nothing but praise for them as well.

Since I was completely broke, I was able to pay the lowest fees on their sliding payment scale. Because of the sliding scale, I was later take some other important tests that I’d never been able to afford at a regular doctor’s office, and my doctor spoke to me at length about the results. Most importantly, she was the only doctor who has ever told me “these results are totally normal for you, and these are the options you can pursue in the future if you decide you want to go that route, but if you don’t want to do anything, that’s fine too.” Hearing her say that to me was practically revolutionary, considering all the judgement I’ve experienced in the past.

Why does all of this matter to me?

• Because I know that these doctors–and doctors in Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide–are listening to their patients.
• Because I know that, had I–a woman of color–gone in to find out about abortion options or HIV testing, I would’ve been treated with the same respect.
• Because I know that, for thousands of women nationwide, Planned Parenthood is the only place they can go for affordable, necessary screening services.

The law is going to have the most impact on people of color and those who are economically disadvantaged: people who are at a higher risk of dying from undiagnosed and/or untreated health problems.

The Senate probably won’t let the law pass. And if they did, President Obama probably wouldn’t sign it. Even so, various state legislatures are chipping away women’s access to the important health services provided by Planned Parenthood and clinics like it. While the law isn’t likely to survive at the federal level, anti-choice laws that have broad healthcare implications will affect Texas and other red states.

I stand with Planned Parenthood. And at noon tomorrow, I’ll be in Austin with my friend and my little sister, standing on the steps of the state capitol to protest these anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-poor people, anti-healthcare laws.

[h/t @AnnaHolmes]