ジェンダー研究第 22 号

2019 年◆ 書評 ◆

Edited by Nadia Yaqub and Rula Quawas

Bad Girls of The Arab World（University of Texas Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-4773-1335-7, USD27.95）

Nadje Al-Ali（The Watson Institute of Public & International Affairs and the Anthropology Dept., Brown University）

Bad Girls of the Arab World pushes ourunderstandings of women and gender inArab-majority countries by challenging
simplistic ideas of oppression, agency andresistance. The edited volume complicatesnotions about change and transgression,and succeeds in both providing interesting
historical and ethnographic material while
also offering personal and artistic reflections. The twelve contributions by or about
women who either defy gender norms or
are perceived to do so, are framed by aneloquent and insightful introduction written by Nadia Yaqub, and two artistic interventions in the form of Afterwords byLaila al-Atrash and Miral al-Tahawy.
Inspired by the seminal collection Bad
Girls of Japan (2005), this volume highlights the various ways gendered boundaries and norms are historically contingent
and socially produced but are also potentially shifting and subject to change in thecontext of both individual transgressionand wider social and historical transformations. The editors put together a rangeof examples of women being branded as“bad”, either intentionally or against theirwill, showing that the control and scrutiny of women’s behavior, their mobility,
their bodies and their sexuality, is central
to reinforcing and reproducing patriarchal
authoritarianism in the context of widersocial, economic and political crises andanxieties in the region. Examples andcontexts are wide-ranging and include theexperience of a university professor teaching feminism to students in a classroom inAmman, a performance artist responding
to frequent suicide bombings in Beirut, an
Arab American immigrant who worked asa CIA agent and became the target of an
Islamophobic campaign, Palestinian women accused of being bad mothers for theirsupposed willingness to sacrifice theirchildren in the context of Israeli military
violence, and Sudanese female musicians
who live in the diaspora and continue toplay a role in Sudanese national politics.
This important book gains particularsignificance as Rula Qawas, one of the247

書評

editors, passed away unexpectedly before
the book was published. All of us, whether
students or fellow academics, who knew
her, were touched by her commitment togender studies, to the education of her students and to women’s rights more broadly.
What struck me most about Rula were her
wit and humour, coupled with a politicaland intellectual astuteness, all crouched inmodesty and respect for others. Her commitment to gender studies, feminism andthe well-being of her students got her into
trouble on more than one occasion. She
was courageous to stand up to injustice,inequalities and attempts to side-line orsuppress women’s voices. The mere factthat she claimed the term “feminist” andprovided her students with the knowledge
and tools to challenge existing gendernorms made her stand out and transgressive in the eyes of many people, inside andoutside the university.
Just like Rula Qawas experienced on
several occasions during her life time,
many of the “bad girls” presented and discussed in this edited volume are branded
as such due to their transgression, courage and daring to defy norms. They are
not necessarily intending to appropriate

the term “bad”, in fact some loathe it andwould much prefer to be accepted and respected by society. It is not only strict gender norms and gendered roles that cause
transgression, whether intended or not, but
socio-economic factors like class, ethnicity, religious affiliation (or lack thereof)
as well as political conviction that mightalso influence whether a certain behavior is viewed as transgressive or not. The
focus on transgression, allows for a morenuanced approach to the way women resist, subvert or negotiate the structuresand processes that might restrain theirfreedom, thereby shifting our focus to thefraud concept of agency.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading both themore analytical as well as the reflective
and artistic contributions to this volume,and recommend the book to be on reading
lists for students learning about womenand gender in the Middle East. My only
suggestion for future publications would
be to start challenging the idea of the Arabworld, given the fact that many of the “badgirls” are named as such because they are
not ethnically Arab or don’t identify assuch.

（掲載決定日：2019 年 5 月 29 日）

248