Gender, Textile Work, and Tunisian Women’s Liberation

Beschreibung

This book presents ethnographic research conducted in an export zone textile factory in Binzart, Tunisia during the years leading up to the Arab Spring. The author focuses on the sexist management tactics in the factory, as well as women workers’ patterns of resistance and capitulation to sexual objectification and exploitation. Masculinity as enacted by men and by some women is revealed as fundamental to the processes of production. Certain women workers, Oueslati-Porter shows, challenge cisgender norms by appropriating masculinity for themselves, threatening men’s masculine supremacy. Furthermore, socio-cultural surveillance mechanisms in the factory and in the family is curtail the tensions posed by the presence of masculine women.
Gender, Textile Work, and Tunisian Women’s Liberation will be of interest to students andscholars of anthropology, sociology, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ+ studies,and Middle East and North Africa studies.
Claire Oueslati-Porter is Senior Lecturer, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Anthropology, University of Miami, USA. 

In this book, author Claire Oueslati-Porter describes her field research  in Binzart, Tunisia's sprawling factory zone and in the surrounding city. She blends conventional ethnography with auto-ethnography, leading readers inside a textile factory, among the women and men workers who navigate intensely gendered labor. While there is pressure to adhere to gendered codes of behavior in the factory, some women engage in subversive gender performances. Oueslati-Porter elucidates a phenomenon that is oft-neglected in studies of women in the Middle East and North Africa: gender-queerness. Further, Oueslati-Porter explores her own perceptions of being a researcher while also being a daughter-in-law in a Tunisian family, and a mother to a toddler-aged son while conducting field work. This ethnography centralizes women's waged and unwaged labor in the understanding of women’s rights

Gender, Textile Work, and Tunisian Women’s Liberation will be of interest to students andscholars of anthropology, sociology, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ+ studies,and Middle East and North Africa studies.
Elucidates women’s varied strategies for contending with exploitation, from emphasized femininity to female masculinity Promotes new understandings of women’s and men’s place in rapidly neoliberalizing MENA economies Challenges oversimplified representations of Muslim women and men

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Claire Oueslati-Porter

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Sexuality Masculinity labour work Anthropology Africa feminism feminist anthropology

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