Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore the conjunctures between historical context and individual life choices in the context of Egyptian women’s activism. It is my argument throughout this paper that life-stories illustrate both the possibilities and limits of individual choice, political consciousness, and action. Moreover, they give evidence to the high level of heterogeneity among contemporary women activists. On a broader level, this paper addresses the debate on the use of life-stories in Middle East studies. A heightened awareness of the need to avoid generalizations about “the Arab world” has led to a growing body of work focusing on personal accounts and voices, narratives, and biographies.2
This chapter is based on “Self and generation: formative experiences of Egyptian women activists,” in Nadje Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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Notes
See, for example, Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
Nayra Atiya, Khul-Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories (Cairo: the American University in Cairo Press, 1984)
Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago Press, 1990)
Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn Early, eds., Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993)
Cynthia Nelson, Doria Shafik: Egyptian Feminist—A Woman Apart (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1996).
Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. R. G. Fox, (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991).
Charles Lindholm, “The New Middle Eastern Ethnography,” in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute 1 no. 4 (1995): 805–820.
Michael Jackson, ed., Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996).
For a brief summary of the debate, see Philip Abrams: Preface and Introduction in Historical Sociology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Rout-ledge, 1962).
Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 2, trans. R. M. Zaner and D. J. Parent (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. I.
Daphne Patai, “U.S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?” in S. Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: the Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 18.
See Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992);
Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Mervat Hatem, “Toward the Development of Post-Islamist and Post-Nationalist Feminist Discourses in the Middle East,” in Judith Tucker, ed., Arab Women: Old Boundaries—New Frontiers. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993)
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).
See, for example, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Cox and Wyman Ltd., 1966);
Nickie Charles and F. Hughes-Freeland, eds., Practising Feminism: Identity, Difference, Power (London and New York: Routledge, 1996);
Virginia Dominguez, “Differentiating Women/Bodies of Knowledge,” in American Anthropologist 1 (1994): 127–130;
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980)
Donna Haraway, “Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective,” in Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–599
Helen Longino, “Feminist Standpoint Theory and the Problems of Knowledge,” in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 19 (1993): 201–212
See Hekman, “Truth and Method: Feminist Theory Revisited,” Signs 22, no 2 (Winter 1997): 142.
Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Judith Butler and Joan W Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992).
See Salma Botman, “Women’s Participation in Radical Egyptian Politics 1939–1952,” in Women in the Middle East-Khamsin (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1987), p. 17.
Akram Khater and Cynthia Nelson, “Al-Harakah Al-Nissaiyya: The Women’s Movement and Political Participation In Modern Egypt,” in Women’s Studies International Forum 11, no. 5 (1988): 465–483.
See Ahmed Abdallah, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt (London: Al Saqi Books, 1985).
Ibid., and Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 231–251.
Hatem, “Economic and Political Liberation,” (1992), p. 232.
Kirk Beattie, Egypt During the Nasser Tears: ideology, Politics, and Civil Society (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994);
Haggai Erlich, Students and University in 20th Century Egyptian Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1989).
Raymond Baker, Sadat and After. Struggles For Egypt’s Political Soul (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 1990), p. 127.
Karl Mannheim, “The Problems of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 381.
See, for example, Soha Abdel Kader, Egyptian Women in a Changing Society, 1899–1987 (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987)
Margot Badran, “Gender Activism: Feminists and Islamists in Egypt,” in Valentine Moghadam, ed., Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994)
Azza Karam, Women, Islamisms and the State: Contemporary Feminisms in Egypt (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
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© 2001 Mary Ann Fay
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Al-Ali, N.S. (2001). Between Political Epochs and Personal Lives. In: Fay, M.A. (eds) Auto/Biography and the Construction of Identity and Community in the Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62114-9_11
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