Zakia Salime

New Feminism as Personal Revolutions: Microrebellious Bodies

In March 2013, the nineteen-year-old Tunisian woman Amina Sboui, affiliated with the group Femen, posted two topless pictures of herself on the Internet. She marked her chest with the expression “Fuck your morals” and, in Arabic, “My body belongs to me, and it is not anybody’s honor.” The controversy over Sboui’s semantics of the body inspired a group of women to form Femen Morocco on March 23, 2013. Inspired by the epistemology of the naked body, women started to post topless pictures of themselves on Femen Morocco’s Facebook page. Much earlier, in August 2011, Woman Choufouch, a Moroccan anti–sexual harassment online network, planned to organize a SlutWalk to draw attention to the bodily oppression of women and the sexualization of their presence in public space. The nude marks the visual memory of the revolutionary square, inviting a new power/knowledge configuration and a new politics of remembering along sexualized scripts, rather than moralizing ones. When inserted in the paradoxical spaces of the revolution, disruptive nudes and sexually scripted bodies create an immediate temporality in which women’s bodies and sexuality are not suspended (as usual) but are remembered as part of the entangled sensibilities of the revolution and its visual memory.

Arab Revolutions Legible, Illegible Bodies

After the euphoria of the first waves of the Arab uprisings that toppled two heads of state in Tunisia and Egypt, the woman’s body became the frontline of the protest scene. The unitary mass-revolutionary body that marked the visual memories of the first weeks of the uprisings ceded the ground to the “micro-rebellious body” of the naked, tortured, and sexually harassed female protestor. Nevertheless, this article discusses, the individual assertive body reproduced through these images is usually defined through the paradigm of gender oppression versus sexual liberation and self-realization. Other bodies remain marginal to this historiography of a revolution crystallized around the middle-class urban cosmopolitan bodies. In what language did “other” bodies of “ordinary” women speak in the context of the uprisings? Through what kind of representational regimes are these “other” bodies allowed to speak or be made silent?

Manufacturing Islamophobia: Rightwing Pseudo-Documentaries and the Paranoid Style

Rightwing organizations in the United States have produced and circulated a number of videos which exaggerate the threat Islamic militants pose to ordinary citizens in the West. These videos owe a great deal to the frames established two decades earlier in religious right campaigns against homosexuality. This article provides a textual analysis of these videos and their production, showing how they manifest “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” which Richard Hofstadter characterized as the “paranoid style.” We term these films “pseudo-documentaries” because while they utilize some of the conventions of the documentary genre—claims to “fairness and accuracy,” the use of “experts,” and the incorporation of news footage, testimonies, and “facts”—they are produced by political interest groups and are expressly made to persuade and mobilize through distortion. A comparison of homophobic and Islamophobic videos reveals continuities in rightwing rhetoric, as well as strategic shifts, and indicates the emergence of an increasingly fragmented, pluralized, and privatized political sphere.

Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of IdentityMaking Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity, by WyrtzenJonathan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. 334 pp.

Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity offers a historical analysis of national identity-making in Morocco. In order to understand the construction of national identity, we need to revisit what author Jonathan Wyrtzen calls the ‘‘colonial political field’’ and its symbolic, social, and institutional techniques of legitimation since the 1912 Fes Treaty of Protectorate was signed. Throughout the book the author outlines the competing logics of ‘‘legitimation’’ and ‘‘legibility’’ deployed by multiple actors: colonial residents in Morocco, nationalists, women, Jews, and the Sultan (king). The author draws on Bourdieu’s field theory in his rereading of secondary historical writings to show how the competing logics of these actors have shaped the formation of identities and the type of state that emerged at the aftermath of independence (1955) and how they have contributed to the consolidation of power around the person of the Sultan and the Alawite Dynasty. The colonial past of Morocco is complex since the country was divided between two types of protectorates and two different yet interacting colonial political fields. The 1912 treaty authorized Spanish control over the northern part of Morocco and the westernsouthern parts and French control over the rest. The ‘‘international’’ status of the northern city of Tangier and the older presence of Spain in the cities of Ceuta and Melilla challenge any simplistic or homogenizing readings of the Moroccan political colonial field. Wyrtzen makes two main points: first, ‘‘colonial intervention represented a fundamental historical rupture’’ (p. 7) that cannot be bracketed should we want to understand the political and social dynamics in play in independent Morocco. Second, understanding this rupture requires an ‘‘interactional’’ (p. 7) rather than a top-down or a bottom-up historical analysis. The nine chapters of the book help us revisit historical sources or rather ‘‘write new colonial histories’’ that interrogate the interactions among different elites and non-elite groups and individuals as they construct logics of legitimation for colonial intervention and pacification or anticolonial struggles. Particularly important is the author’s effort to highlight the way in which ordinary men and women responded to the colonial intervention through cultural production of songs and through forms of resistance that acquired gendered and sexualized dimensions. Despite the book’s reliance on secondary sources, this part offers a fascinating reading of oral sources documented by colonial writers or by historians of Morocco. Chapter One revisits the long history of state-building in Morocco through several Arab and Amazigh dynasties. Before the colonial intervention, a variety of state and non-state actors competed for control and domination over the spaces of political action. The spaces of state and non-state power were constantly in flux. The protectorate created a rupture in existing societal and political arrangements by fixing power around newly created state institutions, planting the seeds for political centralization and shifting power away from tribal leaders and ethnic collectivities. Total pacification of Morocco, which took several decades, transformed state space, creating a ‘‘colonial political field’’ with ‘‘new forms of territoriality and new modes of legibility’’ (p. 61). Chapter Two explores the contingent factors that helped determine the ‘‘entwined logics of legitimation and legibility’’ (p. 91). The protectorate justified its intervention in a political imaginary that held traditionalization and modernization in tension. Reviews 729

45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781501700231.

Mobilizing Piety, Rachel Rinaldo’s ethnographic study of Islam and feminism in Indonesia, enriches the repertoire of gender studies that locate women’s activism at the intersection of ‘‘gender politics’’ and ‘‘Islamic politics.’’ Rinaldo considers religion as a ‘‘heterogeneous cultural schema’’ that shapes three types of agency that ‘‘have emerged in the Indonesian public sphere in the wake of democratization’’ (p. 3). The author offers a rich conceptual framework through which she explores the different trajectories of women activists within four types of organizations and understands the differences in the way they relate to feminism, Islam, and gender. Rinaldo focuses on the life trajectories of the activists and the way they have influenced their approach to gender, feminism, and Islam. She argues that social action fields give rise to different forms of agency, while actors’ location and experiences within these fields shape their subjectivities. Rinaldo uses ‘‘woman activist’’ as a general label for ‘‘women who mobilize politically as women’’ (p. 5) and identifies three distinct but overlapping modes of agency, two of which are deeply informed by Islam. She defines agency as ‘‘people’s capacity to make choices and take action’’ (p. 2) by mobilizing ‘‘pious critical agency,’’ ‘‘pious activating agency,’’ and ‘‘inclusive feminist agency.’’ She explores these modes of agency by looking at four organizations and shows how these modes of agency are different but not dichotomous. Fatayat is a women’s organization affiliated with Nahdlatul Ulama, an established Muslim organization founded in 1926; Rahima is a newly established non-governmental organization focusing on ‘‘gender sensitivity trainings’’ and ‘‘education in matters of gender, as a social construct’’ (p. 6). Rahima aims to disseminate an ‘‘‘alternative perspective on Islam,’ one that is egalitarian’’ (p. 6). Rahima and Fatayat are two organizations that exhibit ‘‘pious agency’’ (p. 10) as ‘‘an agency that is influenced by religion’’ and for which being a religious person is central (p. 10). The third organization is composed of the women’s division within the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), a political party that advocates Islam ‘‘as a source of values for national law and policy’’ (p. 7). PKS women demonstrate ‘‘pious activating agency’’ because they activate the party’s interpretations of religious texts to advocate for women’s greater political participation, but they also use them to support policies that are opposed by many feminists. The fourth organization is Solidaritas Perempuan (SP), Jakarta’s best-known women’s rights NGO (p. 6). SP activists demonstrate an ‘‘inclusive feminist agency,’’ aiming at ‘‘gender equality and the empowerment of women’’ (p. 10). In Chapter Two, Rinaldo considers Islamic and gender politics in four eras: the Nationalist Awakening (1911–1928), the Sukarno regime (1945–1965), the Suharto regime (1965–1998), and the post-Suharto period (1998–present). Her analysis focuses most closely on the transformations of the Suharto era and the years following. What is evident from her discussion is that ‘‘during much of the twentieth century Islam played a modernizing role in Indonesia’’ (p. 33). In Chapter Three, the author uses the notion of ‘‘pious critical agency’’ to explore Rahima and Fatayat activists’ ‘‘critical and public engagement with religious texts’’ (p. 65). Pious critical agency is enabled by a contextual approach to religious texts that takes into account societal and historical change (p. 65). Fatayat’s connection with Nahdalatul Ulama and their members’ pious backgrounds legitimizes their activism and grants them a wide representation among middle-class urban women. Rinaldo’s study shows how these activists’ interpretive endeavors are built at the intersection of transnational women’s rights discourse and Islamic traditions. Higher education, democratization, and the global Islamic revival have all influenced activists, including those of Solidaritas Perempuan and the Prosperous Justice Party. The difference with Rahima and Fatayat is that the latter ‘‘embody 230 Reviews