HIST 3570 - Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East

5 credit hours
This course interrogates the changing politics of gender and sexuality in the modern Middle East (1800-present). It places special emphasis on the political and social forces that have empowered, or circumscribed, the rights of women and men depending on ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and/or religious affiliation. The course addresses the ways in which the status of women has been debated within imperial, nationalist, and Islamist projects and women’s roles in those debates. Far from being the powerless subjects of the Western colonial imagination, women in the Middle East have played a significant role in affecting the region’s history and its present.