Gender in the Middle East

Anthropological studies of gender contributed pioneering fieldwork that recorded definitions of masculine and feminine honor, sexuality, and self-representation through poetic expression in rural areas from Morocco to Iran. The documentation of unequal, gendered hierarchies of power demonstrated that women negotiated these structures in distinctly inventive ways. Erika Friedl's revealing observations of women in a rural Iranian village allowed the voices of these women to be heard without seeming intrusion. The gendered implications of their rich, lived experience in marriage, childbirth, and complex daily life emphasized their resilience. The support they lent one another often negated the poverty and isolation of their lives. Friedl's self-awareness of her role as observer, participant, and confidant questioned the boundaries between Middle Eastern women and their representation by outsiders.

Scholars of Middle Eastern literature differentiated between premodern works written by men about women and the emergence of women's writing about men, society, and themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Medieval male writers devoted extensive amounts of energy to their definition of the feminine as the exact opposite of the masculine. These assertions received no recorded response by women in this period. In contrast, the emergence of women's writing in all genres of poetry, history, and social commentary emerged in full bloom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries throughout the Middle East. These sources sought redefinition of women in tandem with new female definitions of men. Literary critics and historians, the latter informed by postmodern theoretical models and interests in the formation of modernity, examined magazines founded, edited, and written by women for upper-and middle-class women. Marilyn Booth's study of gender definitions replete in biographical collections authored by women captured the emergence of a new hierarchy of female exemplars, ranging from the Prophet's daughter, Fatima, to Joan of Arc. Booth's study deftly reconfigured gender at the intersection of Egyptian reaction to the British occupation and the emergence of nationalism.

Numerous studies now document gender in all periods of Middle Eastern history. Male articulations of the role of the Prophet's most controversial wife, Aisha bint Abi Bakr (614–678 C.E.), were dissected to yield new insights into the medieval construction of gender in politics, sexuality, and the sectarian division between Sunni and Shii Muslims. The importance of education, as taught to women by men and one another in the medieval period, also proved critical to a reexamination of literacy and intellectual achievement. Scholars of gender contradicted through archival research the traditional theory that Ottoman imperial decline was precipitated by meddlesome, royal women in the harem. In spheres of daily life presumed to have been exclusively masculine, the contributions of women's labor to the marketplace, silk production, and agriculture redefined the agency of nonelite women.