Description
Book SynopsisBased on extensive fieldwork, Women of Fes shows how Moroccan women create their own forms of identity through work, family, and society. The book also examines how women's lives are positioned vis-a-vis globalization, human rights, and the construction of national identity.
Trade Review"An outstanding contribution of Muslim world anthropology and gender studies; a careful ethnographic work attuned to large-scale forces and their capillary saturation of daily social arrangements and innovations. It very skillfully draws on canonical studies of Morocco (e.g., Abdellah Hammoudi on patriarchy, André Adam on class, Hildred Geertz on kinship, and Fatima Mernissi on gender) to fully contextualize her own luminous ethnography." *
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences *
"No one reading this book will doubt that the author has lived up to her aim of making available nuanced portraits of a variety of Muslim women, sensitively and multivocally conveyed, in a domain of literature still dominated by stereotypes of "the oppressed Muslim woman." *
American Ethnologist *
"Newcomb's insightful and engaging book contributes to an important, but neglected area of scholarship, ethnography of the urban middle class. It demonstrates that Fassi middle-class women, like members of the middle class elsewhere, are actively reconstituting space, identity and community, as they embrace the tension between the order an chaos of modernity, while maintaining strands of continuity between a dissipating past and an imagined future. It constitutes an important resource for students and scholars of anthropology, gender studies and Middle East studies." *
Journal of Islamic Studies *
"An engaging and very well written study of women and gender change in contemporary Morocco. Employing the narratives of Fassi women, the reader is led into a nuanced world where women consciously try to embrace, and thereby create, their own forms of modernity." * Deborah Kapchan, New York University *
Table of ContentsNotes on Transliteration
Chapter One: Introduction: Women of Fes and the Territories of Ideology
Chapter Two: Rumors: Constructing Fes
Chapter Three: Mudawana Reform and the Persistence of Patriarchy
Chapter Four: Solidarity with Distinctions: The Limits of Intervention at a Fassi Nongovernmental Organization
Chapter Five: Kinship: Seeking Sanctuary in the City
Chapter Six: Occupying the Public: New Forms of Gendered Urban Space
Chapter Seven: Singing to So Many Audiences
Chapter Eight: Conclusion: Community, Chaos, and Continuity
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
