The Harem Syndrome: Moving beyond Anthropology's Discursive Colonization of Gender in the Middle East

Abstract

The urgent need to redirect the debate on gender in the Middle East has led one commentator to suggest that "facile assumptions about the monolithic role 'Islam' or Arab culture plays in the seclusion, disempowerment, and oppression of women no longer pass as the accepted academic discourse on the topic." 1 This valiant declaration, which sought to establish the proprieties of discourse on gender in the Arab world, may have succeeded in banishing facile assumptions in favor of a more complex sense of the relationality between Islam and the construction of gender in the Arab world. Nevertheless, historical legacies, the persistence of certain idioms and their deployment as part of the discursive currency about the Middle Eastern region, cannot be wished away by wellmeaning declarations.One such idiom is what I call "the harem syndrome," a com plex ensemble of ideas and of nearly indelible images that have constituted a kind of doxology informing the discourse on gender in the Middle East as a whole. This ensemble of ideas includes the cult of domesticity of women that certain verses of the Quran seem to have sanctioned. During the era of the Islamic empire, such practices, which entailed the near incarceration of women into the elaborate gynaecea-that is, the harem-of the great houses, were commonplace. Today the cult is associated with women's relative exclusion from the public sphere and seclusion in the more mod est abodes of present-day Muslim societies. This is coupled with the perception of women as the custodians of Islamic tradition, values,

Culture, Gender, and Medical Waiting Rooms: A Kuwaiti Case Study

“…Gender became the primary site of contention, with the “women question” acting as a smoke screen to divert attention from all other political and social struggles (Elie, ; Haghighat, ; Tétreault, ; Wills, ). According to Longva (), traditional values and norms are used in Kuwaiti culture to construct a collective identity and a sense of personal order making family, marriage, and gender relations critical areas for identity politics.…”

“…Gender became the primary site of contention, with the "women question" acting as a smoke screen to divert attention from all other political and social struggles (Elie, 2004;Haghighat, 2014 Public spaces in Kuwait also cater to gender separation with rules that state where male and female users are to be.…”

“…Both groups opposed women's rights, democratization in general, and blamed working women for the breakdown of the Kuwaiti society (Tétreault, 2001). This alliance provided a platform for fundamentalists to intensify the focus on women's appearance, gender segregation, and traditional family life (Elie, 2004), all of which had implications for public spaces including, as we will see, medical waiting rooms.…”

“…Gender became the primary site of contention, with the "women question" acting as a smoke screen to divert attention from all other political and social struggles (Elie, 2004;Haghighat, 2014; Tétreault,…”