HIST 207 - Gender in the Middle East

This course will explore the topic of gender, as well as women, sexuality, and the family, in the Middle East and North Africa region, spanning a chronology from the height of the Ottoman Empire (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will explore a wide variety of scholarship, including feminist literature, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and discuss current and developing trends in Middle East studies that have sought to apply these lenses to Arab and Islamic societies. Questions we will explore include: How has gender defined the social and political subject? How have Western feminist lenses influenced or distorted depictions of Muslim women? How were gendered categories transformed under colonialism and globalization, and what did precolonial conceptions of gender and sex look like? Topics will include precolonial gender and sexual categories in Islamic societies; women in the Ottoman Empire; the making of gendered nationalist subjects in Egypt, Palestine, and North Africa; Orientalist fetishization; and feminist political movements, among others.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2026-27
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.