Since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the challenges of sectarianism and militarism have weighed heavily on the women of Iraq. In this book, Zahra Ali foregrounds a wide-range of interviews with a variety of women involved in women's rights activism, showing how everyday life and intellectual life has developed since the US-led invasion. In addition to this, Ali offers detailed historical research of social, economic and political contexts since the formation of the Iraqi state in the 1920s. Through a transnational and postcolonial feminist approach, this book also considers the ways in which gender norms and practices, Iraqi feminist discourses, and activisms are shaped and developed through state politics, competing nationalisms, religious, tribal and sectarian dynamics, wars, and economic sanctions. The result is a vivid account of the everyday life in today's Iraq and an exceptional analysis of the future of Iraqi feminisms.
1. Genesis of the 'woman question': the colonial state and the rise and fall of the new Iraqi Republic (1917-68); 2. Women, gender, nation and the Ba'th authoritarian regime; 3. Experiencing the invasion and occupation and the women of the new regime; 4. The emergence of women's groups and networks after the fall of the Ba'th regime; 5. Kurdish women's activism in Iraqi Kurdistan; 6. Mobilizing for women's legal rights: gender and sectarianism; 7. Iraqi feminisms: searching for common grounds.
