Women and sexuality in muslim societies

WOMEN AND SEXUALITY IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES Pinar Ilkkaracan, ed. New York: Women for Human Rights (WWHR), 2000; 455 pp. A discussion of women's sexuality in societies begs for compliance with an unspoken convention that requires one to clearly indicate one's political/ideological location in in or the World. I could begin simply by listing well-publicized violence against women that has mobilized many women towards political struggle - forced marriages, violent punishments for sexual expression, and socalled honour killings of wives, sisters, daughters and female cousins. Such an approach may find itself positioned within self-righteous outrage against Islam from conservative forces in West at a time when women's sexual freedom has become an important rhetorical weapon in discursive battle of versus West. On other hand, there appears to be a strategic commitment among progressive academics to contextualize all women's struggles in societies within resurgence of colonial ideas about women's oppression in order to forestall denigration of Islamic culture through deliberate misreadings of women's political activism. Feminist scholars, particularly those associated with Muslim World, must write from an indeterminate location that is neither within the West, nor within Islam. This preferred strategy clears necessary space for drawing attention to other issues that are integral to any discussion of women's sexuality, in fact to overall democratization, in societies such as monopolizing of Islam by patriarchal authoritative voices, compelling need for dissent, discussion and reform within world and undemocratic nature of social, economic and political structures that have become entrenched in most states and communities. It is, therefore, propitious that a Turkey-based women's group has assembled a collection of articles and documents which easily demonstrates that women's sexuality is not simply a pawn in representational battle between Islamic and Eurocentric fundamentalists or between Islamic extremists and moderate Muslims. Women and Sexuality in Societies enables us to argue that politicizing issue of women's sexuality, in its narrow and broader connotations, is both necessary and timely. This book substantiates notion of sexuality as individual woman's to pleasure and, as legitimation of women's uncensored economic, cultural and political participation, needs to be read not simply as bourgeois woman's individualized notion of choice or liberation but as a barometer of relationship between and family, community and nation state. In many societies and particularly in so-called Islamic states, women's sexuality has become a signifier of gendered claims to public space and a definer of separating line between woman and citizen. Thus women's expression of sexuality, through their relationships, dress, deportment, their presence in bazaars, mosques, and streets, their depiction in media, and their writing, is both an issue of bodily integrity of embodied individual-as-woman and right to equal public access and participation of abstract individual-as-citizen. However, in spite of its centrality to women's rights and status, issue of women's sexuality in societies is currently subsumed within struggles for legal and political rights mainly because of personal, social and political consequences of raising an issue which is so culturally tabooed. Therefore, this collection is an important first step. Women and Sexuality in Societies is published by Women for Women's Human Rights (WWHR), a group engaged in struggle for women's sexuality, bodily integrity and violations of women's human rights. The book is a collection of scholarly analysis, research findings, literature, cartoons and anecdotal accounts of female researchers, academics, activists, authors, poets, journalists and caricaturists from different countries. …

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