Reina Lewis

Bio: Reina Lewis is an academic researcher from University of the Arts London. The author has contributed to research in topics: Feminism & Islam. The author has an hindex of 14, co-authored 49 publications receiving 1799 citations. Previous affiliations of Reina Lewis include University of East London & University of Delaware.

Feminist Postcolonial Theory : A Reader

Abstract: Feminism and postcolonialism are allies, and the impressive selection of writings brought together in this volume demonstrate how fruitful that alliance can be. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills have assembled a brilliant selection of thinkers, organizing them into six categories: "Gendering Colonialism and Postcolonialism/Radicalizing Feminism," "Rethinking Whiteness," "Redefining the 'Third World' Subject," "Sexuality and Sexual Rights," "Harem and the Veil," and "Gender and Post/colonial Relations." A bibliography complements the wide-ranging essays. This is the ideal volume for any reader interested in the development of postcoloniality and feminist thought.

Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation

Abstract: In contrast to most cultural histories of imperialism, which analyse Orientalist images of rather than by women, Gendering Orientalism focuses on the contributions of women themselves Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne, other `lost' women Orientlist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Reina Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze Gendering Orientalism argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implicitly male position of western superiority, Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference It is this different, and often less degrading, gaze on the Orientalized `Other' that is analysed in this book By revealing the extent of women's involvement in the popular field of visual Orientalism and highlighting the presence of Orientalist themes in the work of Browne, Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, Reina Lewis uncovers women's roles in imperial culture and discourse

Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem

Abstract: pp.297 Supported by grants from the AHRC, and Leverhulme Trust, this monograph (translated into Turkish, 2006) was the culmination of a longstanding body of work concerned with gender and Orientalism, and it has contributed new primary material and analytic frameworks for a number of related fields. While the figure of the oppressed, yet highly sexualised, female inmate of the Muslim harem has been understood as the pivot of western Orientalist fantasy (Yegenoglu 1998; Zonana 1993), little attention has been paid to the voices of self identified ‘Oriental’ women. Rethinking Orientalism remedies this by providing the first monograph on English-language books by Ottoman women from the turn of the twentieth century. Arguing that non-Western sources deserve critical attention of the same rigour as would be directed as canonical texts, my primary research on Ottoman women’s writing in English demonstrates that they were able to intervene in Orientalist culture with a self-conscious ability to manipulate cultural codes that is not usually attributed to the inferiorised, silenced woman of the harem stereotype. The project extended the range of primary material available to the developing field of middle-eastern women’s history (Frierson 2000; Baron 1994; Booth 2001) and changed the ways in which women’s sources are analysed by integrating theories of performative gender identity into the historicised critical examination of non-Western cultural texts. My research into publishers’ archives, literary reviews and author correspondence in Europe, Turkey and the USA meant that I could construct a materialist analysis of the conditions of production and reception of middlebrow Western harem literature. My analysis of how the Ottoman authors intervened in local debates about female and social emancipation challenges some of the orthodoxies that have emerged in postcolonial studies. The project has prompted international keynotes and plenary papers, including Vienna, Berlin, Kuwait, USA (Tulsa, MIT), Toronto, Helsinki, Trier, Limerick.

Veils and Sales: Muslims and the spaces of postcolonial fashion retail

Abstract: Linking veils to fashion (and Islam to modernity), this article analyzes the presence of veiled assistants in London fashion shops as examples of spatial relations that are socializing and ethnicizing. In the anxious days after the 2005 bombs, the veiled body working in West End fashion retail moved through the postcolonial city in a series of fluid dress acts whose meanings were only partially legible to her different audiences. Connecting recent international Muslim lifestyle consumer cultures to gendered consumption in the development of Middle Eastern modernities, this article evaluates new British legislation protecting expressions of faith at work in relation to the role of veiled shop girls in postcolonial shopping geographies.

The Complexity of Intersectionality

Abstract: Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

Can the Subaltern Speak

Abstract: In the present paper a research has been done on the essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ by’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’. It has been explained into much simpler language about what the author conveys for better understanding and further references. Also the criticism has been done by various critiques from various sources which is helpful from examination point of view. The paper has been divided into various contexts with an introduction and the conclusions. Also the references has been written that depicts the sources of criticism.

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Abstract: WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics