Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

The Hands

The cover of Nashim Number 18, a special issue about Iranian Jewish women (consulting editor: Farideh Dayanim Goldin), features “The Hands,” a painting by Iranian-Israeli artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik showing her own open palm above the folded hands of her mother, artist Rina Schmuelian. “The Hands” work belongs to Schmueli Buchnik’s “Pompei Persia” series, displayed recently in a solo exhibit at the Antea Gallery in Jerusalem.

Nashim’s covers are designed by art editor Judith Margolis with a view to creating a dialogue between the works of major feminist artists with the themes of each issue of Nashim. For more on the work of the Antea Gallery, Jerusalem’s only feminist art gallery, see the interview with Mendes-Flohr published in Nashim Number 14 (Fall 2007), a special issue devoted to women in the visual arts.

Below, in a text accompanied by several more images from the exhibit, curator Rita Mendes-Flohr describes Schmueli Buchnik’s interweaving of motifs from her Iranian background with Jewish themes, Islamic and Christian motifs, and western and classical traditions.

Pompeii Persia
On a visit to Pompeii, the artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik was struck by the similarities of the friezes running along the walls, and the Persian miniatures she knew from her own cultural heritage. The common thread in these works from cultures of plenty and often excess, she found in the small size, the framing with decorative borders, and the subject matter – scenes of courting and eroticism.

Her works in this exhibit, Pompeii Persia, bring together elements from the classic visual art of east and west, while Jewish themes intermingle with Islamic and Christian motifs – as she appropriates all these traditions as her own. There is a meeting between the artist’s training in western European art and her digging deeper into the cultural traditions from the place where she was born, Iran, but left when she was still an infant.

As if staging a play, the artist carefully searches for characters and details from all her sources and lets the actors encounter each other on the framed space, as they emerge from the darkness into the spotlight, tempting the audience into a magical, make-belief reality. Indeed, she is well aware of letting the paintings take on the role of seducer – by ornament and beauty ‐ and titled an earlier work Khanfanit – the Charmer – a painting exhibited in Antea’s exhibit “Achoti /Sister – Mizrahi women artists in Israel” – held at the Jerusalem Artists’ House in 2000. But beauty might be only a ruse to draw the viewer into a painting, in which critical readings of established religion and patriarchal relations are slowly discerned.

Often the artist casts herself into the characters she gathers from the different traditions, with eyes closed in devotion, waiting for a kiss; as a voluptuous oriental dancer; or an elusive temptress with a saintly halo – uniting the spiritual and the sensuous. In the portrait of her own hand, she vulnerably exposes her open palm, placed in a field of Rococo ornamentations, above the folded hands of her mother, the artist Rina Schmuelian ‐ hands that painted as well.

The depth, both spatial and spiritual, created by the darkness and light is achieved by a her technique of glazing ‐ derived from the classic Renaissance tradition of using a monochromatic underpainting, a grisaille, and slowly building up the work, layer by layer, with thin colored glazes, bestowing a sense of transparency and luminescence. Here, it is the painstaking process of layering from which the figures emerge on their stage, while at the Pompeii excavations, it is the taking out of the covering ash that reveals the life of a city that was caught in the middle of the act and stood still.

The artist starts out by painting her canvas black, then begins to draw out her composition in white chalk – like writing on a blackboard in school and connecting with the itinerant teachers in the contemporary Iranian film, Blackboards. Writing is a central element in the works in this exhibit – as it is in Persian miniatures. At times, her use of the Persian script is purely ornamental and the decorative quality is taken to the extreme by her writing in mirror image, thus neutralizing the meaning. In other instances, the text is hastily scribbled across the painting, like graffiti ‐ as if challenging the time‐consuming effort of the painted layering process as vanitas – a theme that appears in several of the works and again connects to Renaissance art.

Among the texts are lines from Jewish religious sources, translated into Persian ‐ such as Eshet Chayl, Woman of Valor, the liturgical poem that the Jewish man sings to his wife at the Sabbath table. Perhaps a critical reading is suggested, of the woman’s seduction, through praise and glorification, to be a faithful mother and housewife. Other texts are from the poetry of Oman Khayyam, who uses the rubaiyat, quatrain format precisely to break out of the square of prevailing norms and rigid enclosures, seeking to free spirituality from the monopoly of all religious establishments.

In the triptych “Khoda Negadar” (May God Protect) the artist juxtaposes herself as a full‐bodied dancer out of a Persian miniature, with a pious, similarly draped, but two‐dimensional figure from a medieval manuscript. In the middle panel is a catastrophic eruption ‐ a warning that all is vanity? Or is the artist spinning her magic tales, like Scheherazade, in an attempt to hold off, indefinitely, the moment of destruction?

Rita Mendes Flohr
Exhibit Curator and Antea Gallery Director

Kol Ha-Isha, founded in 1994, is a Jerusalem nonprofit organization (amuta), dedicated to promoting a multicultural feminist model of social change. Kol Ha-Isha provides the space for multicultural action of diverse groups of women in Jerusalem and speaks out in the struggle for equality and a just society, while running a variety of programs for women’s leadership, the advancement of women’s rights and the economic empowerment of women.

The Antea Gallery was established together with Kol Ha-Isha with the goal of creating a forum for the critical examination of issues related to women, art and culture and to advance the multicultural discourse of women and women artists in Israel.

Contact the artist Parvin Schmueli Buchnik, Parvin105@walla.com.

Cultural Globalization

English Faculty Begin Journal's Third Year Responding to Literary, Cultural Globalization
Written by Edwin Smith  
09/15/2009

http://news.olemiss.edu/index.php/Ole-Miss-News/News-Releases/The-Global-South.html

OXFORD, Miss. - A scholarly movement addressing the impact of globalization on Southern societies around the world continues at the University of Mississippi with the research journal The Global South beginning its third year of publication. The interdisciplinary journal, started in 2007 by faculty in UM's Department of English, is published once each semester by Indiana University Press. It focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization.

The journal's editor, Adetayo Alabi, UM associate professor of English who teaches courses in Caribbean, African and African-American literatures, said the university is the ideal locale for the journal's headquarters.

"Being a major university in the South, we're located where the action is," Alabi said. "Also, having the Center for the Study of Southern Culture here on campus fits very well with what we do. The two entities complement each other well."

"Having The Global South (journal) here has helped put the university at the center of an important scholarly movement that studies the American South from multiple and transitional perspectives," said Ted Ownby, CSSC director. "Taking a global perspective is part of a movement that involves new conferences, new courses and new ways of teaching, along with some inspired and exciting recent scholarship."

Addressing such themes as the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, race, hybridity, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and post-colonialism, and transatlantic encounters, the journal has experienced rapid readership growth. Each peer-reviewed volume logs approximately 1,700 subscribers to either its online or print version.

"Since assuming sole editorship of The Global South, Professor Alabi has kept the journal on the cutting edge of academic scholarship," said Ivo Kamps, UM chair and professor of English.

Other members of the journal's staff include Assistant Professor of English Sarah Lincoln, who serves as assistant editor, and graduate assistant James Christopher O'Brien of Memphis, who works as an editorial assistant.

Advisory editorial board members include faculty at the University of New South Wales, University of London, University of Macau, University of Nottingham, Delhi University, University of Wollongong and University of Western Australia, as well as those at several state and private universities in the United States.

Alabi said that from the North American South to the European South, Latin and Central America, Africa, Asia and Australia, the various Souths share comparable experiences that differentiate them from mainstream cultures.
"Findings indicate that while expansion and trade are generally beneficial for those living outside the South, those in the South don't always get the best of the pie," he said.

For example, globalization directs mass production of items manufactured by various industries, a change that usually causes the production of materials indigenous to the local citizenry to significantly dwindle, Alabi said. In another instance, the influx of textiles from China into Nigeria has adversely affected that country's own textile industry.

"The research shows that many of the Souths have not had a completely positive experience of globalization," Alabi said. "While they may not necessarily share a common wealth, they do intersect over various issues of marginalization and inadequate access to means of production and amenities under globalization.

For more information, call Alabi at 662-915-6948 or visit http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/gso/

Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care

IJFAB, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2
Special Issue: Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care: Papers from the Sixth International Congress of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics   

From the Introduction by Wendy Rogers and Carolyn McLeod:

The new issue of IJFAB, Volume 2, Issue 2, is based on papers presented at the Sixth International Congress of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB). The theme of our 2008 congress, in Rijeka, Croatia, was “Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care.” The congress offered two and a half days of stimulating thought, fresh insights, vigorous debate, and new perspectives on issues in bioethics. The papers in this issue reflect the current strength and diversity of feminist bioethics. The issue includes articles from eminent colleagues, together with papers from younger scholars whose strong contributions indicate very promising futures. The FAB biennial congress has played a significant role in the development of feminist bioethics. The first FAB congress in San Francisco in 1996 led to the publication of Embodying Bioethics: Recent Feminist Advances, edited by Anne Donchin and Laura Purdy. Several other collections based on papers from FAB congresses, including a special issue of Bioethics, provide critical resources for teaching and scholarship. In 2007, FAB established IJFAB to advance feminist approaches in bioethics. Beginning with this issue, every fourth issue of IJFAB will be based on FAB’s biennial congress.

The field of feminist bioethics has expanded far beyond an early focus on issues that primarily affect women. This volume includes papers that elegantly and successfully use feminist theory to investigate topics that are very much in the mainstream of bioethics (e.g., conflicts of interest or evidence-based medicine), as well as papers on topics that have particular resonance for women (e.g.,care of the elderly and hybrid embryos). As we write this, the World Health Organization has declared the emerging swine flu to be a level-4 pandemic. If a full-blown global pandemic ensues, health care systems and societies around the world will be challenged to find just and ethical ways to respond. Several of the themes in this issue are relevant here. Who will care for those affected, and who will receive care? It is unlikely that existing services will be able to care for all who become ill. How will resources be distributed, and will those who already are vulnerable be further disenfranchised? What notions of duty and responsibility will be at play, and on what basis will health care professionals advise their patients in this situation of uncertainty? The first congress issue of IJFAB demonstrates clearly that feminist bioethics plays a crucial role in addressing these and other questions in the potentially difficult times ahead.

IJFAB, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2

Special Issue: Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care: Papers from the Sixth International Congress of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics   
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2

ESSAYS
Long-term care for the elderly worldwide: Whose responsibility is it?
Rosemarie Tong

Shades of gray: From caring to uncaring labor
Monique Lanoix

Stories from the margins: Immigrant patients, health care, and narrative medicine
Anna Gotlib

“Babies with some animal DNA in them”: A woman's choice?
Françoise Baylis

Glass houses: The power of money in bioethics research
Jocelyn Downie

Trust and responsibility in health policy
Meredith Celene Schwartz

Evidence-based medicine and patient autonomy
Robyn Bluhm

Why reading the title isn't good enough: An evaluation of the 4S approach to evidence-based medicine
Kirstin Borgerson

To subscribe to IJFAB visit our website http://inscribe.iupress.org.

Transition 101: Looking Ahead

From the issue:

“What is the community? is not a question that one can easily answer, and to make the community the bearer of human rights, and to define duties toward its preservation, predisposes one to an incarcerating conception of identity, one which eventually endangers the very notion of human rights.”
—Souleymane Bachir Diagne

“Democratic ideals must come to terms with economic ideals for the empowerment of the least among us. What is needed is less mysticism and more rational analysis of social situations—whether in Africa or elsewhere.”
—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

“Mr. George takes a fifty-euro note. It has some markings on it, reddish brown, above the stars of Europe. He wipes it down with a cloth on which he has sprinkled a transparent fluid. The note emerges pristine.”
—Petina Gappah

“In the same week that Luxolo came in, a teenager was stabbed in the heart with a screwdriver; a mother of three children was shot in the head by her boyfriend; a middle-aged man was attacked with an ax; and a teenager was beaten to death by his neighbors after having stolen a CD.”
—Rebecca Rosenberg

“Purging territory designated as home of outsiders appears to be the most decisive and only accessible expression of power available to people in desperate conditions seeking to regain control over their lives and the spaces they inhabit.”
—Moradewun Adejunmobi

Plus: Poems from Sonata Mulattica, by Rita Dove

http://www.transitionmagazine.com/index.html

To subscribe visit http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/trs.

Historical Scholarship in Post-Soviet Russia

History & Memory 21/2
Special issue: Historical Scholarship in Post-Soviet Russia
Guest editor: Gabriel Gorodetsky

This issue is devoted to a fascinating case study on the impact of political and social change on the writing of history: the changing trends in historical research in Russia following the demise of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Marxist ideological framework that had been imposed on historiography, along with the new access to previously closed archives and the freedom to discuss previously taboo topics, have led to the reassessment of central problems of Russian historiography and opened new fields of research. Following Michael Confino’s opening article on the current state of Russian historiography both inside and outside Russia, the following five articles consider the main issues occupying Russian historians today. Boris Kolonitskii examines the relations between the official “politics of memory” and historical research in the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia, with particular attention to the 1917 revolution, the founding myth of the Soviet Union. Teddy Uldricks explores the myth of the Great Patriotic War, which continues to be a key element in the national identity of the Russian people, including the conflicting interpretations of the role of the USSR in the origins of World War II. Vera Kaplan analyzes the changes in both the meaning and the role of the concept of socialism, one of the fundamental axioms of Soviet historical discourse, in post-Soviet Russian history textbooks. Victor Shnirelman continues the discussion of school history texbooks from a different perspective, examining the shift in emphasis from class struggle to nationalism and ethnocentrism. He demonstrates that the aspiration to depict Russia as a homogeneous civilization has led to the biased representation of certain non-Russian ethnic communities.  Finally, Yaacov Ro’i outlines Russian historiography on one of the most troubled episodes in Soviet history—the deportation of ethnic populations, the impact of which has continued to trouble Russian politics in the post-Soviet period, and to an extent also the politics of other Soviet successor states.

Table of Contents

From the Editor                                   

The New Russian Historiography, and the Old—
Some Considerations                                   
MICHAEL CONFINO

Russian Historiography of the 1917 Revolution                   
New Challenges to Old Paradigms?
BORIS KOLONITSKII

War, Politics and Memory                               
Russian Historians Reevaluate the Origins of World War II
TEDDY J. ULDRICKS

The Vicissitudes of Socialism in Russian History Textbooks       
VERA KAPLAN

Stigmatized by History or by Historians?                       
The Peoples of Russia in School History Textbooks
VICTOR  SHNIRELMAN

The Transformation of Historiography on the “Punished Peoples”           
YAACOV RO’I

To subscribe or purchase a single issue to History & Memory visit our website at http://inscribe.iupress.org.

Race and Secondary Education: Content, Contexts, Impacts

Race/Ethnicity 2.2
Special Issue: Race and Secondary Education: Content, Contexts, Impacts

In the introduction the editors write:

"This issue of Race/Ethnicity explores the implications of race and ethnicity in systems of secondary education across the globe. We have chosen to focus on secondary education because it provides many children with their final level of formal education, making the content and character of that education a topic worth examining. In doing so, we recognize that formal learning environments must be considered within larger cultural, societal, national, and even global contexts to account for the overall impacts of the educational experience. All of these components work together to influence how children see themselves as individuals, national citizens, and global inhabitants.

While it is impossible, and not particularly desirable, to synthesize educational
practices across the globe, the essays within this volume provide some insight into the similarities and differences in the education of children and how issues of race and ethnicity are engaged in that process…

… The global impact of educational practices in all nations makes the ongoing discussion surrounding secondary education an important one to pursue, and we hope that the articles in this issue will contribute to conversations that will bring practitioners, researchers, and concerned citizens together in praxis in their continued work on the issues of access, equity, value, and reform."

The table of contents includes:

Race / Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts Apr 2009, Vol. 2, No. 2

Chapter 2 from Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paolo Freire

Selected Responses to Editors' Queries on Education
Robin Burns, Grace Takaheebwa, Robert Aspelagh, Erica Frankenberg, Sylvère Farraudiere

Social Studies Teachers' Reflections on Citizenship Education in Bavaria, Germany
Debora Hinderliter Ortloff

End of the Line: Tracing Racial Inequality from School to Prison
Lizbet Simmons

I Am Because We Are: Increasing Educational Opportunity for Early Childhood Education in Ghana, West Africa
Cynthia B. Dillard

Black Girls' Voices: Exploring Their Lived Experiences in a Predominately White High School
Tiffany A. Eggleston, Antoinette Halsell Miranda

Muslim Uyghur Students in a Dislocated Chinese Boarding School: Bonding Social Capital as a Response to Ethnic Integration
Yangbin Chen, Gerard A. Postiglione

Jewish WWII Soldiers in the Israeli National Narrative

From Exclusion to Inclusion: Jewish WWII Soldiers in the Israeli National Narrative by Sveta Roberman

Israel Studies
VOLUME 14, ISSUE 2

Summer 2009, Vol. 14, No. 2, Pages 50-71
Posted Online April 28, 2009.

From the abstract by Sveta Roberman

This study focuses on the case of 1.5 million Jewish soldiers who fought in the Allied Armies in WWII and explores its place in Israeli social memory. For decades the story of military combat and sacrifice of WWII Jewish soldiers was marginalized in the Israeli mnemonic narrative. Over the years, different groups of ex-servicemen living in Israel kept alive the memory of their involvement in the combat and contested its silencing and marginalization. Weaving the texture of those events from the dual strands of forgetting and remembering, I elucidate on the process by which the national historical narrative was formed, revealing the dynamics of Israeli nationalism and showing how symbolic boundaries of national belonging were reshaped over time.

Two New Special Issues: Climate Crisis and African Identity

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
JEMCS 8.2 — Climate and Crisis
Guest Editors: Robert Markley and Gillen D’Arcy Wood

With tropical warmth threatening to become a global phenomenon—ushering in an era of chronic drought and desertification, acidifying oceans, coastal inundation, and global food shortages—the necessity of integrating climate and environment into the work of history has become increasingly urgent. Crude climatic determinism remains anathema, but historical materialism without ecological awareness now appears vulnerable to a dangerous determinism of another kind: a grand narrative of class, government, empire and trade whose anthropocentric terms are no less a product of imperialism and the Enlightenment than the current ecological crisis itself. Climate, long a background constant, is back in the spotlight as a key, shaping variable in the human story, an imperative reflected in each of the six essays of this timely special volume, entitled “Climate and Crisis.”

Traditional ecocriticism’s concern for how nature and environment are discursively constructed and politicized has only rarely been adapted to the urgent task of eco-historical revisionism: to illuminate how, in the colonial era for example, specific instances of human ecological agency—land use, agricultural technology and food production, the opening of trade routes, urban planning, and public health policy—were acculturated and rationalized. Likewise absent from ecocritical scholarship have been critical histories of cultural response and adaptation to natural phenomena beyond human control: to seasonal temperature anomalies, extreme weather events, climate change (e.g. the vicissitudes of the Little Ice Age), and natural disaster.

The two guiding questions of the new eco-historicism would thus be: What were the dynamic relations between climate, environment, and human culture in the past? And what is the relevance of a given eco-historical case study to the current emergency period of environmental degradation and global warming? Each of the essays in “Climate and Crisis” poses variations of these questions, and makes the argument for climate discourse as a pervasive and crucial element in texts and historical formations of the early modern period.

To subscribe to the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies or to purchase a single issue, visit our website at http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/jem.

Research in African Literatures
RAL 40.1—Oral Literature and Identity Formation in Africa and the Diaspora
Guest Editors: Isidore Okpewho and Funso Aiyejina

“Oral Literature and Identity Formation in Africa and the Diaspora” is a special issue of Research in African Literatures, guest-edited by Isidore Okpewho and Funso Aiyejina and dedicated to the late Dr. John Delworth Elder, whose career was devoted to the exploration of the roots of Caribbean culture in Africa. The papers explore ways that individuals and communities identify themselves “both within their local and national settings and against the grain of hegemonic forces that drive them to defend their stakes.”

The special issue opens with Maureen Warner-Lewis’s overview of J. D. Elder’s career and ethnographic studies, ranging from the agricultural cycle and religious practices, to food preparation, rites of passage, and songs and tales, leading the way for work by today’s scholars. Philosopher Kwasi Wiredu writes on the concept of personhood, and the differences between person and human being or individual, setting the stage for articles by Mumia G. Osaaji (exploring subversion of patriarchal ideology through a Kenyan woman oral narrative), Beverly J. Stoeltje (on the power of the curse and female authority among the Asante), and Antoinette Tidjani Alou (on the Nigerien queen Sarraounia and “one hundred years of forgetting female leadership”). Additionally, Claudius Fergus describes the ritualization of the kidnap of the common ancestor of a family tree that spans from Ghana to Nigeria as well as countries outside the continent, shedding light on ties that bind those devoted to tradition and those assimilated to European culture, and Chiji Akoma looks to the popular 1980s television program Icheoku to reveal how an Ibgo court clerk undermines his colonial employer’s authority through oral speech forms.

Joseph McLaren writes on the dilemma of identity resulting from the erasure of Africanized linguistic elements in the English language, while John Roberts shows that African Americans continue to rely on the power of the spoken word, especially as it can provoke dialogue about potential dangers in their community. Funso Aiyejina, Rawle Gibbons, and the late Baba Sam Phills discuss two bodies of songs from the Yoruba oral tradition in Trinidad and Tobago, and Michael Toussaint examines how the Trinidad calypso maintains its relevance in its source community as well as the wider world. Adetayo Alabi studies Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name to consider orality, memory, and the diaspora, and Lee Haring closes the volume with a reflection on how for the student of creole cultures, the spaces of formalism and ideology are “the same element in different spaces.”

To subscribe to Research in African Literatures or to purchase a single issue visit our website at http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/ral.

IU Press/Journals to Publish Black Camera

In partnership with the Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive (BFCA), IU Press/Journals will publish Black Camera, edited by Michael T. Martin, beginning in the fall of 2009.  

Black Camera is devoted to the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience and is the only scholarly film journal of its kind in the United States. Published twice a year, it features essays and interviews that engage film in social as well as political context and in relation to historical and economic forces that bear on the reception, distribution, and production of film in local, regional, national, and transnational settings and environments.

In addition, Black Camera includes research and archival notes, editorials, reports, interviews with emerging and prominent filmmakers, and book and film reviews and addresses a wide range of genres—including documentary, experimental film and video, diasporic cinema, animation, musicals, comedy, and so on. It challenges received and ensconced views and assumptions about the traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, where new and longstanding cinematic formations are in play. While its scope is interdisciplinary and inclusive of all of the African diaspora, the journal devotes issues or sections of issues to national cinemas, as well as independent, marginal, or oppositional films and cinematic formations.

Please check our website at http://inscribe.iupress.org for more information on Black Camera and on Film History, which has been published by IU Press since 2004 and is now in its twentieth volume.

The Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive, directed by Michael Martin, was established in 1981 as a repository of films and related materials by and about African Americans. Included in its collection are hundreds of movie posters.  Black Camera will regularly include four-color samples of this impressive collection in every issue.  

Innovative Women:
Unsung Pioneers of Social Change

This special issue, guest edited by Nikki Keddie, points to the originality and importance of women who pioneered in major areas of social change and whose contributions have not been recognized. Indeed, most are scarcely known in their own societies or in the West.

Powerful men sometimes appropriated their ideas, often erasing their originators' names from history; sometimes rejected these ideas; and sometimes ignored them. Yet many of these ideas were later accepted, and some are still on the agenda. As Baron has noted regarding Egypt, many such women, whose ideas were practical and based on experience, deserve the kind of attention usually accorded almost exclusively to male writers. The popularity in the West of Middle Eastern and North African women's memoirs, films, novels, and other contributions is another side of the growing recognition of such women's importance and influence, a recognition to which this issue gives added impetus.

The articles in this issue deal with prostitution and marriage (A. Holly Shissler), birth control (Beth Baron), women's education (Jasamin Rostan-Kolayi), and the expression of feelings related to gender and sexuality (Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi). Three of the articles deal in significant part with women who contested traditional ideas and practices concerning sexuality and women's bodies; all four of the articles feature women who broke with traditional ideas and mores and presented alternative views of women.

The special issue is based on papers presented at a workshop on New Ideas for Middle Eastern Societies: Analyzing Women's Writings, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. The chief sponsor was the fund created to support three years' postdoctoral fellowships from the International Balzan Foundation Prize, awarded to Nikki Keddie, with several co-sponsors including the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. Three of the authors: A. Holly Shissler, Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, and Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, were Keddie/Balzan Fellows in 2005-07.