Femmes Et Le Genre en Irak
This research explores gender issues and women's political activism in contemporary Iraq via a socio-historical study of women's social, economic and political experiences since the formation of the modern Iraqi state, as well as a detailed ethnographic account of the context, content, and political significance of post-invasion women's political activism. Throughout this thesis, I explore contemporary Iraqi women's political activism using a socio-historical and intersectional approach, which includes the study of the relationship between gender, nation, state and Islam. I argue that exploring Iraqi women's political activism requires looking at the way gender and women's issues have been socio-historically defined - according to conflicting notions of nationhood, the evolution of the postcolonial state and state-society relations - as well as different understandings and deployments of Islam. In adopting this complex socio-historical and intersectional framework of analysis, I ethnographically explore and problematize notions of women's rights, feminism, Islamist and secular women's rights activism. I propose that linking postcolonial feminism to intersectionality through a socio-historical and ethnographic approach allows one to go beyond simplistic dichotomies - such as culture/economy, feminism/religion, secular/Islamist women's rights activism and local/global. I suggest to ground gender, class, statehood, and geographic, ethnic, religious and sectarian belongings within their complex and multilayered contexts of deployment, while bearing in mind global structures of inequality such as colonialism and imperialism.