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Critiquing Gender & Islam: Transnational, Intersectional and Queer Perspectives

Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and EuropeQueer Feminist Critiques

Edited by Tunay Altay, Nadje Al-Ali and Katharina Galor

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About this book

A comparative analysis of far-right politics across Europe and the Middle East with a focus on gender and sexuality

  • Highlights anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ discourses as central to far-right politics across national and regional boundaries
  • Provides an original comparative perspective and de-exceptionalises the Middle East in the study of far-right politics
  • Showcases local, national and transnational resistance initiated by grassroots movements and civil society organisations, local activists, artists and socially committed academics

Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe provides an empirically grounded exploration of different case studies on anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender mobilisations of the far-right in Europe and the Middle East. The contributions engage with multilayered histories of gender and sexuality politics that connect the Middle East and Europe, informed by histories of colonialism, racism, and border controls.

A second, underlying objective of this volume is to contribute to decolonized knowledge productions by de-centering Europe and simultaneously de-exceptionalising the Middle East. The contributors commit to respecting the heterogeneity and complexity of these regions by focusing on grounded and life experiences. Ultimately, this volume illustrates a conceptualisation of the broad spectrum of far-right politics and queer feminist critiques as manifested in a wide array of contexts, including academia, politics and everyday lives.

Reviews

This volume makes a compelling case for the urgency of foregrounding gender and sexuality to connect Middle Eastern and European critiques of far-right politics. Locating the collection in its contemporary moment – of ongoing genocide in Gaza and increased populism and right-wing political recognition in Europe - the editors show the centrality of anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ aggression to both contexts. Indeed, it is through shining a spotlight on anti-gender and anti-LGBT aggression that the connections between the two sites, and their colonial and anti-migrant histories, can best be made. Importantly, the focus here is on the multiple forms of resistance that constitute the terrain: queer feminist interventions; critical comparisons; bottom-up mobilisation and knowledge production. Through a variety of case studies and critical interventions, the editors and authors insist that it is precisely this resistance that offers hope in the contested political present.
Table of contents

List of Figures
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Anti-Genderism, Homophobia and Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe
Nadje Al Ali, Tunay Altay and Katharina Galor

I. Framing Far-Right politics: Queer Feminist Perspectives

1. The Gender Wars: New Conundrums of Our Times
Deniz Kandiyoti

2. Feminist and Queer Politics without Guarantees: A Rejoinder to Deniz Kandiyoti’s ‘Gender Wars’
Evren Savci

II. Anti-LGBTQ and Anti-Feminist Mobilisations in the Sphere of Politics

3. The Rise of Israeli Far-Right Politics: A Queer Feminist Analysis
Sa’ed Atshan & Katharina Galor

4. ‘For the Sake of Kids’: National Security and Family Values in the Ukrainian Sexuality Education Debate
Maryna Shevtsova

5. Attacks on the Academy from Gender Studies to Post-Colonialism: Science, Secularity and the Far Right in France, Germany and Beyond
Elizabeth Berman

III. Comparative Studies between the Middle East and Europe

6. Anti-Feminist Strategies of Right-Wing Parties in Turkey and Germany: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Sexuality Politics
Nur Sinem Kourou and Victoria Scheyer

7. Homophobia without Borders: Dismantling Homophobia’s Architecture in Cairo’s Bathhouse Raid and Berlin’s Rave Crackdown
Ahmed Awadalla

8. ‘From Belfast to Diyarbakır’: Transnational Conversations on Conflict and LGBTI+ Politics in the Archive
Hakan Sandal-Wilson

IV. Bottom-Up Interventions and Resistance

9. Feminist and Queer Action and Art in Poland’s Illiberal Democracy
Pawel Leszkowicz & Tomasz Kitlinski

10. Why Do We ‘Care’? Neo-Liberal Governance and Emergence of the Feminist Subject in Iran
Firoozeh Farvardin

Index

About the contributors

Tunay Altay

Tunay Altay is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology and gender studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. He specializes in queer migration and sexual politics in the context of Europe and the Middle East. By following queer feminist methodologies, he focuses on the experiences of migrant sex workers, drag performers, and LGBTQ activists and how they navigate social exclusion and marginalization in Europe. His 2020 article (co-authored with Gökce Yurdakul and Anna C. Korteweg) is the recipient of the Best Article Award by the Council for European Studies' Gender and Sexuality Research Network. He published widely in academic journals, including in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnic and Migration Studies, and the European Journal of Women’s Studies.

Nadje Al-Ali

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, with a focus on Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (University of California Press, 2009, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt) and Gender, Governance and Islam (University of Edinburgh, 2019, co-edited with Deniz Kandiyoti and Kathryn Spellman).

Katharina Galor

Katharina Galor is a Senior Lecturer of Judaic Studies at Brown University. She specializes in the visual and material culture of Israel-Palestine with a focus on gender studies. She is the author of Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology (University of California Press, 2017) and Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency (Routledge, 2024); the co-author of The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins through the Ottomans (Yale University Press, 2015, with Hanswulf Bloedhorn) and The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020, with Sa’ed Atshan) and the co-editor of Gender and Social Norms in Ancient Israel, Early Judaism and Christianity. Texts and Material Culture (Journal of Ancient Judaism. Supplements, 2019, with Michaela Bauks and Judith Hartenstein), and Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema (Bloomsbury Press, 2022, with Sa’ed Atshan).

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