Arab American femininities: Beyond Arab virgin/ American(ized) whore

Feminist Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 87-111

  Naber, Nadine ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745658444     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20459071     Document Type: Review

References (13)

1. This is not a literal translation, but conveys the message of my mother's words. Throughout the rest of this article, I have edited my research participants' quotes into a readable form, maintaining the originality of the quote as much as possible. This process included cutting repetitive words and statements, rearranging the order of the narratives, and simplifying elaborate explanations. I have also altered names and places in order to protect my research participants' privacy.
2. These networks included local chapters of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, the Muslim Students' Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Arab Cultural Center.
3. Minoo Moallem and lan Boal, "Multicultural Nationalism and the Poetics of Inauguration," in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminism, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 243-64.
4. I first became acquainted with my research participants by joining community organizations and cultural/artistic collectives and by attending functions organized by Christian and Muslim religious institutions, Arabic language schools, and Arab and Muslim student groups. Fifteen of the women research participants were Palestinian, seven were Syrian, six were Jordanian, and two were Lebanese. The greater number of women of Palestinian descent whom I interviewed represent a pattern common within what my research participants refer to as San Francisco's "Arab American community," in which Palestinians make up the majority among those active in Arab American community affairs. Nevertheless, immigrants from the Levant (Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria) comprised the majority of early Arab immigrants to San Francisco. They developed a variety of community networks through the establishment of a series of clubs and community associations. These networks have organized "difference" in terms of village of origin (i.e., the Ramallah Club), country of origin (i.e., the Lebanese American Association) or pan-ethnic Arab identity (i.e., the Arab Cultural Center). Due to their early history of migration to San Francisco, the varieties of institutions they established, and their overall socioeconomic privileges compared to Arab immigrants and refugees living in the San Francisco Bay area from other countries (such as Yemen, Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco), the term "Arab" or "Arab American" community often privileges Levantine Arabs, while either excluding or marginalizing "other Arabs." 5. Here, 1 use terms that were reiterated among my research participants to illustrate the ways that my research participants regularly associated "Americanness" with freedom and individualism and "Arabness" with family and connectivity.
5. See Trinh T. Min-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
6. Throughout my field sites, Palestinian and Jordanian Arab Americans tended to view Syrian and Lebanese Arab Americans as more " assimilated" than themselves. Several factors have produced this "difference." Historically, Syrian and Lebanese emigrated to the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1900s, before Palestinians and Jordanians, who first immigrated in the late 1950s.
7. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 17.
8. Here, I build on Suad Joseph's definition of patrilineality in Arab families in "Gendering Citizenship in the Middle East," in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Suad Joseph (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 3-32.
9. See Aaron Rodrigue, "Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by Nancy Reynolds," ed. Nancy Reynolds and Sabra Mahmood, special issue, Stanford Humanities Review 5, no. 1 (1992): 81-92.
10. Here, I borrow from Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's three axes of sexualized, racialized, colonialist discourse. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1992).
11. Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20.
12. "Connectivity" here is from Suad Joseph's definition of "patriarchal connectivity" in Lebanon. See Suad Joseph, "Gender and Rationality among Arab Families in Lebanon," Feminist Studies 19 (Fall 1993): 465-86.
13. Ella Shohat, introduction to Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat (New York: MIT Press, 1998), 6.