Arab American Femininities Beyond Arab Virgin American(iz.docx

Arab American Femininities: Beyond Arab Virgin/
American(ized) Whore
Author(s): Nadine Naber
Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 87-
111
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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Arab American

Femininities:

Beyond Arab Virgin/
American (ized) Whore

Nadine Naber

It was a typical weeknight at my parents' home. My father was
asleep

since he wakes up at 4:00 a.m. to open his convenience store in
down

town San Francisco. I joined my mother on the couch and we
searched

for something interesting to watch on TV. My mother held the
remote

control, flipping through the stations. Station after station a
similar pic

ture of an Anglo American male and female holding one
another in

romantic or sexual ways appeared on the screen. As she flipped
the sta

tion, my mother remarked, "Sleep, Slept . .. Sleep, Slept . ..
THAT is

America!" She continued, "Al sex al hum, zay shurb al mai
[Sex for
them is as easy as drinking water]."

-Nadine Naber, journal entry, December 2, 1999

A s I L I S T E N E D to my mother,' I recalled several
experiences growing up

within a bicultural Arab American familial and communal
context. Al

Amerikan (Americans) were often referred to in derogatory
sexualized
terms. It was the trash culture-degenerate, morally bankrupt,
and not

worth investing in. Al Arab (Arabs), on the other hand, were
referred to

positively and associated with Arab family values and
hospitality. Similarly,

throughout the period of my ethnographic research among
middle-class

Arab American family and community networks in San
Francisco, Cal

Feminist Studies 32, no. 1 (Spring 2006). C 2006 by Nadine
Naber

87

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88 Nadine Naber

ifornia,2 between January 1999 and August 2001, the theme of
female sexu

ality circumscribed the ways my research participants imagined
and con

tested culture, identity, and belonging. The theme of female
sexuality

tended to be utilized as part of some Arab immigrant families'
selective

assimilation strategy in which the preservation of Arab cultural
identity

and assimilation to American norms of "whiteness" were
simultaneously

desired. Within this strategy, the ideal of reproducing cultural
identity was

gendered and sexualized and disproportionately placed on
daughters. A
daughter's rejection of an idealized notion of Arab womanhood
could sig

nify cultural loss and thereby negate her potential as capital
within this

family strategy. In policing Arab American femininities, this
family strate

gy deployed a cultural nationalist logic that represented the
categories

"Arab" and "American" in oppositional terms, such as "good
Arab girls" vs.

"bad American(ized) girls," or "Arab virgin" vs.
"American(ized) whore." I

coin the term Arab cultural re-authenticity to contextualize this
process

within Arab histories of transnational migration, assimilation,
and racial

ization. Arab cultural re-authenticity, I suggest, is a localized,
spoken, and

unspoken figure of an imagined "true" Arab culture that
emerges as a
reaction or an alternative to the universalizing tendencies of
hegemonic

U.S. nationalism, the pressures of assimilation, and the
gendered racializa
tion of Arab women and men. I use the term hegemonic (white)
U.S.
nationalism to refer to the official discourses of the U.S. state
and corpo

rate media and the notion of a universalized abstract American
citizen
that "at the same time systematically produces sexualized,

gendered, and

racialized bodies and particularistic claims for recognition and
justice by

minoritized groups."3
This article focuses on the narratives of three of the thirty
interviewees

who are specifically activists who have worked within or
supported Arab

homeland struggles (i.e., Palestine and Iraq), radical Arab and
Arab
American feminist, queer Arab, and/or women of color feminist
move

ments. Their location on the margins of both hegemonic U.S.
nation
alisms and Arab American cultural nationalisms provides a rich
site from

which to explore dominant discourses on gender and sexuality
that cir
cumscribe Arab American femininities. Their narratives
represent histori

cally specific contexts in which the gendered and sexualized
discourses of

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Nadine Naber 89

assimilation, anti-Arab racism, and U.S. Orientalism emerge, as
well as the

multiple points at which they break down. Counter to dominant
colo
nialist Western feminist approaches that highlight "religion"
(Islam) as

the primary determinant of Arab women's identities, this article
demon

strates that religion (Christian or Muslim) alone does not
determine the

processes by which Arab American femininities are imagined
and per
formed. Instead, it situates discussions on religious identity
within the

context of intersecting coordinates of power (race, class,
nation, and so

forth) and historical circumstances. Moreover, I do not present
their nar

ratives as sites from which to universalize the experiences of
all Arab
American women, but to provide an opportunity to think
beyond mis
perceptions and stereotypes. I locate myself in the context of
multiple,

contradictory loyalties, such as Arab daughter, sister, and
cousin, anthro

pologist, researcher, community activist, and feminist. This
location
rendered me at once "insider" and "outsider," collaboratively
and individ

ually deconstructing, contesting, and often reinforcing the
cultural logics

that circumscribed my research participants' identities.

This article focuses on the tense and often conflictual location
of Arab

American femininities at the intersections of two contradictory
discourses:

Arab cultural re-authenticity and hegemonic U.S. nationalism. I
explore

the ways that the theme of sexuality permeated many Arab
immigrant

families' engagements with the pressures of assimilation vis-a-
vis a series of

racial and cultural discourses on Arabness and Americanness. I
argue that

although my research participants (and their parents) perceived
their cul

tural location within a binary of Arabness and Americanness,
when lived

and performed, this binary constantly broke down, particularly

along the

lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation. Yet
binary terms

for expressing the themes of family, gender, and sexuality
persisted
throughout my field sites as a discursive mechanism for
explaining more

complex processes that implicate my research participants and
their par

ents within a desire for a stereotypical "Americanization" that
is predicated

on "Arabness" as the crucial Other. A binary cultural logic of
"us" and
"them" that was gendered and sexualized was then a discursive
reaction to

the complex dichotomies of hegemonic U.S. nationalism that at
once pres

sure racialized immigrants to assimilate into a whitened
middle-class U.S.

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90 Nadine Naber

national identity while positioning them outside the boundaries

of
"Americanness." Both generations were mutually invested in
expressing

the two racial-ethnic-national categories (Arab and American)
in dichoto

mous terms because it provided a discursive mechanism for
engaging with

the processes of immigration and assimilation in which
Arabness and
Americanness absolutely depend on each other to exist-as
opposites and
in unison.
My research is based on intensive interviews and participant
observation

among thirty second-generation women between the ages of
twenty and

thirty, both Muslim and Christian, of Lebanese, Jordanian,
Palestinian, and

Syrian descent.4 My research participants' parents emigrated to
the U.S. in

the 1960s, during a period of heightened secular Arab
nationalism in the

Arab world. Although most of my research participants were
raised within

secular families, religious affiliation (Muslim or Christian) was
a key mark

er of identity and difference throughout my field sites. Most of
my
research participants of Muslim descent, for example,
explained that
growing up they understood Islam as part of their cultural
identity. Most

of my research participants who were from Christian
backgrounds gener

ally agreed that they were raised as "Christian Arabs" or that
the "Arab

community" that their parents identified with was comprised
predomi
nantly of Christian Arabs.

Before coming to the United States, most of my research
participants'

families were traders involved in small business enterprises
who were
either displaced to the San Francisco Bay area as a
consequence of colonial

ism, neocolonialism, and war (i.e., Palestinians and Israeli
colonization, or

Lebanese and the Lebanese civil war) or emigrated to the San
Francisco
Bay area in the 1960s in search of economic mobility. Their
parents did not

integrate into culturally whitened middle-class corporate
communities

upon migration, but relied on familial and communal financial
networks

and support to eventually buy their own grocery and liquor
stores. The

internal pressures of tight-knit, familial, and communal
networks and the

external pressures of Americanization, assimilation, and racism
have
fostered an often reactionary bourgeois reproduction of Arab
cultural
identity. Cultural authorities-including parents, aunts, and
uncles as well

as the leaders of secular and religious community-based
institutions-tend

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Nadine Naber 9I

ed to generate a socially conservative and essentialized notion
of "Arab
culture" alongside a contradictory desire for the "American
dream" and

assimilation into American modes of whiteness.

This article, then, is not an analysis of all second-generation
Arab Amer

icans, but of how locational conditions (especially when it
comes to racial

ized, gendered, class, and religious identities) mediate and
break down an

imagined "Arab" identity in the context of the San Francisco
Bay area of

California. It is an exploration of how binary oppositions
within Arab
American discourses on gender and sexuality take on particular
form
among my research participants, a group of educated, middle-
class, young

women active in progressive Arab, Arab feminist, and/or queer
Arab politi

cal movements whose parents are ethnic entrepreneurs and
immigrated,

or were displaced, to the San Francisco Bay area-a traditionally
liberal,

racially/ethnically diverse location. Focusing on the narratives
of three
young Arab American women, this article highlights the
processes by
which discourses of Arab cultural re-authenticity and
hegemonic U.S.

nationalism police Arab American femininities
circumstantially, depending

on the types of "bad girl" behaviors to be controlled within a
particular

location. I argue that the phenomena of intersectionality cannot
be gener

alized as taking one singular form for all Arab Americans; that
one must be

cautious about using the terms "Arab American" or "Arab
American wom

en" in a U.S. national sense; and that feminist theory and
practice vis-a-vis

Arab American communities should take the specific ways that
the coordi

nates of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation
intersect in differ

ent contexts seriously. For example, perhaps part of the
motivation behind

the policing of an Arab daughter's behavior among middle-class
business

entrepreneurs invested in economic mobility and the selective
reproduc
tion of patriarchal cultural ideals is that San Francisco is home
to some of

the most vibrant progressive Arab, queer Arab, Arab feminist,
and Arab

student movements alongside some of the most vibrant civil

rights, racial

justice, feminist, and queer movements in the nation. In the San
Francisco

Bay area, multiracial coalition building, transgressive sexual
politics, and

critiques of classism, capitalism, U.S.-led imperialism, and war
heavily
inspire young people, such as my research participants, who are
either

active in or loyal to progressive politics.

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92 Nadine Naber

Among my research participants, the performativity of an
idealized
"true" Arab culture emerged in the context of "regulatory
ideals" that

they associated with "being Arab" and distinguished from the
regulatory

ideals of "being American," such as: knowing what is 'abe
(shameful);
knowing how to give mujamalat (flattery); knowing what you're
supposed

to do when someone greets you; drinking shai (tea) or coffee;
talking
about politics "sooo" much; getting up for an older person;
respecting

your elders; looking after your parents and taking care of them;
judging

people according to what family they are from; marrying
through con
nections; gossiping and having a good reputation.5

Articulations of "selfhood" among my research participants
were key

sites where the oppositional logic of self/Other, us/them,
Arab/American

was reproduced among my research participants. Selfhood was
often artic

ulated in terms of a choice between "being an individual, being
my own
person, being an American," or "being connected, having
family, and
being 'Arab."' Yet what ultimately distinguished "us" from
"them," or Al

Arab from Al Amerikan, among my research participants was a
reiterated set

of norms that were sexualized, gender specific, and performed
in utter

ances such as "banatna ma bitlaau fil lail" (our girls don't stay
out at night).

Positioning the feminized subjectivities within my field sites in
between

the binary oppositions of good Arab daughter vs. bad
American(ized)
daughter, or Arab virgin vs. American(ized) whore, the
discourse of Arab

cultural re-authenticity reproduced a masculinist cultural
nationalist
assumption that if a daughter chooses to betray the regulatory
demands

of an idealized Arab womanhood, an imagined Arab community
loses
itself to the Amerikan. Jumana, recalling her parents'
reinforcement of this

distinction while she was growing up, explains,

My parents thought that being American was spending the night
at a friend's

house, wearing shorts, the guy-girl thing, wearing make-up,
reading teen maga

zines, having pictures of guys in my room. My parents used to
tell me, "If you go

to an American's house, they're smoking, drinking . .. they
offer you this and

that. But if you go to an Arab house, you don't see as much of
that. Bi hafzu 'ala al

banat [They watch over their daughters].

My research participants generally agreed that virginity,
followed by
heterosexual (ethno-religious) endogamous marriage were the
key de

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Nadine Naber 93

mands of an idealized Arab womanhood that together,
constituted the
yardstick that policed female subjectivities in cultural
nationalist terms.

Here, discourses around Arab American femininities allow for
a cultural,

versus territorial, nationalist male Arab American perspective
within the

United States that emerges in opposition to hegemonic (white)
U.S.
nationalism and in the context of immigrant nostalgia. Here, an
imagined

notion of "Arab people" or an "Arab community" is inspired, in
part, by a

collective memory of immigrant displacement and romantic
memories of

"home" and "homeland culture." Among middle-class familial
and com
munal networks in San Francisco, Arab American cultural
nationalism
was expressed in terms of an imagined Arab community or
people that

constituted "woman" as virgin or mother vis-a-vis an extended
family
context. Among Arab American cultural authorities in San
Francisco, the

ideal of marrying within one's kin group within the discourse
of Arab cul

tural re-authenticity was refashioned in terms of marrying
within the kin

groups' religious group (Muslim or Christian); village of origin
(Ramallah, Al Salt), economic class, national (Jordanian,
Lebanese,
Palestinian, or Syrian), or racialized/ethnic (Arab) group.
These categories

were hierarchical, as "religious affiliation" tended to supersede
"national

origin" and "national origin" superseded "racial/ethnicity
identity" as the

boundary to be protected through a daughter's marriage.
Although the
regulatory demands of Arab womanhood were often framed as
an alter
native to assimilation and Americanization, the cultural
discourses that

controlled a daughter's marriagability simultaneously enabled a
family
strategy of assimilation to an appropriate American norm of
whiteness

that privileges heterosexual marriage-within particular
boundaries of
race and class-as capital.
The following narratives epitomize the processes by which
discourses on

Arabness and Americanness shifted depending on the kinds of
power rela

tions that set the stage for a daughter's expression and/or
transgression of

idealized notions of femininity within a given context. The first
narrative

centralizes intersections of race and class in the policing of
Arab American

femininities. The second narrative emphasizes intersections of
religion and

sexuality. The third narrative draws attention to intersections
of
Orientalism and religion. Together, these narratives highlight
three differ

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94 Nadine Naber

ent locations along a continuum of gendered experience among
my
research participants at the intersections of race and class;
religion and sex

uality; and Orientalism and religion. In doing so, they point to
the process

by which different sociohistorical circumstances produce
shifting con
structions of Arabness and Americanness in general and
shifting construc

tions of Arab American femininity in particular. Although my
research

also illustrates that Arab cultural re-authenticity articulates
masculinity

and femininity as relational and mutually constitutive and
implicates mas

culinity in binary terms that are contested, transformed, and
often repro

duced along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion,
and nation,

an analysis of Arab American masculinities is beyond the scope
of this arti

cle. Overall, this article argues for a historically situated, anti-
essentialist

approach to Arab and Arab American feminist studies that
takes the loca

tional conditions that mediate and break down an "imagined
Arab
American identity" seriously.

RACE, CLASS, AND THE DOUBLE LIFE

Rime and I met at Arabian Nights, one of the few clubs in San
Francisco

where the DJ spins Arabic music. A mutual friend introduced
us to one

another and told her that I was doing research among young
Arab
Americans. As the DJ mixed hip-hop, reggae, and Arabic beats,
Rime

described herself as "living in two worlds . . . the 'Arab' world
of [her]

family ... and the 'American' world outside of home." The next
time
we met, she explained that her parents emigrated to San
Francisco
from Jordan in the late 1960s in search of economic
opportunity, that

she was the oldest among five siblings, that her father owned a
liquor

store in one of San Francisco's poor black neighborhoods for
the past

fifteen years and that she graduated with a BA in nutrition and
was per

suing a master's degree in public health.

-Naber, journal entry, June 18, 1999

EXCERPTS FROM RIME'S ORAL HISTORY: In hilgh school,
my parents didn't want me hang

ing out with my brother's friends because they got paranoid
about my virginity and they didn't

want me hanging out with my cousins'friends because they
were Mexican and black. In high

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Nadine Naber 95

school, my mom got paranoid about my virginity. My dad used
to tell me, "I had a nightmare

that my daughter would marry a black man." That was because
my dad owns a liquor store in

the Tenderloin [neighborhood] and all his life he's been robbed
and shot at, and his wife's been

robbed by blacks. He blamed poor black communities for their
situation without understanding

it and he couldn't understand that I had a lot of black friends at
school and that blacks were

always thefirst ones out there supporting Arab student
movements at school.

I remember when my cousin got pregnant with a guy who was
half Mexican and half black.

She lied and stayed out of the house for four years. Her family
knew but kept it secret. The

couple got in a big fight and the guy kicked my cousin out and
she moved back to her parents'

house. She did the most despicable thing a girl could ever do in
Arab culture-and they took her

back.

I was with Roger until recently. He was someone who I thought
was total instant love but he

was more of my support blanket because he was outside of the
traditional Arab cultural realm.

I lived in his house, and his parents accepted that 100 percent.
As far as my parents were con

cerned, I was living with my cousin. But there was always the
anxiety about getting caughtfor

lying and I internalized hating being a woman. I would wake up
at his house thinking about

my father seeing me with a black guy. It was pure panic. Roger
would touch my skin and be

like, "You're so cold."

Because I was Arab I had to take care of my family's reputation
and I was always reminded

of it. I think my parents knew about him, but their attitude was,
"Do what you do ... don't let

anybody find out." Then it was always myfriends'fault-my
American friends-'they're bad."

And I couldn't work at the family store, because "American"
men picked up on me there.

When I was graduating from college, I was partying a lot and
Ifelt I needed to be more

responsible. That's why I went back home to Jordan. In Jordan,
my life completely turned

around. I met Omar. All my life, the message was that I had to
marry an Arab Christian

man. Ifinally met an Arab Christian man who I love, and I
thought the double life and the

lying could be resolved. . . but my parents are not accepting
him. Before he told his family or

my family, he asked me to marry him, and traditionally, that
was wrong. My mom is stuck on

that issue. The thing that was really bugging her is that he's a

communist and an atheist and

against all the traditions. But what they focus on mostly is that
. . . "the guy has no

money-and you're going to go live with his family."

Traditionally if an Arab man is going to get married he
shouldfurnish and open a housefor

the girl and then get married, not get married and then worry
about that stuff My motn keeps

saying "Batlee [stop]. You're not getting married." It all comes
down to our traditions-hav

ing Arab traditions, and then being raised here in the US....
Why does it have to be so dif

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96 Nadine Naber

ficult? Is it because I'm Arab? Is it because of my mother?"

I'm planning on moving to Jordan and marrying him. My
parents will get over it. My

cousin asked me, "Have you told him about birth control?" And
when I said yes, she went

crazy and said I was crazy for telling him about birth control.

They see him through a Western

image of Arab men. They think I'm going to go back therefrom
this independent, free spirit to

be all the way across the world in this backward culture, like
I'm going to be locked up at home

rolling grape leaves all day. He says, "Don't worry, it won't be
like that."

If we get married and I move back to Jordan and it doesn't
work, I'll say, I'm going to get

some milk, but then I'll get a ticket and go to New York. I
won't even give them a phone num

ber. I'll call them once a month-and tell them that I'm okay.
Then I'll go and get all thisfree

dom, but I'll be all alone. I'll be another lonely white CEO
woman who's all alone and has no

one: has nofamily, no brothers, no nothing. 'Cause that's what
it's like in American culture.

Sometimes it can all make you crazy because you can't get out.
I have so many worlds and

every world is a whole other world. But in your mind they're
totally separated, but then they're

all there in your mind together. You get to a point that you are
about to explode.

When Rime speaks of living in "two worlds," fixity and

singularity under

write her view of "culture." Rime speaks about "Arab culture"
and "Amer

ican culture" as though they already existed, transcending
place, time, and

relations of power. Yet as Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it, "categories
always
leak."6 Rime's family's Christian religious affiliation and
Omar's economic

class, which disqualifies him as a suitable marriage partner,
disrupt Rime's

homogeneous "Arab world." Moreover, Omar's position as a
"disappoint
ment" to Rime's parents and his ironic foreignness reflects the
instability

of Arab cultural re-authenticity in that Omar bursts the bubble
of
"authentic Arabness" that they left in the homeland and have
tried to
recreate in the United States. Here, Omar's forced presence in
Rime's fami

ly's life exposes the nostalgia underlying Arab cultural re-
authenticity for

what it is.

Similarly, the racialized distinctions Mexican and black rupture
Rime's

essentialized "American" world. These discontinuities drive the
present

argument that while Rime sees herself between "two worlds,"
rupture and

difference position her along the two axes of sameness and
difference. At a

critical distance from both "worlds," Rime decides to marry a
Jordanian

man of Christian descent who is an atheist. Yet her narrative
reproduces a

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Nadine Naber 97

good girl versus bad girl binary in which "bad-girl behaviors"
are signified

by her desire to marry across lines of socioeconomic class and
political

affiliation. As she crafts an alternative plan to move to New
York alone in

case the marriage does not work, she invents tactics for
transgression
beyond the boundaries of a nostalgic "true" Arab culture.

Rime's "two (Arab and American) worlds" are not
homogeneous or sta
ble, but multiple and overlapping in the context of power,
history and the

changing intersections of class, race, gender, religion, and
politics in differ

ent locations. Rime implies that the unacceptability of
interracial marriage

compounds the virginity ideal. Although prohibitions against
mixed-race

unions are common in the Arab word, Rime's interpretation of
her com

munity's prohibitions is mediated by historically based U.S.
nationalist

anxiety about interracial marriage. Rime's father's positionality
as a liquor

store owner in the Tenderloin neighborhood further shaped the
racialized

and gendered imperatives that policed Rime's sexuality. His
nightmare

over his daughter's potential interracial marriage emerges as a
threat to

securing white middle-class norms and implies the forging of a
critical dis

tance from the racial Other toward whiteness. Here, "Arab

culture" is

invoked as a strategy for harnessing markers of middle-class
whiteness.

Meanwhile, the regulatory ideal that forbids sex with the
United States'

racialized Other controls Arab daughters' sexuality while
protecting Rime's

family, and an imagined Arab people, from degeneracy in white
middle

class terms. Binaries collapse in the context of a much greater
complexity

in that her father's attitude fits comfortably when he seems to
be speaking

(in his daughter's mind) to Arabness. Yet in fact, in policing
Rime's sexuali

ty, he is reinforcing the new identity he has had to develop in
the United

States, demonstrating the fiction of Arab cultural re-
authenticity.

Rime's two worlds are similarly narrated in gendered and
sexualized
terms and her perception of a fixed and stable "Arab culture" is
disrupted

when her aunt and uncle take her cousin back after she "got
pregnant with

a guy who was half Mexican and half black." Here, her cousin's
parents

seem to care less about her mixed-race relationship and
illegitimate preg

nancy than with presenting the public face of an "authentic" or
"tradition

al" Arab family. Through silence (that is, Rime's cousin staying
out of the

house for years; Rime living with her cousin) both
"traditionalist" parents

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98 Nadine Naber

and their "Americanized" daughters are mutually implicated in
keeping

the idealized notions of Arabness and Americanness active and
in opposi

tion. These silences allow them to keep the binary intact and
mask the fact

that at different points the oppositions threaten to be one and
the same.

Although Rime narrates herself as a split subject, her "worlds"
"inside"

and "outside" (Arab and American) were not discreet. In bed,
the bound

aries between "inside" and "outside" collapse as her father's
disapproving

gaze interrupts the privacy of her boyfriend's bedroom while
her boy

friend places his hand on her skin. Rime interprets the
regulatory ideal of

marrying "an Arab Christian man" as the central act that would
render

her embraceable or acceptable within the discourse of Arab
cultural re

authenticity in between two seemingly distinct and
homogeneous "Arab"

and "American" worlds. Yet in learning of Omar's
unacceptability as a
communist atheist from a different socioeconomic class, Rime
comes to

terms with the heterogeneity of Arab cultural identity. Yet she
also repro

duces the notion of a normative "Arab cultural identity" when
she inter

prets her reality as a choice between "having a family and

community," or

"being another lonely white CEO woman." Here, Rime's
distinction be
tween "having family and community" and "being a lonely
white CEO
woman" represents the reproduction of idealized notions of
selfhood in
the diaspora. As Rime critically receives cultural meanings, she
associates

"Arab" cultural identity with love, community, cohesiveness,
and control

and "American" cultural identity with individualism, autonomy,
and
alienation. Yet as Rime's parents render Omar unacceptable
because he
lives in the homeland, lacks money, and lacks Christian values,
the fantasy

of a romantic notion of "cultural authenticity" located in the
homeland

collapses along the lines of class, religion, and gender.

THE HETEROSEXUAL IMPERATIVE

Waiting for a friend at Caf6 Macondo, in San Francisco's
Mission district,

graffiti reading QUEER ARABS EXIST caught my attention.
Later, in

conversations among Arab women activists, I learned that the
graffiti

artist was a Syrian American woman named Lulu. Lulu was
also the

coproducer of a special issue of Bint Al Nas on the theme of
"sexuality."

Bint Al Nas is a cyber magazine and network for queer Arab
women and

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Nadine Naber 99

as part of this issue, Lulu designed the web art,
"Virgin/Whore," where a
collage representing herself as "virgin" (represented by drums,
pita

bread, camels, Allah, a Syrian flag, and a photograph of her
family

members wearing blindfolds) transforms into a second collage
repre

senting her as "whore" (represented by images of dildos next to
her girl

friend's name written in Arabic, handcuffs, a blurred image of
the pic

ture that represents her parents, and a photo of Madonna). A

few
months later, Lulu and I made plans to meet at Cafe Flor, a
queer hang

out in the Castro district of San Francisco. I recognized Lulu
from the

tattoo of her girlfriend's name Amina in Arabic script on her
arm and

the Palestinian flag sewn onto her book bag. We talked about
the col

lage and she explained, "What I am doing with the two images
is show

ing how they are dichotomous, or at least they have felt that
way, and

how really, it has been an either/or situation. Also, I think it's
how my
mother would see my sexuality: dirty, sinful, dark. The reason
for the

roll over of images is to show that the two states can't coexist."

-Naber, journal entry, December 28, 2000

EXCERPTS FROM LULU'S ORAL HISTORY: I grew up with
this all the time: "Sex is an act

of love in marriage. If you're not a virgin when you get
married, you're in trouble." I fought

that all the time. I would ask my mom about Syria. I would say,
"Ifgood Arab women are not

having sex and Arab men can have sex, then who were the Arab
men having sex with?" She

would answer, "The Christian women." So the Christian women
were the whores. That is very

prevalent in my family, the Muslim virgin and the Christian
whore. The whore is either

American or Christian.

My family is unique because we talked about sex. My sister
was really vocal about having

boyfriends and they were always black, which was even more
of a problem. My parents are into

the idea that Arabs are white. I think it's more of a Syrian-
Lebanese thing. But I didn't have

the same problems with my parents about boyfriends as my
sister because I knew I was queer

since I was thirteen orfourteen. It was when I came out when
things eruptedfor me. It got to

the point where they were asking, "Don't you want to have a
boyfriend?"

My mom won't come visit me at my house because she doesn't
want to see that I live with a

woman. The bottom line is premarital sex. Lesbian sex doesn't
happen because Arab girls

don't have premarital sex. When I came out, it was like, "That's
fine that you're gay-but

don't act on it. We don't want you having sex." Everyday I
heard, "Get married with a guy

and. . . " suppress it, basically. I said, "I can't do that. " And I
still get that . . . " We (Arabs)

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100 Nadine Naber

don't do that". . . or "You're the only gay Arab in the world."

It became this thing that everyone was going tofix me. My
uncles would come and take me

out to lunch. They would say, "Let's talk. This doesn't happen
in our culture. You've been

brainwashed by Americans. You've taken too many feminist
classes, you joined NOW, you

hate men, you have a backlash against men...." It was like . . .
"This is what this American

society has done to our daughter."

When that was the reaction I received, I totally disassociated
myselffrom Arabs. Ifelt I

couldn't be gay and Arab. Ifelt that either I have to go home
and be straight or be totally out

and pass as white. But later, Igot a lot of supportfrom queer
Arab networks.

One of the first people I met was Samah. She was doing some
research and asked if she

could interview me. I did it and we both cried. Then I went to a
queer Arab women's gather

ing. I was the youngest one and everyone knew that I came out
a week after I turned eighteen

and was kicked out by my parents four months later. I was the
baby. They all supported me.

Over the years, they've become myfamily.

Now my mom tells me, 'Just go have sex with a man-maybe
you'll change, " and I say,

"Maybe you should try it with a woman." She keeps finding
ways to say I'm too

Americanized . .. and when I tell her, "You don't know how
many queer Arabs I know." She

says, "They're American, they're American born, they're not
Arab . . . "or "They must be

Christian," or "Theirfathers must not be around because
nofather would accept his daughter

being gay.

They blamed Western feminism and said I should go to a
therapist. Then they changed their

mind and said not to go because they don't want it on my
hospital records that I am

gay-because "You know, " they would say, "After you change-
someone might see on your

hospital records that you were gay." Their idea was that they
didn't want anyone finding out

"after I change" and "once I get married, " that I had this dark
past. Then at the very end they

did try to send me to a hospital. That was when the shit hit
thefan, our biSgfinalfight. I was so

strong in defending myself-and they thought that too was very
American. So it became this

thing of like- and they make it very clear-"You chose your
sexuality over us. Sex is more

important than your family." Which goes back to the tight-knit
family Arab thing. It's all

about group dynamics.

When Lulu's mother replaces the "American whore" with the
"Christian
Arab" she reveals the gaps and fissures within the idea of a
unified Arab

American nationalist identity and the ways that Arab cultural

re-authen

ticity shifts depending on sociohistorical circumstances. Lulu's
mother's

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Nadine Naber 101

association of the category "Syrian Christian" with the
classification "Wes

ternized Other" signifies the ways that the categories "Islam"
and "Arab

ness" have often been conflated throughout Arab history and in
several

cases, juxtaposed against the notion of a Christian West.
According to her

mother, the Syrian-Muslim self is to be protected from the
corrupted,

Westernized, Syrian-Christian Other.

Intersections between national origin and racial identification
in Lulu's

narrative further complicate Arab cultural identity in the
United States.

Lulu, in remembering why her parents did not accept her
sister's black

boyfriends, explains that identifying as white is "a Syrian-
Lebanese thing."

The Syrian-Lebanese distinction is common within hegemonic
Arab
American discourses in San Francisco. Many of my research
participants

agree that Syrian and Lebanese Arab Americans have had more
access to

the privileges of middle-class whiteness compared to other
Arab Ameri

cans.7 Steering Lulu's sister away from the racial Other, Lulu's
mother, like

Rime's father, secures a white middle-class positionality. Yet
when it

comes to Lulu's sexuality, the association of Syrians with
whiteness is

quickly disrupted as a sexualized, cultural, nationalist logic
disassociates

them as "Arabs" from the loose, sexually immoral American
"feminist"

Other in the name of controlling Lulu's sexuality. In Lulu's
narrative,
then, the Al Arab/Al Amerikan boundary is permeable and
shifting. As Lulu

explains, her parents uphold the normative demands of middle-
class
American whiteness to tame her sister's sexuality while they
distinguish

themselves from Al Amerikan when it comes to taming Lulu's
behaviors.

Fissures in Arab cultural re-authenticity also emerge when
Lulu's moth

er suggests that Lulu "try sex with a man." In the case of Lulu's
queer iden

tity, a heterosexual imperative becomes a more significant
symbol of the

Arab virgin/American whore boundary than the "virginity"
ideal. Gloria

Anzaldu'a writes, "For the lesbian of color, the ultimate
rebellion she can

make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior.
She goes

against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality."8
Lulu's
queerness, the central marker of her betrayal, underwrites her
marginaliza

tion as traitor-outsider-American by cultural authorities such as
her moth

er, her father, and her uncle. The extent to which she is seen as

"un
acceptable, faulty, damaged," culminate in her family's attempt
to send her

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102 Nadine Naber

to a hospital to fix her so that she might return "straight" home.
Here, the

stance of their conservativism is made possible by their
inculcation and

reproduction of white American middle-class norms, such as
"therapy,"

within the discourse of Arab cultural re-authenticity. Lulu's
parents thus

reinforce a particular kind of assimilation constituted by the
ways that

Arabness and Americanness operate both as opposites and in
unison in the

policing of Arab American femininities throughout my field
sites.

In overriding the virginity ideal with the heterosexual
imperative, Lulu's

mother reinforces the control over women's sexual and
marriage practices

that underlie the heterosexual conjugal ideal in Arab and
Western soci
eties. Yet beyond reinforcing a heterosexual imperative, Lulu's
mother is

also reinforcing family ideals critically inherited from Arab
homelands

that are not only conjugal, but include extended kin that are
inscribed be

yond household or nuclear terms. In attempting to reinstate
Lulu's
heterosexuality, Lulu's mother seeks to protect Lulu's father's
honor as

well as the family honor of her nuclear and her extended
family.
Moreover, the intervention of Lulu's uncle can be interpreted in
terms of

the refashioning of a patrilineal ideal in the diaspora, in which
males and

elders remain responsible for female lineage members (even
after mar
riage) and men are responsible for providing for their families,
which
includes their current wives and underage children and may
include aged

parents, unmarried sisters, younger brothers, and the orphaned
children

of their brothers.9

As a form of political critique directed against patriarchy and
patrilineal

ity, Lulu's chosen family is a sign of her resistance. In the act
of choosing

her family, Lulu challenges Arab and Anglo-European
ideologies that read

blood and heterosexual marriage ties as the key foundation of
kinship,

demonstrating that all families are contextually defined. In
undermining

the association of kinship with biology, Lulu overtly performs
the social,

ideological, political, and historical constructedness of kinship.
Yet when

she meets Samah and joins queer Arab e-mail lists, Lulu finds
an alterna

tive to the Arab/American split in the coming together of what
she under

stood to be her "queer" and her "Arab" identities. Lulu's
insistence that

QUEER ARABS EXIST is an act in resisting racism,
homophobia, and
patriarchy on multiple fronts: it undermines the Arab

virgin/American

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Nadine Naber 103

(ized) whore that seeks to control women's sexuality by
marking women

who transgress the heterosexual imperative of Arab cultural
authenticity

as "American" and it disrupts the dualistic logic of hegemonic
U.S. nation

alist discourses that homogenize and subordinate Arab women
as either
veiled victims of misogynist terrorist Arab men or exotic erotic
objects

accessible to white/Western male heroes. Yet cultural identity,
for Lulu, is

more than "separate pieces merely coming together"-it is a site
of tension,

pain, and alienation that is constantly in motion.

Lulu's narrative signifies the critical inheritance of the
polarization be

tween Muslim and Christian Arabs from the homeland(s) to

Arab San
Francisco. It exemplifies the ways that this polarization took
on local form

among many bourgeois Arab American Muslims with whom I
interacted.

Throughout my field sites, hegemonic Arab Muslim discourses
often privi

leged Arab Muslim women as the essence of cultural re-
authenticity-as

opposed to Arab Christian women who were often represented
as promis

cuous and therefore, "Americanized." Yet although cultural
authorities

often deployed religion as a framework for policing feminized
subjectivi

ties throughout my field sites, religious background alone did
not deter

mine the extent to which my research participants upheld,
reconfigured,

or transgressed the feminized imperatives of Arab cultural re-
authenticity.

My research participants who transgressed "good girl"
behaviors through

dating before marriage, interracial, and/or same-sex
relationships were

religiously diverse. In addition, religious affiliation alone did
not determine

the extent to which parents, aunts, or uncles circumscribed
their daugh

ters' behaviors and identities.

While Lulu explained that her mother deployed her Muslim
identity to

reinforce the normative demands of virginity, her parents' self-
identifica

tion as "white" complexified their understanding of a
"normative feminin

ity." In addition, Lulu stated that her mother deployed a pan-
ethnic
"Arab" identity when she asked her to suppress her lesbian
identity. Thus,

while the discourse of the "Muslim virgin" and the "Christian
whore"

policed Lulu's femininity, the "virgin/whore" dichotomy was
also consti

tuted by a series of intersecting and contradictory discourses
such as white

versus non-white, Arab versus American. The ways that these
discourses

operated to police femininities depended on the different ways
that coor

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104 Nadine Naber

dinates of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation
intersected in

each of my research participants' lives.

U.S. ORIENTALISM AND THE RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE

Nicole and I agreed on Kan Zaman in San Francisco as our
meeting spot

since we heard they served argilah [an Arabic water pipe].
Little did we
know that on Thursday nights, it was the place to be for ex-
hippie yup

pies who enjoy mixing a little humus and a pita with a few
drinks before

a night of partying on the town. As we walked in, I greeted the
owner

Yousef, who goes by the name of Joe to his customers, as we
watched

two Anglo-American women who went by the names of Laila
and
Amina belly dancing with nose rings and sequined bikini tops.

Sitting

down on a bed of bright colorful pillows in a recreated
imaginary
Orient we began our first conversation. As daughters of Arab
Christians, we had parents who similarly believed that
emigration to

the United States would mean further distancing themselves
from the

"backwards, uncivilized, Muslims." Over dinner, we confessed
similar

stories about our parents' comments about the Muslim Other
and pon

dered the irony that our immigrant parents view us as "more
Arab"

than them because we interact with Muslims. For the following
three

months, Nicole and I continued meeting for dinner as she
shared with
me her struggles over gender, culture, and identity between and
among

the boundaries of "Arab" and "American."

-Naber, journal entry, August 16, 1999

EXCERPTS FROM NICOLE'S ORAL HISTORY:

One time I asked my uncle to send me an argilah from
Lebanon. When it arrived in the mail,

my mom hid it in the closet and startedflipping out at me. She
kept asking why her Western

educated, Lebanese, Christian, civilized, modern daughter-and
she used all these adjectives

who they gave the privilege of having a Western education-
wanted to go back and smoke an

argilah which is a backwards, dirty, horrible, uncivilized
Muslim habit.

But when you grow up in the United States, all kinds of Arabs
end up hanging out with

each other and the Muslim Christian thing isn't as big. In
college, the biggest movement was

the Palestinian movement. I was involved because it was an
Arab thing, even though growing

up Lebanese, the Palestinian struggle wasn't driven into you as
much. In Lebanon, Pales

tinians, especially the Palestinian Muslims, were associated
with being refugees, being radi

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Nadine Naber 105

cal politically, and trying to take over other Arab countries.

In college, my ethnicity bloomed. I felt more proud of being
Arab-even though when I

would tell people I was Arab, they wouldn't believe me because
I go to parties and drink and

they thought that if you were an Arab girl, you had to wear a
veil and your parents never let

you do anything. I remember once, when I told someone I was
Arab, they said, "And your

father let you go to college?" In college, my name and my look
became cool because I was

viewed as exotic. All of a sudden, you turn around with dark
curly hair and dark lips and

you're the item of the year. White men are confident to
approach you. It's trendy. It's part of

the boy talk with other boys. This one guy said to me, "I've
been with a Sri Lankan, a

Madagascan, a Somali. . . . It's like . . . I was with this
Lebanese." People approach you

because you are the vision of this exotic Arab woman goddess.

My parents were really liberal about guys. I would tell them
when I had a boyfriend. In

college, I started dating Ben. His mother is a Jewish lesbian. I
told my father this over the

dinner table. He was upset, but he got over it. They accepted
him because no one else would

have tofind out about his mother. We could have told my
dad'sfamily that he is Christian.

Both my parents are Christian, but we were raised atheist. So
why this reaction to

Mohammed? After college, I met the love of my life,
Mohammed. He's a Palestinian Muslim,

and we've been dating seriously. My momfreaked out saying
that meant he is Muslim and how

dare I date a Muslim. She went on to say, "Don't you know that
there are 15,000 cases of

Christian Western American women married to Muslim men
and the women are in the States

and the men have taken their childrenfrom them to the Muslim
world and the women are in the

States trying to get their children backfrom those horrible
men?"

She learned this on 20/20. Then she said, "Well you know,
ifyou are sleeping with him, his

family is going to kill you." The stereotypes never stop. She
says that he will force me to sleep

with him so I will have to marry him or that he will make me
cover my hair, or he will marry

more than one wife. After afew months she said, "Your father
isfreaking out because people

in the community are talking about you. Even his friends in
Lebanon heard your are dating a

Muslim. He's saying that you've ruined his reputation." My dad
called me and said, "You

have to stop dating him right now." I told him that this doesn't
make sense. I have aunts mar

ried to Palestinians. But even though Lebanese think they're
better than Palestinians, that

wasn't the issue. The issue was that he is Muslim. My dad is
acting as if he's experiencing

absolute betrayal and they're losing their daughter to the
enemy.

What's crazy is my mom is Armenian and her Armenian parents
let her marry my dad, an

Arab! And my parents are atheists! So it's not really about
religion per se, it's that they want

me to marry someone Westernized, and Lebanese Christian
falls into Western. Then there's

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io6 Nadine Naber

this issue of land. My dad has all this land in the village. He's
already discussed with my

brother and [me] what land we get. And in the future, I want to
build a house on that land. I

know if I marry Mohammed my father is going to disown me
and he won't give me that land.

But I know that my brother will undo it. My brother told me he
would give me the land but I

know it's hard on him because he is also worried that he will
get a bad reputationfor sanction

ing his sister to date a guy that is against hisfather's wish. I
think my parents are doing all this

to save face. I'll neverforget the e-mail Mohammed sent me. It
said, "How good is it that we

love each other if we're going to allow Ottoman conventions to
kill it?"

I have to figure out for myself if I can endure being rejected by
my society and excluded

from the social glue that keeps me tied to my roots and all the
networks of social relations my

family built here even though they're so reactionary. If I make
the decision to marry him, I will

be cut offfrom my lifeblood. Can I endure the pain and
hardships of struggling against society

for the sake offollowing my heart? But personal happiness
extends way beyond the bond that

ties man to woman. There are other ties . . . between an
individual and her society, a daughter

and her mother, and a girl . . . and the community that nurtured
her. When I think about giv

ing up Mohammed it's like giving up one kind of happiness to
preserve another. My family and

community's love has roots and gives me stability, whereas
Muhammed symbolizes risk and

daring and revolutionary uncertainty. That's what is causing my
identity crisis. My life is

bound up in the lives of others.

Within Nicole's narrative, her peers' Orientalist representation
of Arab
women as simultaneously veiled victim and exotic goddess,
coupled with
her mother's associations of Muslim habits with the terms,
"backwards,
dirty, horrible, and uncivilized" and Muslim men with the
themes of
misogyny, illustrate the significance of Orientalism to middle-
class U.S.
notions of identity and modernity. Her peers reproduce an
Orientalist
logic that renders Arab women as requiring Western discovery,

interven

tion, or liberation. Her mother, in aspiring to avoid
identification with the

Orientalist's Other, refashions Ottoman distinctions between
Muslims and

Christians and Lebanese nationalist distinctions between
Lebanese and
Palestinians in Orientalist terms. Here, Ottoman distinctions
between
Muslims and Christians are rooted in a framework for
organizing social

difference according to religious categories that persists in
Arab states,

despite the establishment of nation-states. (Within the Ottoman
period of

Middle East history, the categories "Muslim and non-Muslim"
[with mul

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Nadine Naber 107

tiple subgroups] provided the predominant framework for
organizing dif

ference, and civil rights were assigned and administered by

religious sect or

rite.)'0
At the intersections of Orientalism and Ottoman frameworks
for orga

nizing difference, the terms of Arab cultural re-authenticity
shift. Nicole's

mother deploys a selective assimilationist strategy that on the
one hand
operationalizes Arab cultural re-authenticity in terms of
homeland notions

of cultural difference, such as Ottoman distinctions between
Muslim and

Christians, while on the other hand, deploys Orientalist terms
that deni

grate behaviors and identities that are associated with pan-
Arabism and

Islam. This strategy disassociates Arab Christians from Arab
Muslims, asso

ciates Arab Christians with the "West" and with "modernity,"
and articu

lates a desire for middle-class U.S. nationalist notions of
identity that affirm

that to be "modern" and "American" is to be "Orientalist."
Nicole's mother

thus pronounces a selective assimilationist strategy that

reproduces the sex

ual politics of colonial discourse in terms of a rape/rescue
fantasy in which

the figure of the dark Arab Muslim male rapist threatens
Western (includ

ing Westernized Arab Christian women) and sex between
Muslim men and

Christian women can only involve rape."'

For Arab Christians, the possibilities for disassociating
themselves from

Orientalism have been made possible in that the "Western trope
of the
Muslim woman" articulated "as the ultimate victim of a
timeless patri

archy defined by the barbarism of the Islamic religion, which is
in need of

civilizing" has permeated Orientalist discourses.'2 The
significance of Islam

within the refashioning of Orientalism among Nicole's
Lebanese Christian

family is particularly clear when Nicole recalls the difference
between her

parents' response to her ex-boyfriend Ben whose mother was a
Jewish les

bian and their response to Mohammed. Although Ben's mother's
Jewish
and lesbian identities can be hidden, or conflated with Western
or
"American civilized identity," Mohammed's identity cannot.

Throughout her narrative, Nicole locates herself in between a
series of

binaries, such as American vs. Orientalized Other, Western
modernity vs.

religious discourse, Muslim vs. Christian, Lebanese vs.
Palestinian, and indi

vidualism vs. "connectivity."'" While she uses binaries as a
coding for articu

lating her struggle between different kinds of happiness, she
simultaneous

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io8 Nadine Naber

ly articulates her identity at the intersections of a constellation
of loyalties

that are multiple, contradictory, constantly shifting, and
overlapping. As

these loyalties intersect, they produce a complex process that

implicates

her (and her parents) within a desire for being with the man she
loves in

the context of stereotypical Americanized norms such as
freedom, individ

ualism, and loneliness, and for maintaining her ties to her
family, which are

constituted by the multiple genealogies of Ottoman history,
Western
Christian modernity, and U.S. Orientalism, multiculturalism,
and racism.

Nicole's narrative thus redraws the boundaries between
"Arabness" and
"Americanness" along multiple axes of power and control;
affirms that

binary formulations such as "Arabs" vs. "America," or
"Christians" vs.
"Muslims" are "always more complex than the straightjacket of
identity

politics might suggest";'4 and counters celebrations of
hybridity that fail to

account for the ways that essentialist categories, while
constructed and fic

tive, operate to support hierarchies of privilege and domination
and power

and control.

CONCLUSION
Walking down the street between one of San Francisco's largest
popula
tions of homeless women and men and the new dot-com
yuppies, I did

my usual skim of graffiti on Cafe Macondo's walls. The "FOR"
in LES
BIANS FOR BUSH had been crossed out and replaced with the
word
"EAT." As I turned to the wall behind me to find out whether
QUEER
ARABS still EXIST[ed], my eyes followed an arrow, drawn in
thick black
marker that pointed to the words QUEER ARABS and was
connected to
the words, ONE OF MANY PROBLEMS.
Looking closer, I noticed another message superimposed over
QUEER

ARABS EXIST in faint blue ink. A line was drawn between the
words
QUEER and ARABS and the letter "S" was added to the
beginning of the
word "EXIST." I re-read it several times before I finally
understood that

superimposed upon QUEER ARABS EXIST, the new message,
in coupling
the words ARABS and SEXIST, implied that ARABS are
SEXIST. I thought

about my research and the resemblance between the images on
the wall

and my research participants' everyday experiences. While
Lulu's graffiti

confronted the lumping of Arabs into the homogeneous
categories "veiled

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Nadine Naber IO9

victim" or "polygamous terrorist," the defacement of QUEER
ARABS
EXIST reinforced the binary construction of "the Arab" as
Other.
Similarly, while Rime, Lulu, and Nicole burst the boundaries of
hegemon

ic Arab American and U.S. nationalisms on multiple fronts,
they also re

articulate hegemonic nationalisms in binary terms as a coding
for a more

complex process in which the categories "Arab" and
"American" are mu

tually constitutive and exist both as opposites and in unison, in
the context

of immigration, assimilation, and racialization.

As I took another glance at ARABS ARE SEXIST,

superimposed over
QUEER ARABS EXIST, I noticed another message, a much
smaller message

written in black letters in Spanish and English that framed the
top right side

of QUEER ARABS EXIST. It read ES ALGO BUENO. IT'S A
GOOD THING.

-Naber, journal entry, June 2001

Notes
I am grateful to Suad Joseph, Kent Ono, Ella Maria Ray,
Martina Reiker, Minoo Moallem,

Andrea Smith, Rabab Abdulhadi, and Evelyn Alsultany for
providing me with invaluable

feedback and support while I was developing this article. I
would like to especially thank
the editorial board members of Feminist Studies and the
anonymous readers for their con

structive suggestions and the immense time and effort they
committed to seeing this arti

cle in publication. I am indebted to each and every person who
participated in this project

and I am grateful to Eman Desouky, Lilian Boctor, my mother,
Firyal Naber, and my

father, Suleiman Naber for their persistent support and
encouragement throughout the
period of my field research.

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 Ian Boal, "Multicultural Nationalism
and the Poetics of In

auguration," 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.

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2016 18:15:19 UTC

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110 Nadine Naber

4. I first became acquainted with my research participants by
joining community orga

nizations 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 with

in what my research participants refer to as San Francisco's
"Arab American commu

nity," 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 establish
ment 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 vari

eties of institutions they established, and their overall
socioeconomic privileges com

pared 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, I 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.

6. See Trinh T. Min-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing
Postcoloniality and Feminism (Blooming

ton: Indiana University Press, 1989).

7. 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.

8. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 17.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Here, I borrow from Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's three
axes of sexualized, racial

ized, colonialist discourse. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam,
Unthinking Eurocentrism:

Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1992).
12. Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled
Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics

of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 20.

13. "Connectivity" here is from Suad Joseph's definition of
"patriarchal connectivity" in

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Nadine Naber III

Lebanon. See Suad Joseph, "Gender and Rationality among
Arab Families in
Lebanon," Feminist Studies 19 (Fall 1993): 465-86.

14. Ella Shohat, introduction to Talking Visions: Multicultural
Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed.

Ella Shohat (New York: MIT Press, 1998), 6.

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Contents878889909192939495969798991001011021031041051
06107108109110111Issue Table of ContentsFeminist Studies,
Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 1-210Front MatterPreface
[pp. 7-10]From Genocide to Justice: Women's Bodies as a Legal
Writing Pad [pp. 11-37]Afraid to Say [pp. 38-53]Kahlo's World
Split Open [pp. 54-81]Two Coins [p. 82-82]A Song My Mother

Sang to Me [p. 83-83]Envy to My Twin [p. 84-84]Spike Heels
[p. 85-85]At Eleven, My Granddaughter Loves to Read [p. 86-
86]Arab American Femininities: Beyond Arab Virgin/
American(ized) Whore [pp. 87-111]The Seafarer [pp. 112-
120]Woman Saved from Salad Spinner [pp. 121-122]Scars [pp.
123-124]Pornographic Voice: Critical Feminist Practices among
Sri Lanka's Female Garment Workers [pp. 125-154]A New
Entity in the History of Sexuality: The Respectable Same-Sex
Couple [pp. 155-162]Review: What's Sex Got to Do with It:
Gender and the New Black Freedom Movement Scholarship [pp.
163-183]The Privet Hedge [p. 185-185]News and Views [pp.
186-191]Publications Received [pp. 198-205]Back Matter

P A L E S T I N I A N W O M E N ’ S

D I S A P P E A R I N G A C T :

THE SUICIDE BOMBER THROUGH

W E S T E R N F E M I N I S T E Y E S

Amal Amireh
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

My interest in writing this essay was sparked by an encounter I
had in the spring
of 2004 with a British reporter who called my office to
interview me about
Palestinian women suicide bombers. After introducing herself
and the topic on
which she was working, she asked her first question: “Can you
please talk about the
treatment of Palestinian women?” When I started to talk about
the hardships
Palestinian women experience living under occupation, she
interrupted me. “I
meant for you to talk about how Palestinian society treats its
women”, she
explained. “But the occupation”, I stammered. “Well, the
occupation is really
another topic for another article.” At that point, I asked the
reporter how she knew
there was a connection between the way women were treated by
their society and
suicide bombings. From her answers, it became clear to me that
she had no
evidence to support that connection, but rather an assumption,
which I, the
Palestinian feminist native informant, was being called upon to
validate. For the rest
of the conversation, I questioned that assumption and insisted
that she consider the
occupation as a relevant issue for her piece. The rest of this
essay is specifically an
extended questioning of the connection the reporter assumed

between suicide
bombings and culture. More broadly, it is also a critique of
some problematic
paradigms in Western feminist writings about gender and
Palestinian nationalism.

MISTRANSLATING GENDER

To illustrate some these problematic paradigms, let me begin
with two
examples of gender related mistranslations from Arabic into
English. In an article

∗
Amal Amireh is an associate professor of English at George
Mason University. She is the author of

The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and
Class in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and co-
editor, with Lisa Suhair Majaj, of Going Global: The
Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers
(2000) and Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American
Writer and Artist (2002). Her current research
focuses on gender, nationalism, and Islam in postcolonial
literature.

http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/

229

about Arab women’s war-writing in her book Gendering War
Talk, and in a section
devoted to a discussion of the first Palestinian uprising, Miriam
Cooke translates
the Arabic word “intifada” for her readers by writing: “It is
worth noting that intifada
is a domestic term referring to the shaking out of the dust cloths
and carpets that
illustrates so brilliantly the process of these women’s almost
twenty-five-year-old
insurrection.” Cooke maintains, “the naming changed the nature
of the war.”1

The second example is from a recent book called Army of
Roses: Inside the
World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers by Barbara
Victor. Early in the book,
Victor focuses on a 2002 speech by the President of the
Palestinian Authority,
Yasser Arafat, to a crowd of Palestinian women who came to his
bombed-out
quarters in a show of support. In this speech, Arafat reportedly
uttered a phrase,
which according to Victor, “changed forever the nature of the
Palestinian-Israeli
conflict” and “would become his mantra in the weeks and
months ahead.” What
was this amazing phrase? According to Victor, Arafat said
“Shahida all the way to
Jerusalem”, thus “coining on the spot the feminized version of
the Arab word for
martyr, shahide, which previously existed only in the masculine
form.”2

In the first case, Cooke’s statement is a mistranslation because
“intifada” is
not a domestic term. It is true that one of the uses of the root
verb “nafad” may be
to shake up the carpets, but it can also mean to shake hands,
cigarette ashes, a part
of the body, or anything else. To select that one possible use
and generalize it as the
main meaning of the word to underscore the domestic or
feminized nature of the
intifada is a stretch. It is to ignore that, after all, “intifada” also
comes from the verb
“intafada”, which is an intransitive verb meaning to shake off,
often the body or part
of it. According to this meaning, “intifada” describes the
Palestinian rebellion in the
West Bank and Gaza as a shaking off of the chains of Israeli
occupation and/or of
Palestinian inertia by the collective Palestinian national body
that includes men and
women, adults and children. This is the generally accepted
meaning of the word
“intifada.” While it is true that the first intifada witnessed a
more visible role for
women (one of the icons of that intifada is the Palestinian
woman deploying her
body between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youth to prevent
the latter’s arrest), it
is an exaggeration to say that it was a women’s uprising or that,
to use Cooke’s
words, it was “the most explicitly feminized of all postmodern
wars.”3 It is
significant that at the very moment Palestinian women were
assuming a more
visibly public political role (as opposed to their more traditional
private political

role), their actions are mistranslated into a language that
emphasizes their
domesticity. This domesticating language is the effect of a
Western feminist
paradigm that, in the name of politicizing the personal, ends up
domesticating the
political in Third World women’s lives. In the process of this
domestication, the
dichotomy between the political and the personal, the public
and the private, is
upheld.

The second example is also an attempt to draw attention to the
role of
Palestinian women but this time in the second intifada. Victor
takes one of Arafat’s
familiar statements, “Shahada hatta al Quds”, (which literally
translates to,
“Martyrdom till Jerusalem”, a variation on, “shahada hatta al
nasr”, or “Martyrdom
till victory”) and transforms into “shaheeda”, meaning female
martyr (both have the
regular feminized ending, but they are different words). Not
only that, she claims
that the feminine form “shaheeda” did not exist before and was
invented by Arafat
on that wintry morning. As anyone who is familiar with the
Arabic language knows,
“shaheeda”, the feminine form of “shaheede”, preexists both
Arafat and Victor. It is
the regular feminine form of a regular noun. Victor goes even
further by arguing

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230

that on that same day, and after that explosive speech, a woman
called Wafa Idris
exploded a bomb and herself in Jerusalem, becoming the first
Palestinian shaheeda.
So not only did Arafat invent a new word for the Arabic
language, but he also
invented a new woman for the Palestinian people. Like the
sorcerer of a thousand
and one nights, Arafat used his magical words to conjure up the
Palestinian woman
suicide bomber. Victor mentions his amazing feat on page 20
and goes on to write
300 more pages on the basis of this mistranslation. Ignorant of
the existence of the
word, she erases the hundreds of women martyrs in Palestinian
history through an
act of mistranslation.

GENDERING SUICIDE BOMBERS

These mistranslations are symptomatic of a deeper problem
relating to
discussions of gender and nationalism. While recent feminist
scholarship has drawn
attention to the relevance of gender to the study of nationalism,
the specific ways
by which gender and nationalism inform each other remain
under theorized and

captive to certain feminist paradigms that are limited in their
relevance and
application.4 When Western feminists, for instance, address
gender and nationalism
in relation to Palestinian women, they privilege sexual politics
to the exclusion of all
else, such as history, class, war, and occupation. The result is a
privatization of the
political instead of a politicization of the private. One important
consequence of
this privatization is the disappearance of women as national
agents. This is nowhere
more evident than in the Western feminist discourse on
Palestinian women suicide
bombers.

Since September 11th, a whole industry has evolved to explain
the motive
of the suicide bomber. Much ink has been spilt in an attempt to
develop a profile
for the male suicide bomber. The more serious studies tend to
emphasize a
complexity of motives and thus the elusiveness of a fixed
profile while the more
ideological ones focus on psychological aspects, with special
emphasis on
pathology.5 Sex has figured prominently, with U. S. and Israeli
media advancing the
“hour el ‘ain” theory of suicide bombing, according to which
men become suicide
bombers because they are promised 72 virgins in paradise.6 One
thing that can be
discerned from most of these studies is that the image of the
male suicide bomber
could fit easily into the preexisting dominant discourse about
Muslim and Arab

men as violent and licentious others. The female suicide
bombers, however, have
posed more of a challenge.

The female suicide bomber challenges the image of Muslim and
Arab
women as docile bodies that is dominant in the Western context.
While this image
of docility has its roots in the long history of Orientalist
stereotypes of Muslim
women, it has become more visible in recent years. Certainly, in
the aftermath of
September 11th, the veiled and beaten body of the Afghan
woman under the
Taliban was deployed on a massive scale and came to stand for
Muslim and Arab
women generally. U. S. feminists played a key role in
disseminating this profile,
when the Feminist Majority, a prominent U.S. feminist
organization, joined forces
with the Bush Administration to “liberate” the bodies of the
downtrodden women
of Afghanistan. The oppressed body of the Muslim woman was
inserted into
debates about American national security and was offered as an
important reason to
justify a war. In contrast to this image, the female suicide
bomber’s body is far from
being dormant or inactive, passively waiting for outside help. It
is purposeful, lethal,
and literally explosive. Sometimes veiled, sometimes in
“Western” dress, this body

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231

moves away from home, crosses borders, and infiltrates the
other’s territory. It is a
protean body in motion and, therefore, needs a translation.

Another reason the woman suicide bomber poses a challenge to
feminists
in particular is the ambivalent view feminists have concerning
women’s relationship
to nationalism. Despite recent scholarship that attempts to
provide a nuanced
analysis of women’s connection to national institutions, the
dominant view
continues to see women of the Third World as victims of
nationalism,
simultaneously embodied by their governments, countries, and
cultures. While U. S.
feminists may acknowledge that American women have a
complex relation to their
country and its patriarchal institutions (such as the military),
they often deny that
same kind of relationship to Arab and Muslim women, who are
usually seen as a
monolithic group always tainted with victimhood. As a result,
the nationalist Arab
and Muslim woman, with the suicide bomber as her most
sensational embodiment,
urgently needs an explanation.

To make this incomprehensible woman figure accessible to a
Western

readership, some U. S. feminists have deployed what Uma
Narayan has called, in
the context of her critique of Western feminist discourse on sati,
a “death by
culture” paradigm.7 This paradigm abstracts Palestinian women
suicide bombers
from any historical and political context and places them
exclusively in a cultural
one. Culture is opposed to politics and is seen as “natural”,
“organic”, “essential”,
and therefore unchanging.8 Doomed to this cultural context,
Palestinian women are
seen as victims of an abusive patriarchal Arab culture that
drives them to destroy
themselves and others.9 Thus, their violent political act is
transformed into yet
another example of the ways Arab culture inevitably kills its
women.10

GOING BACK TO BASICS, OR, ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO
STEPS
BACK

The uncontested spokeswoman for this paradigm has been
Andrea
Dworkin, who wrote an essay for the online feminist magazine
Feminista! about
“The Women Suicide Bombers.”11 When I first read Dworkin’s
essay, I was simply
irritated by it, regretting that with such publications, feminist
solidarity between
First and Third World women takes a step backward. But when I
re-read it through
my graduate students’ eyes, I was angered. At the time the essay

came out, I was
teaching a seminar on postcolonial fiction and theory. Since one
of the sections
dealt with postcolonial feminist theory, I thought Dworkin’s
essay would be a good
example of problematic Western feminist writings about Third
World women, an
easy exercise for the students to analyze using the feminist
theory they had been
reading. I e-mailed the essay to my 19 students (17 of whom
were women) without
comment, just asking them to read it and post their responses to
the rest of the
class.

Their responses shocked me. The two self-identified feminists
among my
students admired the essay greatly. The others agreed. None of
them questioned
Dworkin’s racist characterization of Palestinian women and
their society. On the
contrary, those claims were assumed to be correct. The one
dissenting post came
from the Arab-American student in the class. But her response
was delayed, making
me suspect that she was intimidated by the consensus. I then
emailed the class a
letter to the editor responding to Dworkin’s essay written by
Monica Tarazi, an
Arab-American woman who was once a student of mine at
Birzeit University.
Unfortunately, Tarazi was attacked for her lack of sources,
something the students

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232

never demanded of Dworkin. More ironically, she was chastised
for daring to speak
about women she did not know.

As I stood in front of my students the next class, I could not
hide my
distress and spent some time explaining it. I spoke as a
Palestinian, a feminist, and a
teacher. Although there were several uncomfortable moments, I
could tell that my
students heard me, and that, by the end of the day, we all had
learned something:
They learned to be more alert to their unexamined
preconceptions about women of
“other” cultures, particularly Arab and Muslim women, and not
to let their
misconceptions undermine their critical faculties. I learned that
as sophisticated as
postcolonial feminist theory has become, it might still fail, as it
did in this case, in
shaking deep-rooted assumptions about Arab women and their
culture. The
following critique of Dworkin’s essay is an attempt to go back
to basics, that is, to a
critical examination of these faulty feminist assumptions that
continue to
undermine the efforts to consolidate a transnational feminist
movement.

DEATH BY CULTURE AS RACIST DISCOURSE:

ANDREA DWORKIN

Dworkin confidently gives her readers three reasons why there
are

Palestinian women suicide bombers. The first reason is sexual
abuse. She states that
Palestinian women are raped “often by men in their own
families”, and since they
will be killed by their families, they “trade in the lowly status
of the raped woman
for the higher status of a martyr.” While one cannot deny that
Palestinian women,
like women everywhere, are subject to sexual assault and that so
called “honor
killing” does exist in Palestinian society, the second part of
Dworkin’s statement is
baseless. Dworkin offers no evidence whatsoever to support a
link between sexual
abuse and suicide bombing. The only evidence she provides to
support her claim is
that Palestinian and Israeli feminists have worked together in
rape crisis centers to
repair torn hymens of Palestinian women. That no one else has
uncovered the truth
of the suicide bomber as sexual abuse victim “has to do with the
invisibility of
women in general and the necessary silence of injured victims.”
Indeed, an
American feminist is needed to expose these women for the
sexual abuse victims
they really are.

It is fascinating that despite the loud explosions, Dworkin can
only hear the
“silence of injured victims.” Blind to the hundreds of
Palestinian women whose
bodies have been torn to shreds by Israeli missiles and bullets
during the past four
years, she can only shed tears for the torn hymen between
Palestinian women’s legs.
According to Dworkin’s logic, Palestinian suicide bombers are
really victims of their
culture, a culture that systematically rapes them and then
punishes them for the act.
The only context that matters in understanding their action is a
reified cultural one
that completely supersedes all historical and political contexts.

The other two reasons Dworkin gives illustrate that not only
abused
women, but the “best and brightest” also die by culture. She
claims that the suicide
bombers are Palestinian women who are trying to “rise up in a
land where women
are lower than the animals.” Their societies are so oppressive
and demeaning that
these women are left only with the option of exploding their
bodies to advance the
cause of women in their societies: “The more women want to
prove their worth,
the more women suicide bombers there will be” is Dworkin’s
ominous prediction.
She does not explain whether these women are recruited by
Palestinian feminist
organizations or whether they are free feminist agents working
on their own.12 But

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233

worried that she may have assigned too much agency to them,
she does remind us
that they are really just dupes of nationalism. To seal her
argument, she invokes
what has become the scarecrow of Arab women nationalists, the
“Algerian
woman”, who heroically fought for her country but was “pushed
back down” after
liberation.

Not only are Palestinian women dupes of nationalism, they are
also dupes
of their families, according to Dworkin. “The best and the
brightest are motivated
to stand up for their families” who, Dworkin begrudgingly
admits, suffer from
Israeli occupation. While Palestinian women’s violence against
Israel is highlighted
right at the beginning of the essay and even given a “long
history”, this is the first
time that Dworkin mentions the occupation and its violence
against Palestinians.
This violence, however, is reduced to “beaten fathers”,
“destroyed homes”, and
“angry mothers.” There is a tentative mention of “the brothers”,
but before one
thinks that the brothers too must be suffering from Israeli
aggression, Dworkin

adds, “who are civilly superior to them [their sisters].” In other
words, Palestinian
women are acting on behalf of brothers, fathers, and mothers
who, as we were told
earlier, abuse and kill them. At no point in her article does
Dworkin consider that
Palestinian women themselves can be subject to Israeli
violence.13

On the contrary, Dworkin works hard on suppressing Israeli
violence
against Palestinian women. At some point she quotes an
unnamed Palestinian
woman as saying:

It is as if we were in a big prison, and the only thing we really
have
to lose is that. Imagine what it is like to be me, a proud, well-
educated woman who has traveled to many countries. Then see
what it is like to be an insect, for that is what the Israeli
soldiers call
us—cockroaches, dogs, insects.

This testimony undermines Dworkin’s main argument: the
Palestinian woman here
is not speaking as a victim of her patriarchal society; she is
educated and proud.
She, like others, is imprisoned and treated like “less than
animals” not by the culture
but by Israeli soldiers. She sees herself in unity with, and not in
opposition to,
Palestinian men, who, like her, are oppressed by the racism and
injustice of the
occupation.

Dworkin, however, turns a blind eye to all of that. She quotes
this woman
to prove that “the best and the brightest” are dupes who find it
easier to blame “the
Israelis for women’s suffering than to blame the men who both
sexually abuse and
then kill them according to honor society rules.” This woman’s
complaint about
Israeli oppression, is, according to Dworkin, misplaced.
Dworkin, the American
feminist who has not spent one day in her life living under
occupation, clearly
knows what is oppressing Palestinian women better than the
women themselves.
She can only shake her head in disbelief that a woman who is
treated like a
cockroach by her Israeli occupier is directing her anger at him
and not at the men
of her culture, who, after all, can only be rapists and murderers.
Dworkin’s imperial
and racist discourse regarding Palestinian women blinds and
deafens her to their
suffering for which she can allow only one reason-- culture.14

ROBIN MORGAN’S DEMONS

The racism of Dworkin’s essay is so blatant that it is tempting
to dismiss

her argument as an exception. But, unfortunately, the death by
culture paradigm

Vol. 5, Spring 2005, © 2005 The MIT Electronic Journal of
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234

seeps into the discourse of feminists who have expressed more
sympathy towards
women of the Third World and who have worked hard to build
bridges among
women globally. One such feminist is Robin Morgan, founder of
the Sisterhood is
Global Institute, editor of the landmark Sisterhood is Global
anthology, and former
editor-in -chief of Ms Magazine. Morgan entered the fray when
she wrote an article
in Ms. Magazine explaining the phenomenon of the Palestinian
female suicide
bombers.15 In this article, Morgan extends to them the
argument she made in her
1989 book The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, a new
edition of which was issued
after September 11th. According to Morgan, these women are
“token terrorists”;
they are “invariably involved because of . . . the demon lover
syndrome, their love
for a particular man: a fraternal or paternal connection but more
commonly a
romantic or marital bond.” While men, according to Morgan,
“become involved
because of the politics”, the women “become involved because
of the men.” To
support her point, she mentions that two of the women had
fathers and/or
brothers who had been tortured while in custody of the Israeli

army. Morgan
undermines the women’s political motivation by privatizing
their political agency.
She ignores all the signs that framed their action as a political
one: the fact that the
would be bomber publicly declares her allegiance to a political
group (by leaving a
video taped message in the hand of that group, by allowing her
picture to be used
on their posters, and by inscribing their slogans on her body),
that she declares in a
read statement her motivation to be nationalist, not personal,
that she commits the
violent act in a public place for all to see (restaurant,
supermarket, checkpoint,
street)—all these facts are ignored and Morgan can see this
woman’s action only in
“private” terms.

Moreover, Morgan belittles the women’s political agency by
casting the
demon lover syndrome as a form of false female consciousness
that women should
transcend. This is another version of the “they are duped”
argument that Dworkin
propagates. But this time, Palestinian women are dupes because
they are adopting a
male form of political expression. While the Palestinian woman
has engaged in non-
violent resistance, Morgan maintains that such a woman
discovered that “to be
taken seriously--by her men, her culture, her adversary, and
even eventually
herself—she must act through male modes, preferably violent
ones.” By “acting
through male modes”, she is not really exercising her full

agency or will; she is
under the spell of the “demon lover.” Only non-violent
activities can be accepted as
genuine expressions of women’s will since, according to
Morgan, women are
essentially non-violent.16

To be fair to Morgan, her essentialism has a universal sweep
and does not
target specific cultures. Still, Palestinian culture as a source of
the suicide bomber’s
motivation does creep into her argument. After mentioning the
two women who fit
the diagnoses of the “demon-lover syndrome”, Morgan refers to
a third suicide
bomber, one who “was reported to be depressed about [her]
impending arranged
marriage.” Although this example obviously does not fit
Morgan’s theory, the
“demon lover” explanation slips in nevertheless. In this case,
the violent act is seen
as an expression of female agency, but this agency is allowed
only because it is to
“escape” the woman’s oppressive culture, metonymized by “the
arranged
marriage.” We are back, then, to the formulation of “death by
culture.” The
woman destroys herself and others in order to escape a
traditional oppressive
patriarchal culture, the root cause of her violent act.

Morgan has written about Palestinian women’s relation to their
culture in
more detail in a chapter in The Demon Lover entitled “What Do
Men Know about

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235

Life?: The Middle East”, in which she relates her encounters
with Palestinian
women in the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1980s. Morgan is
eager in this
chapter to dispel stereotypes of the Palestinian woman as either
“a grenade-laden
Leila Khaled”, or “an illiterate refugee willingly producing sons
for the
revolution.”17 She acknowledges the Palestinian women
doctors, nurses, dentists,
midwives, social workers, educators, researchers, professors,
architects, engineers,
and lawyers that she meets. Still, she admits that the “focus of
this journey was the
women in the refugee camps, who suffer from the sexuality of
terrorism with every
breath they inhale.”18 While Morgan does not explain what
“sexuality of terrorism”
is, the meaning of the phrase becomes clearer as she proceeds in
her narrative. It
becomes evident, for instance, that “sexuality of terrorism”
cannot be referring to
the Israeli military occupation, for while Morgan mentions it as
a factor in refugee
women’s lives, she minimizes its effects (for example, she calls
the houses the
Israeli army demolishes “shelters”). Soon we realize that the

one issue that seems to
plague refugee women’s lives and terrorize them is multiple
pregnancies. In fact, the
body of the Palestinian mother haunts Morgan, and by the end
of her journey, it
assumes demonic proportions. Ironically, this is the image with
which she
concludes her chapter in solidarity with Palestinian women:

The form is also grossly misshapen. This specter has a
protruding
belly, and balances a bucket on the head. Dark, cheap cloth
shrouds the body, and smaller forms cling leechlike to every
limb
like growths on the flesh—children at the hip, thigh, calf, waist,
breast, back, and neck. She is trying to refuse the job he
requires of
her. She is almost dying, almost surviving.19

What we have in the above image is a description of the body of
the

Palestinian woman as an “other.” This is a non-human body, a
“grossly misshapen
form, ” a “specter”, made up of disjointed body parts, such as a
“protruding belly”,
a head, a hip, thigh, calf, waist, breast, back, and neck. It is a
zombi-like body,
wearing a shroud, and invaded by alien, non-human “smaller
forms” that “cling
leech like”, “like growths on the flesh.” This deformed,
diseased, silent body of the
Palestinian mother can only put her in the range of our
condescending pity,
rendering Morgan’s profession of empathy in the chapter’s

concluding words “she
is ourselves” completely hollow. Morgan can express solidarity
only with women
abstracted from men, country, and history; she certainly has
little sympathy for real
women of flesh and blood and is almost terrified by those with
children.

The horror that permeates Morgan’s description of Palestinian
women’s
bodies echoes the racist Israeli anxieties about the high birth
rate among Palestinian
women. Morgan’s reference to disease-like growth brings to
mind those Israeli
officials who always saw the Arab presence as a “cancer” in the
body of the Jewish
state. Morgan’s feminist rhetoric, then, coincides with the
colonialist racist
discourse about Palestinian women’s bodies. With this view of
Palestinian women’s
bodies, it is not surprising that any explanation of their political
involvement would
be seen as an example of their subservient bodies and minds to
their demon lovers
or as a desperate attempt to escape from their repressive culture.

BARBARA VICTOR’S SENSATIONAL DESIGNS

But if the death by culture discourse is implied in Morgan’s
narrative, it is

the structuring principle in Barbara Victor’s Army of Roses:
Inside the World of

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Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers. While Victor is not a
feminist theoretician and
activist, as Dworkin and Morgan are, she does employ a
feminist language in
addressing her general reader. Using investigative reporting to
construct a profile
for the first four women suicide bombers, Victor discovers “that
all four who died,
plus the others who had tried and failed to die a martyr’s death,
had personal
problems that made their lives untenable within their own
culture and society.”20
Victor offers a parable that “tells the story of four women who
died for reasons
that go beyond the liberation of Palestine”, a feminist morality
tale that serves “as
an example of the exploitation of women taken to a cynical and
lethal extreme.”21
Political motives are allowed only in relation to the men. Thus
we are told, without
any evidence, that Arafat “shifted the emphasis on his military
operations onto a
very special kind of suicide bomber”22 because he failed to find
any men who would
do the job. Then he sent out his men to “seduce” the women.
When it comes to
the women’s motives, politics is jostled to the background by

seedy narratives of
sex and seduction. Victor writes a book full of egregious
factual errors,
unsubstantiated claims, distortions, and suspicious evidence to
prove that culture,
not politics, is indeed the main factor behind these women’s
violent actions.

The erasure of politics is evident even when Victor mentions
the role
women played in the first Palestinian Intifada. She writes that
the Palestinian
woman became a symbol “who for the first time in the history
of her culture was
involved in and indicted for acts of subversion and sabotage and
jailed in Israeli
prisons.”23 This statement erases a long history of women’s
political involvement
and foregrounds culture by using the curious phrase “history of
her culture.” It
reflects the reductive view that Palestinian women’s history has
always to be a
cultural history, because their lives are mostly shaped by
culture even when they are
asserting their political wills. Not surprisingly, women’s
political involvement,
according to Victor, takes the form of them “shorten[ing] their
skirts, wear[ing]
trousers, and leav[ing] their heads uncovered.”24

The erasure of Palestinian women’s history of victimization by,
and
resistance to, the occupation is glaring when Victor declares
Wafa Idris the first
shaheeda.25 In Victor’s hands, “shaheeda”, meaning female
martyr, becomes a

synonym for “suicide bomber.” This “mistranslation” ends up
writing off hundreds
of Palestinian women martyrs and makes incomprehensible
statements such as “the
whole question of the religious legitimacy of martyrs in general
prompted debate
within the Muslim community.”26 According to Victor, suicide
bombing marks the
beginning of Palestinian women’s history. But, of course,
martyrdom, defined as
dying for one’s country and/or faith, has the highest national
and religious values
ascribed to it and, contrary to Victor’s claim, at no point has it
been a subject of
debate in the Palestinian or Muslim community. What has been
debated is suicide
attacks (al ‘amaleyyat al intihareya) against Israeli civilians,
which the Palestinians
prefer to call (al ‘amaleyyat al isteshhadeya). The man or
woman who undertakes such
an act is referred to as “Isteshhadi” and “Istishhadeya”
respectively, which can be
translated as “that who seeks martyrdom.” This word
distinguishes him or her from
the regular “martyr”, whether a member of an armed militia or a
civilian bystander,
by underscoring the individual will and purposefulness behind
the act.

So perhaps Victor intended to say that Idris was the first
Palestinian
woman “istishhadeya.” Even this statement, however, is not
totally accurate. Both
Palestinian and Israeli sources raise questions about her being
an istishhadeay/suicide
bomber and speculate that it is likely she was a carrier of a

bomb that may have
gone off prematurely. Victor herself quotes an Israeli
eyewitness, for instance,

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237

saying that Idris’s backpack was caught up in the door of the
store in her way out,
which may have led to the explosion. Others point out the fact
that unlike in every
other case of a suicide bombing, no taped or written statement
was found left
behind from Idris. Such evidence should alert us to the
possibility that Idris’s
isteshhadeya identity was constructed by both the Palestinians
and the Israelis after
her death. Nevertheless, Victor ignores this evidence and takes
Idris’s isteshhadeya
status for granted, then goes on to focus on the motives that
drove her to suicide.

In exposing the motives of the female suicide bombers, Victor
constructs a
fictional narrative that casts the women as always victims of
their culture.
According to this narrative, Wafa Idris and Hiba Darghmeh may
seem confident
and independent on the surface but are in fact brutalized by
their culture, one as a

divorced and barren woman and the other as a rape victim.
Darine Abu Aisheh is a
“brilliant”27 student and an ambitious “feminist”28 who is
thwarted by a culture that
values only defeated women. Shireen Rabiya, “a beautiful, long-
legged girl with all
the attributes and grace of a fashion model”,29 is demoralized
by a culture that
teases its “too attractive”30 women. A ubiquitous Arab “honor
code” is invoked to
explain the actions of some: thus Ahlam al Tamimi (a.k.a
Zina), for example, was
pushed by her family to become a suicide bomber to redeem the
family honor after
becoming pregnant out of wedlock while Ayat al Akhras
sacrificed herself to
redeem the honor of a father accused of collaboration with
Israel. And when the
woman has “no sensational story”31, and Victor is unable to
conjure up any scandal
to explain her motivation, as in the case of Andaleeb Takatka,
we are told that she
wanted so much to be a “superstar”32, and suicide bombing was
her only rout to
stardom (the evidence for this is that as a teenager she had
pictures of Arab
entertainers on her bedroom wall). In other words,
marginalized, talented, and
ordinary Palestinian women are all persecuted by their culture
in one way or
another and therefore are viable candidates to carry out suicide
bombings.

Non-cultural reasons that may explain the women’s actions do
appear in
Victor’s book, but only to be subtly dismissed or transformed

into cultural effects.
Thus Victor reports the stories about how Idris was moved by
the injuries of
children which she witnessed as a volunteer paramedic, that she
herself was shot
twice, that Ayat al Akhras was shaken by witnessing the killing
of a neighbor, that
Abu Aisheh was humiliated on a checkpoint by Israeli soldiers
who unveiled her in
public and forced a cousin to kiss her on the mouth. These
reasons, however, along
with the women’s public political activism (as in the case of
Abu Aisheh and
Daraghmeh) invariably recede into the background once Victor
uncovers the
“secret” reason which supersedes all others and which becomes
the basis for her
psychoanalysis of dead women she has never met. As a result,
Victor’s narrative
predictably dwells on Idris’s marital problems, on al Akhras’s
“disgrace”, on Abu
Aisheh’s desire to escape a marriage, and on Daraghmeh’s
alleged rape. Even when
a certain “cultural” practice is not relevant to her story, Victor
still uses it the way a
prosecutor prejudices the jury with immaterial yet tainting
evidence. An example of
this strategy is her going on about “wife beating” as a practice
in Muslim society
only to conclude that Idris’s husband did not beat her.33

However, the nature of the evidence Victor uncovers and her
way of
uncovering it are both problematic. Her sensational information
usually comes in
the form of gossip whispered to Victor by a friend or relative of

the dead woman or
a “confession” of some juicy detail that hitherto has been kept
secret. An example
of the first kind of revelation is the statement by Abu Aisheh’s
friend that Darine
“told me she would rather die” than marry.34 Victor uses this
statement to construct

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a profile for Abu Aisheh as a desperate feminist rebelling
against her culture. There
is no other evidence to support this conclusion, and Abu
Aisheh’s public political
commitments as a student activist at An Najah University are
eclipsed by this
friendly revelation.

More sensational are the “confessions” Victor receives from, for
instance,
Hiba Darghmeh’s mother and the woman she calls “Zina.” In the
first case, the
mother tells Victor that her daughter was raped by a mentally
retarded uncle and in
the second Zina, who was indicted for aiding a suicide bomber,
reveals that she had
a child out of wedlock. These confessions are problematic
because Victor does not
explain why these women would trust her with information that

was not revealed to
anyone else. Why would Hiba Daraghmeh’s mother allegedly
reveal to Victor, a
foreign reporter she is meeting for the first time in her life, a
much guarded secret
about her daughter, now celebrated as an esteshhadeyeh, that
would tarnish the
family’s name? In Zina’s case, Victor claims that at the request
of the woman’s
family she gives her an alias. But this attempt at protecting her
identity is not
convincing because the moment we read that “Zina” is the
woman who helped
transport Izz el Deen al Masri, the bomber of Sbarro’s
restaurant, her real identity
as Ahlam al-Tamimi is revealed. Al Tamimi is well-known; in
fact, her posters are
all over the walls in the West Bank, and her defiant words in
court after her
sentencing are quoted all over the Internet. Why would a woman
who has the status
of a national celebrity, whose story is common knowledge,
make such a gothic
confession of secrets she and her family supposedly guarded for
years? And if we
assume that Victor is not really slandering al Tamimi in this
underhanded way and
is truly ignorant of her public image, how could she justify such
ignorance when she
supposedly researched the minutest detail of this woman’s life?
It does not help
matters that Victor does not explain how she conducted her
interviews: how did
she introduce herself to her subjects? What language did she use
in interviewing
them? Were these “confessions” made in front of an interpreter

as well? Were the
people aware that she was researching a book and that she
would be making the
intimate details of their lives public?

The veracity of Victor’s “evidence” is further undermined by
the many
factual errors that riddle her narrative. According to her, the
late Syrian President
Hafez al Asad is a Christian Alawite35 (no such thing exists; he
is a Muslim
alawayte); Birzeit University is Christian and its student council
was Christian
before it was over taken by Islamists36 (both the university and
the council are
secular; different political groups, including the Islamists, run
for the council’s
elections); the color of mourning in Palestinian culture is
white37 (it is black); and
Darine Abu Aisheh is Hamas’s first female suicide bomber38 (a
simple Google
search would reveal that Reem al Reyashi was, Abu Aisheh was
claimed by Al Aqsa
Martyr’s Brigades who prepared her for her mission after
Hamas refused to). In
addition, Victor either gets the names of her interviewees wrong
(Wafa Idris’s
mother, Wasfeyeh, is renamed Mabrook) or consistently
misspells them beyond
recognition (I counted 22 such instances). The accumulative
effect of the egregious
factual errors, the misspellings, and the mistranslations should
undermine Victor’s
authority as someone reporting from “inside the world of
Palestinian suicide
bombers” as her subtitle claims. But while reviewers of her

other books, such as her
recent biography of Madonna, point to Victor’s love for
sleaziness and her
penchant for unnamed sources,39 none of the reviewers of her
book on Palestinian
women seems to be bothered by the sloppiness of her evidence
and her, at best,
questionable relationship to her Palestinian informants.40

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239

THE CONSUMING GAZE: THE WOMAN SUICIDE BOM BER
AS AN

OBJECT OF DESIRE

In Victor’s narrative, Palestinian female suicide bombers, and
Palestinian
women generally, are objectified through a voyeuristic Western
perspective that can
only see them as sexual beings violated by their culture. When
Victor meets Idris
for the first time, she presents her as an object of Western
desire: she lingers on
Idris’s attractive physical features, then concludes: “It was not
surprising, given her
cheerful personality and good looks, that I later learned that

several western
journalists had asked her out, although, as a good Muslim
woman, she had refused
their advances.”41 Then there is the odd description of Idris’s
body after the
explosion: “I rushed over to see it, and while the entire scene
was horrifying, the
sign of Wafa’s body lying in the middle of Jaffa Road in
Jerusalem, covered
haphazardly with a rubber sheet, was stunning. Even more
shocking was the image
of an arm, her right arm, which had been ripped from her body,
lying bloody and
torn several inches away.”42 The choice of the word “stunning”
(synonyms:
“beautiful”, “gorgeous”, “lovely”, “irresistible”, “breathtaking”,
“awesome”) in this
context shows how Victor’s gaze is fixated on sexualizing and
objectifying Idris’s
body, even in death.43 Victor’s voyeurism is not unique.
Mainstream Western media
has referred to Palestinian female suicide bombers as “lipstick
martyrs”, who are
“dressed to kill.”44 Writing for the Observer, Kevin Toolis
could not hide the sexual
undertones in his description of Hiba Daraghmeh’s poster: “On
the walls of Jenin
she stares out from her poster like a vengeful nun. Her eyes are
defiant, her pupils
enlarged, and her eyebrows are plucked.”45 This is the same
Toolis who offers the
following sexually loaded mistranslation of Hanadi Jaradat’s
will: according to him,
Jaradat declared in her videotaped statement: “By the will of
God I decided to be
the sixth martyr who makes her body full with splinters in order

to enter every
Zionist heart who occupied our country.”46 It is a statement
that is, in Toolis’s
words, “suffused with sexuality.” But in fact Jaradat did not say
what Toolis
attributes to her. A more accurate translation of her Arabic
words is: “I do not have
but this body, which I will make into splinters to uproot anyone
who had tried to
uproot us from our homeland.” By using the word “uproot”,
Jaradat is employing a
familiar national metaphor used by the Palestinians to describe
their experience of
displacement and exile. The sexual connotations that Toolis
reads in Jaradat’s words
are but a figment of his overheated imagination—an imagination
more interested in
the women’s “plucked eyebrows” and “ruby lips” than in the
causes and
consequences of their act.

Early in her book, Victor recalls an encounter she had with a
Palestinian
woman in the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon right after the
phalangist militia,
with Israeli complicity, massacred hundreds of Palestinian men,
women, and
children. Sitting in the midst of a scene of carnage and
destruction, cradling a dead
child in her arms, this survivor confronts Victor, whom she
recognizes as an
American: “You American women talk constantly of equality.
Well, you can take a
lesson from us Palestinian women. We die in equal numbers to
the men.” Victor
chooses to understand this woman’s bitter and ironic statement

as an expression of
a “tragic concept of women’s liberation”,47 that is, Palestinian
women cannot be
equal in their society except through death. By ignoring the
context of the
encounter, Victor misses the obvious—that the woman is
condemning the
hypocrisy of Western feminists who clamor for women’s rights
but turn a deaf ear

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240

to Palestinian women suffering at the hands of Israeli soldiers
and their friends.
Victor’s blindness to the context in which this woman is
speaking—the scene of
death and devastation around her, the dead child in her arms—is
astounding. She is
so fixated on seeing the woman as a victim of her culture that
even when the
woman’s loss and suffering, as a result of political violence
against her and her
family and neighbors, is staring Victor in the face, she is blind
to it.

This Western feminist discourse on Arab women has a chilling
effect
particularly on the relationship between Arab and Arab-
American feminists, on the

one hand, and their American counterparts, on the other. Arab-
American feminists
and activists have long shouldered a double burden: not only do
they work against
sexism and patriarchy in their communities, but they also have
to contend with the
harmful stereotypes propagated about them and their Arab
culture in the mass
media. Due to their hard work and their forming of important
alliances with other
women of color in the U.S., who also had to struggle against the
racism and
classism of mainstream white feminists, their voices have made
some impact and
better channels of communication have been opened. However,
since the tragic
events of September 11th, these little gains in feminist
solidarity seem to have been
eroded in the face of the mobilizing of U. S. feminists in the
service of nationalism
and militarism. The discourse on Palestinian women suicide
bombers, just like that
on Afghan women, is bound to widen the gap separating Arab-
Americans from
feminists like Dworkin, Morgan, and Victor.

But beyond feminist solidarity, invoking the “death by culture”
paradigm to
understand why some women become suicide bombers leads to a
dead end, for this
understanding implies a Kurtzian “exterminate all the brutes”
solution, the “brutes”
in this case being all those who are made by Arab or Palestinian
culture. For those
who do not believe this is a viable solution, it is crucial to
acknowledge that suicide

bombings by women, just like those by men, are, first and
foremost, forms of
political violence. The culture that is implicated in this
phenomenon is not a
fetishized, oppressive “Arab culture”, but rather a culture of
militarization whose
effects are by no means limited to Palestinian society. The
recognition of suicide
bombing as a political form of violence neither trivializes nor
idealizes the suicide
bomber/el isteshhadeya. On the contrary, seeing her as a
political agent is a first and
necessary step for launching a feminist critique of women,
militarization, and
nationalism that goes beyond casting Palestinian women as
demons, angels, or
victims of a killer culture.

ENDNOTES

1 Miriam Cooke, “Women’s Jihad Before and After 9/11”, in
Women and Gender in the Middle East and
the Islamic World Today, UCIAS Edited Volumes Vol. 4
(2003), Article 1063.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/editedvolumes/4/1063, p.
195.
2 Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of
Palestinian Suicide Bombers (New York: Rodale, 2003),
p. 20.
3 Miriam Cooke, “Women’s Jihad”, p. 195.
4 For works on gender and nationalism, see Yuval-Davis,
Gender and Nationalism (London: Sage, 1998);
Valentine M. Moghadam, Gender and National Identity: Women

and Politics in Muslim Societies. (London:
Zed Books, 1994); Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International
Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Caren Kaplan,
Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem,
(eds.). Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational
Feminism, and the State (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1990); Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris
Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds.,
Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992). For
works that address gender and

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241

Palestinian nationalism, see Julie Peteet, “Icons and Militants:
Mothering in the Danger Zone” in Signs.
23.1(1994): 103-129; Nahla, Abdo, “Gender, Civil Society and
Politics under the PA” in Journal of
Palestine Studies, Fall 2002, p. 20-47; Frances S Hasso,
“Feminist Generations? The Long Term Impact
of Social Movement Involvement on Palestinian Women’s
Lives” in The American Journal of Sociology
107.3 (2001), p. 586-613; Frances S Hasso, “The ‘Women’s
Front’: Nationalism, Feminism, and
Modernity in Palestine” in Gender and Society 12.4 (1998),p.
441-486; Tami Amanda Jacoby, “Feminism,
Nationalism, and Difference: Reflections on the Palestinian
Women’s Movement” in Women’s Studies

International Forum 22.5 (1999), p. 511-523; Rhoda Ann
Kanaaneh, Rebirthing the Nation: Strategies of
Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002); Rajeswari Mohan, “Loving
Palestine: Nationalist Activism and Feminist Agency in Leila
Khaled’s Subversive Bodily Acts” in
Interventions 1.1 (1998),p. 52-80; Rita Giacaman, Islah Jad, and
Penny Johnson, “For the Public Good?
Gender and Social Citizenship in Palestine.” Middle East Report
198 (1996), p. 11-16.
5 For examples of works on suicide bombing, see John
Borneman, “Genital Anxiety” in Anthropological
Quarterly 75.1(2002), p. 129-137; Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs:
Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle
East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Hilal Khashan,
“Collective Palestinian Frustration and
Suicide Bombings” in Third World Quarterly 24.6 (2003),p.
1049-1067; Lori Allen, “There Are Many
Reasons Why: Suicide Bombers and Martyrs in Palestine” in
GSC Quarterly (Summer 2002) Ghassan,
Hage, “’Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm’: Understanding
Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times
of Exighophobia” in Public Culture 15.1 (2003), p. 65-89;
Sylvain Perdigon,“Life of an Infamous
Woman: The Funerals of Wafa Idris, Palestine’s First Female
Suicide-Bomber”, Unpublished Paper,
2004; Valentine M.Moghadam, Gender and National Identity.
6 According to this “theory”, young Muslim men become
suicide bombers because they are promised
sex with 72 virgins in the afterlife. This “theory” joins two
Orientalist views of Muslim societies by
casting sexual repression as a marker of their present and sexual
excess as a marker of their future. For
a refutation of this explanation of suicide bombing, see Asa’d
Abukhalil, “Sex and the Suicide
Bomber”,

http://archive.salon.com/sex/feature/2001/11/07/islam/index_np.
html (2001)
7 Sati refers to the practice of widow burning in India. The
word also refers to the woman who
engages in such an act. For insightful work on sati, see Mani.
8 In this context, culture is equivalent to “nature” in the
nature/culture dichotomy that second wave
feminists have engaged with much passion.
9 This is the favorite propaganda argument of Israeli security.
See, for instance, “The Role of
Palestinian Women in Suicide Terrorism”
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2003/1/Th
e%20Role%20of%20Palestinian
%20Women%20in%20Suicide%20Terrorism
10 In fact, Phyllis Chesler, a Zionist radical feminist, declares
that suicide bombing by women is
“another form of Arab honor killing.” FrontPageMagazine.com,
January 22, 2004.
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11
855>http://www.frontpagemag.co
m/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11855
11 Andrea Dworkin, “The Women Suicide Bombers.”
Feminista! 5. 1 (2002)
12 Palestinian women’s organizations have been largely silent
on the issue of the women suicide
bombers and have developed no feminist discourse to either
support or oppose them. As for the
women themselves, if one is to judge by the statements they left
behind, nationalism is emphasized as
their motive, not women’s rights. In the Arab and Islamist
context, which I analyze in detail elsewhere,
the esteshhadeyyat are presented as models of Muslim
womanhood to shame the secular feminists.
13 Earlier Dworkin wrote: “As for the Palestinians, I can only
imagine the humiliation of losing to,
being conquered by, the weakest, most despised, most castrated

people on the face of the earth. This
is a feminist point about manhood.” Andrea Dworkin ---,
“Israel: Whose Country Is It Anyway?” First
published in Ms. magazine, (Volume I, Number 2,
September/October 1990),
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/IsraelI.html.
Accessed 11/20/2004 The problem
with this description is that it excludes Palestinian women.
Israeli conquest of the Palestinians is seen
as an affair between men, as if women did not suffer loss,
displacement, death and injury.
14 During her encounters with Palestinian women in 1990,
Dworkin was better able to hear their
grievances against the Israeli occupation. She wrote:
“Palestinian women came out of the audience to
give first-person testimony about what the Occupation was
doing to them. They especially spoke
about the brutality of the Israeli soldiers. They talked about
being humiliated, being forcibly detained,
being trespassed on, being threatened. They spoke about
themselves and about women. For
Palestinian women, the Occupation is a police state and the
Israeli secret police are a constant danger;
there is no "safe space.” Dworkin, ibid.
15 Robin Morgan, “The Demon Lover Syndrom” in Ms.
Magazine 12 (3), (2002)

Vol. 5, Spring 2005, © 2005 The MIT Electronic Journal of
Middle East Studies

242

16 Miriam Cooke makes a similar argument, in miriam cooke,
“Women’s Jihad Before and After
9/11”, in Women and Gender in the Middle East and the Islamic
World Today, UCIAS Edited Volumes Vol. 4
(2003), Article 1063.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/editedvolumes/4/1063
Moreover, in her
discussion of Wafa Idris Cooke refers to her as a Muslim
woman participating in Jihad, even though
Idris was dispatched and claimed by a secular group. Without
any justification, she places her in the
history of Muslim women fighters, not Palestinian women
nationalists, thus undermining the latter
and privileging a distant history over the more immediate lived
one.
17 Morgan, “The Demon Lover Syndrom,” p.17
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Victor, Army of Roses, p. 7.
21 Ibid., p. 8.
22 Ibid., p. 18.
23 Ibid., p. 9.
24 Ibid., p. 10. This is inaccurate: women’s dress code changed
during the first Intifada into a more
conservative one and not the other way around, when women’s
bodies were targeted by Islamic
political groups as a way to exert political control. See Rema
Hammami, “Women, the Hijab and the
Intifada” in Middle East Report, 20:3&4 (1990), p. 24-28; Amal
Amireh “Between Complicity and
Subversion: Body Politics in Palestinian National Narrative” in
The South Atlantic Quarterly 102:4
(2003), p. 747-772.
25Victor, p. 23, 34, 46.
26 Ibid., p. 32.

27 Ibid., p. 102.
28 Ibid., p. 103.
29 Ibid., p. 261.
30 Ibid., p. 265.
31 Ibid., p. 247.
32 Ibid., p. 265.
33 Ibid., p. 49.
34 Ibid., p. 105.
35 Ibid., p.17.
36 Ibid., p. 16.
37Ibid., p. 165.
38 Ibid., p. 97.
39 Karen Valby, who calls Victor “mean spirited”, writes: “The
journalist has great affection for
unnamed sources. Much of the dredged-up dirt here has already
been revealed in gossip columns, so
don't expect much in the way of revelation.” See Karen Valby,
Book Review of “Goddess: Inside
Madonna by Barbara Victor” in Entertainment Weekly, Issue
627, (November 23, 2001), p. 74.
http://mutex.gmu.edu:2079/pqdweb?index=1&did=00000009232
2114&SrchMode=1&sid=2&Fmt=
3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=
1101145767&clientId=31810
40 Jacqueline Rose, writing for the London Review of Books, is
the only exception; she questions Victor’s
unnamed sources, her fictional narratives, and her prejudice.
Jacqueline Rose, “Deadly Embrace,” The
London Review of Books (Vol. 26, Number 21, 4 November,
2004)
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/rose01_.html>http://www.lrb.co.
uk/v26/n21/rose01_.html;
Baruch Kimmerling, on the other hand, in his review of the
book for The Nation, fails to questions
Victor’s discourse. Baruch Kimmerling, “Sacred Rage” in The
Nation. November 26, 2003,

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031215&c=1&s=kim
merling
41 Victor, Army of Roses, p. 4-5.
42 Ibid.
43 Victor seems particularly sensitive to Palestinian women
nationalists’ charms. She describes Leila
Khaled as “a stunning young woman in her twenties.” Victor,
ibid, p. 62
44 Sarah Pollack, “Lipstick Martyrs: A New Breed of
Palestinian Terrorist”, CBN, May 28,
2003.http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/News/030523d.asp
45Kevin Toolis, “Walls of Death” in The Observer November
23, 2003,
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2003%20Opin
ion%20Editorials/November/24%
20o/Walls%20of%20death%20Kevin%20Toolis.htm
46Kevin Toolis, “Why Women Turn to Suicide Bombing” in
The Observer October 12, 2003,
http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-toolis121003.htm
47 Victor, Army of Roses, p.2.

Peter Crabb: “Faith and Economics: Why Christians Should

Support Immigration Reform”

0

In Luke Chapter 10 Jesus confirms the Law—we must love the
Lord with all our heart, soul, and

strength and love our neighbors as ourselves. He goes on to
show that even strangers are our

neighbors. We learn here and in other parts of the Bible that we
must show love to immigrants

whether or not they serve our economic interests. Fortunately,
immigration reform is not a

situation where our Christian faith must trump our economic
incentives. Immigration, both

authorized and unauthorized, has economic benefits for all.
Economists often disagree, but on the

subject of immigration reform there is a strong consensus over
both the theory and

evidence. Reform of the United States’ current immigration
policy can be done in a way that

respects the God-given dignity of every person, protects
families, and ensures no loss to

taxpayers.

In Deuteronomy chapter 10 God gives specific instructions for
how we are to treat foreigners

living among us. We are to not only love them, but provide food
and clothing. Why did he make

such a demand of the Israelites? Because they too were once
strangers in a land. In Matthew

chapter 25 Jesus commands us to invite strangers in, feeding
them and ministering to their

physical needs. Immigration is a policy debate where both our

faith and economic knowledge

line up. The U.S. has a strong heritage of welcoming
immigrants, and much of our economic

success can be attributed the skills, creative ideas, and work
ethic immigrants brought with them.

There is a strong case that immigration helps the U.S. economy
grow faster than it would

otherwise. Even undocumented workers improve our economy.
A 2006 survey of economists by

The Wall Street Journal found that 59 percent of economists
believe undocumented workers

have only a slight impact on wages in low-skill jobs, but 96
percent said undocumented workers

are beneficial to the economy because these workers fill jobs
many American workers won’t

accept and hold down the rate of inflation.[i] Writing earlier
this year in The New York Times,

Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw said “… economists are
receptive to the concept of

immigration, partly because they tend to have a libertarian
streak.”[ii] Economic analysis shows

that free markets lead to the best outcomes for society, and the
question of immigration’s impact

on labor market is no different. When markets are open to trade

prices are lower and the quantity

produced rises. This increases the rate at which an economy can
grow and provides more choices

for consumers.

Economy theory also supports greater immigration because of
its association with

entrepreneurism. New business formation is a key to economic
growth and immigrants start

small businesses at higher rates than native-born US citizens.
Economist Robert Fairlie from UC-

Santa Cruz showed that immigrants play an important role in
economy by starting new

businesses, creating jobs, and increasing exports.[iii] In 2011
immigrant owned businesses added

more than $775 billion dollars of revenue to the U.S. gross
domestic product. Further, Professor

Fairlie showed that this was true even when the overall
economy was weak.

http://evangelicalimmigrationtable.com/peter-crabb-faith-and-
economics-why-christians-should-support-immigration-reform/

Other economic research shows that immigration is good for
U.S. worker productivity. Anyone

willing to move to a new country is generally ambitious, that is,

a good worker. Whenever output

per worker rises the economy grows at a faster rate. In a 2010
study, Professor Giovanni Peri of

the UC- Davis and researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of
San Francisco found evidence that

immigrants expand the economy’s productive capacity,
stimulate new investment, and boost

productivity.[iv] Their local-level data shows that states with
higher immigrant worker

populations have higher rates of output per worker. Immigrants
raise the overall output. Higher

economic output brings in more tax revenue, helping reduce the
federal budget deficit and

stretched state budgets.

By increasing the avenues for legal immigration and reducing
the number of undocumented

workers in the U.S. we can also address one of the key factors
of poverty – the breakdown of the

family unit. Census data shows that poverty in the U.S. is
strongly correlated with family

composition. Families headed by a female adult without a
spouse present are more likely to live

in poverty than a family headed by a married couple.[v] This
can be thought of as another

productivity issue. A tight family unit is more likely to be
productive and have a higher standard

of living. With immigration reform fewer workers will leave
behind their spouses and children,

the entire family will have more support, and poverty around
the world is likely to be lower.

Some analysts have argued that undocumented workers place a
strain on the many government-

provided benefits in the United States. These researchers have
tried to show that US taxpayer is

providing unwarranted income and services to millions of
workers. But assumptions in this body

of research give rise to inflated costs and ignore benefits. The
Heritage Foundation has produced

many reports suggesting that any revisions to current law
providing undocumented workers some

permanent status are bad for this country.[vi] However, the
Heritage studies falsely assume

immigrants use many services they don’t pay for and fail to
make any assumption about the

potential economic gains that arise when undocumented workers
gain legal status.

The most recent Heritage report uses what economists call static
analysis. The reports states that

undocumented immigrants increase GDP by approximately 2
percent, but goes on to say that

these same workers will capture most of the gain from expanded
production in their own wages.

The authors write, “…while unlawful immigrants make the
American economic pie larger, they

themselves consume most of the slice that their labor adds.”
This statement contradicts the

economic theory outlined above and the findings of other
studies. For example, Professor

Leighton Ku and lecturer Brian Bruen of George Washington
University studied data from

welfare programs like Medicaid, food stamps and the Children’s
Health Insurance Program.

[vii] They found that the families of low wage immigrant
workers consistently use such

programs less than their native-born counterparts. They also
showed that when these poor

immigrants did accept assistance it was at a lower cost than that
of native families. Immigrants

come here to work; the US taxpayer is not at risk. In the
unlikely event an immigrant family does

seek government benefits the cost is low and the long-term
benefits outweigh them.

Our faith and our economics are aligned. Immigration reform is
not just the right thing for

Christians to do, it is good economic policy. There is
widespread consensus among economists

that all forms of immigration improve the country’s standard of
living. Immigrant workers keep

prices lower by accepting many unwanted jobs, starting new
businesses, and increasing overall

worker productivity. With reduced barriers to legal
immigration families are more likely to

remain together and poverty rates will decline. Finally, the data
don’t support any suggestion

immigrants are a burden to U.S. taxpayers. The United States’
immigration policies should be

reformed so that we better respect the God-given dignity of
every person, reduce the risk of

poverty by keeping families together, and grow the economy
faster for the benefit of all.

Peter R. Crabb is Professor of Finance and Economics at
Northwest Nazarene University in

Nampa, Idaho. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the
University of Oregon and an MBA in

Finance from the University of Colorado. His research in
economics and finance is published in

the Journal of Business, the Journal of Microfinance, and the
International Review of Economics

and Finance, among others.

Pass immigration reform bill to improve national security:
Carlos
Gutierrez

The tragic events that transpired in Boston strengthened our
resolve as Americans and served as

a poignant reminder that in today's world, borders alone will
never be enough to separate us from

those who seek to do us harm.

The fact remains that both law enforcement and our federal
government are forced to confront

21st-century challenges with the rusted tools of an outdated and
broken immigration system.

Today 11 million undocumented people are in the United States
illegally, living under de facto

amnesty. The recent terrorist attack in Boston reinforces the
notion that this is an unacceptable

status quo.

As long as Washington fails to act, these numbers will continue
to climb.

The Senate immigration reform bill unveiled by the Group of
Eight is grounded in common

sense and strives to protect our homeland by securing the border
with the toughest security and

immigration enforcement laws in U.S. history.

Rightly, the bill avoids amnesty, reduces instances of human
error and builds upon recent

investments in our nation's defense by requiring verification
systems to be implemented for

every international sea- and airport in the United States.

The bill also deports illegal immigrants guilty of serious crimes
and requires those who remain in

America to become invested in American culture by learning
English, paying taxes and fines,

proving they have a job, then going to the back of the line for at
least 13 years.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/294893-gang-of-eight-
vows-to-defeat-immigration-bill-poison-pills

No one will have the opportunity to apply for citizenship, or
receive federal assistance, until

these rigorous new border security measures are in place.

While some in Washington believe the events in Boston should
delay our efforts to rectify this

broken system, conservative leaders strongly disagree with any
wrongheaded desire for

complacency.

Congressman Paul Ryan said, "We have a broken immigration
system and, if anything, what we

see in Boston is that we have to fix and modernize our
immigration system for lots of reasons."

And Sen. Marco Rubio concurred when he cited his
disagreement with those who say that the

terrorist attack in Boston has no bearing on the immigration
debate: "If there are flaws in our

immigration system that were exposed by the attack in Boston,
any immigration reform passed

by Congress this year should address those flaws."

A single day deferred on our journey toward more effective
border enforcement is a day wasted

in strengthening our national economy and bolstering domestic
security. Decades of wasted days

have led to porous borders and limited means by which we can
account for who is entering our

country.

The world we live in today has bred a need for action in
America when it comes to defending our

homeland. In recent years, we have become all too familiar with
the fact that eternal vigilance is

the best means by which we can defend ourselves against
domestic threats.

In order to accomplish this, law enforcement must be provided
with the resources and funding to

get the job done. The comprehensive immigration reform
legislation unveiled last month offers

critical means toward achieving these ends. Further delay of a
transparent and constructive

hearing process on this legislation is misguided and will only
lead to further hampering of our

efforts to protect America.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/04/boston-
bombings-adds-pressure-to-immigration-bill.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/04/boston-
bombings-adds-pressure-to-immigration-bill.html

Assignment #8

1) Read and summarize Falcon’s article 1/2-1 page
Be sure to address: How does she link gender violence to the
border? How does she think
national security contributes to gender violence? What do they
think is the importance of
transnational activism (and what is transnational activism?)

2) Read the other articles that outline different perspectives on
immigration reform: 1 page

a) Donald Trump (skim)
b) Republicans for immigration reform (note, there are two
blogs cut and paste into the
document, read both) (skim)
c) Indigenous critiques of immigration reform (why do they
think immigration reform is anti-
indigenous)
d) Escobar (explain how Escobar thinks the immigration
movement is complicit in anti-
Blackness)

What are the different assumptions and perspectives behind
these debates? Is there any room for
common ground? What is your analysis and why?

3) Read and summarize on suicide bombers: 1/2-1 page
Be sure to explain: what is her critique of how western
feminism understands the “suicide
bomber”. What does she suggest is preferable framework?

4) Read the Naber article. Over a ½ page reflection.

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