This article asks if and why sexual orientation and gender identity-related rights should connect to a human rights framework. To answer that question it begins by addressing how we understand what makes human rights resonate or not resonate and if addressing a contentious issue such as sexual orientation or gender identity from within a human rights frame advances or detracts from such resonance. The argument developed in response is anti-foundational: i.e., that human rights' resonance has not come from some universally valid extra-political foundational source but, rather, comes from how human rights have been transformed (at times) into tools that become relevant to everyday struggles of marginalised peoples. Considered in that context, including recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity-related rights may be extraordinarily difficult, but also presents an opportunity to re-conceptualise human rights in a way that reflects the sort of bottom-up demands that keep human rights relevant. Resp...

Human rights contestations: sexual orientation and gender identity

This thesis focuses on the role and impacts on women of the system of wilaya (guardianship) – enshrined in Muslim family laws and, more specifically, in the Jordanian Personal Status Law. In this thesis, wilaya over women is treated as crucial to maintaining a system of domination over women, as such designates women as legal minors and forms the basis of women’s legal and social subordination. Therefore, I argue that wilaya plays a key role in the reproduction of the gender hierarchy system. The thesis makes three central points with regards to wilaya. First, the systematic inclusion of provisions of wilaya over women serves as a construct of normative femininity. In this light, I address the relevance of the state as a gender regime in analysing how the masculine and feminine selves are constructed and reproduced in the context of Jordan. I also probe how a masculine state works in collaboration with other institutions to give power, founding legitimate operations and procedural methods for institutions such as family and tribe to manage, produce, and construct normative femininity and masculinity. Second, a relationship exists between the extent/degree of wilaya over women and the view of the Self from within, through, or outside the normative construction of femininity. I argue that women’s experiences of male authority that intersects with tribal, ethnic and class membership inflect the ways in which women interpret and experience the boundaries of the wilaya system. Therefore, this system impacts the diverse and contradictory constructions of Jordanian women’s femininity, where some conform to the system and others contest or embrace a complex combination of compliance, accommodation and resistance. Third, the ambiguous and contradictory state of women’s various forms of femininity resulted in women’s adoption of practices with a tactical nature, which are also informed by available options, opportunities, and the potential for escaping the wilaya system without facing sanction or punishment. Although these tactics of survival and/or resistance have not ensured a substantive transformation in women’s lives at the collective level, they can materialise into strategies aimed at achieving autonomous selves at the personal level, where wilaya is questioned and possibly contested.

Gender and guardianship in Jordan : femininity, compliance, and resistance

Within the social sciences and humanities, failure to adequately account for the intersectional ways people of color navigate their multiple identities within contesting cultural systems, creates an unfinished portrait of queer identity. For queer people of color, negotiating queer identity is always in relation to their nationality, race-ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and family. While many queer of color stories share similar obligatory cultural norms, the legal ramifications that impact the lives of queer Iranians and their families, both within Iran and abroad, challenge many queer of color expectations. Due to stringent cultural and legal influences, Iranian social discourse heavily impacts the family unit and an individual’s ability to navigate sexual identity within those structures. Ascribing to a collectivist orientation, Iranians consider family a cohesive, interconnected, and integral system that relies on extended families for financial, emotional, and social support. Correspondingly, when Iranian women deviate from normalized expectations (e.g., heterosexuality, marriageability, maintenance of virginity, traditional gender roles) they are seen as having betrayed their families and their entire ethnic communities. Thus, the pressure to remain committed to traditional social scripts is imperative for the preservation of family, making the risk of deviating from those conventions for queer Iranians and Iranian-American women, even greater. Within the context of the United States, many of the same social and familial obligations remain steadfast. Despite ideological limitations, the rise of acceptability for LGBTQ iii identity in the U.S. has given leeway for some queer Iranian-Americans to share their sexual identities with their immediate families. However, since similar expectations are placed on queer Iranian-American women, many are still compelled to hide their identities from their families of origin, distance themselves from the Iranian community, and/or enter heterosexual partnerships. Utilizing women of color feminism driven by intersectionality, this project explores how queer identity performances function as tools working to reify and/or resist systems of power and privilege. By utilizing personal narrative interviewing and poetic transcription, I explore the ways in which firstgeneration, queer Iranian-Americans perform their sexualities through an amalgamation of feelings of shame and guilt, the expectation to remain loyal to both family and community, and the possibilities for agency and resistance.

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Navigating the (Im)Perfect Performances of Queer Iranian-American Identity

This paper focuses on FIFA's ‘hijab ban’ crisis, or the disqualification of the Iranian women's national soccer team from the 2012 Olympics because the players wore a head cover. Utilizing Arab, Muslim and anti-racist feminist theories, I analyze a colonialist and Islamist patriarchal alliance built on two gendering and racializing logics. I refer to these overlapping logics as ‘double hijabophobia.’ Both FIFA and Muslim-majority nations used medicalized and cultural notions of the hijab, safety and dress laws. Double hijabophobia denies Muslim women players their bodily integrity and excludes them from world football. This analysis also recognizes Muslim women athletes who are working to overcome colonialist and Islamist racializing and gendering logics in sport.

FIFA's double hijabophobia: A colonialist and Islamist alliance racializing Muslim women soccer players

The article suggests that from the start of the revolutions in the Arab region in late 2010 a connection between the law, state, political economy, gender norms and orientalist
ideology has formed the foundation of women’s systematic exclusion from politics. As a consequence, women’s alienation from politics – a necessity for the restoration of
old regimes of power – took on various forms, including: externalising, exceptionalising, and celebrating women’s revolutionary acts and contributions to revolutions. This article examines these processes that created the ideological and
material conditions of women’s alienation, estranging their political involvement and exposing them to various forms of violence
The article suggests that alienation of women from revolutions relied on gender normative ideology to create women’s supposedly unique and distinct interests; according to this ideology, women attempt to satisfy such interests through dancing, nikah al-jihad or the desire to be sexually harassed. Women’s power and needs were
moulded as distinctly different from those of men. Hence, forms of alienation diminished women’s roles as initiators, producers of revolutions, rendering women apart. This article shows that, whilst forms of alienation differed in various political phases and often contradicted each other, the intent of each form of alienation was to show a defect, a mistake in women’s acts, and thus establish the supposedly ‘correct’ characteristics of women protesters based on women’s intrinsic nature. Through this, gender normativity was reproduced to serve the political class(s)’s specific interests,
2 determining the linkages between the alienation of women from politics, the alienation of the revolution from its people, and the entire sphere of politics. The sphere of politics not only relates to political activism and conflict between revolutions and counterrevolutions, it is also a battlefield for the (re)production of knowledge.

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Gendered Politics of Alienation and Power Restoration: Arab Revolutions and Women's Sentiments of Loss and Despair:

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Anissa Helie

Papers

Policing Gender, Sexuality and ‘Muslimness’