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

2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC

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.
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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.
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC

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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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)
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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

2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC

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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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.
2016 18:15:19 UTC

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
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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.
2016 18:15:19 UTC
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

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

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

Middle East Studies
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

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

Middle East Studies
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

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

Middle East Studies
236
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

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