The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology (After the Empire: the Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

This study examines the ideological production of the North African 'Musim woman' in the discourse of female Orientalism, French Psychoanalytic feminism, and Maghrebian nationalism and Islamic feminism.

In this fascinating and important study, Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon examines how the "Muslim woman" was produced as a fixed category to serve various ideological and political ends. The Production of the Muslim Woman enriches the debate in Islamic and gender studies, arguing that the traditional perception of a division between spiritual Islam and a misogynist Arab culture is a recent construct derived from the rhetoric of cultural liberalism in the West. In addition to incorporating the discourses of Maghrebian feminism, female orientalism, French psychoanalytic feminism, and North African nationalism, this book introduces to an Anglophone audience archival material culled from extensive research in Tunisian collections. The insights offered by this book will be invaluable to students of postcolonial thought and theory, gender studies, Maghrebian literature and history, and Middle Eastern studies.