Last year the editors of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society invited feminists worldwide to comment on the millennial transition. Representing a disciplinary and generational range of writers, the resulting collection is at turns inspiring, troubling, provocative, despairing, celebratory. Some of the essays give voice to anxieties, others are more hopeful; some reflect back, others look forward. Many of these fifty-plus short essays speak to themes of gender, nationality, global independence, transnational corporate domination, racial and ethnic identities, and complex intersections among these systems. Readers will find eye-opening writing that is thoughtful, committed, and passionate about feminist futures.

This collection extends the boundaries of global feminism to include Islamic women. Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam, these essays focus on women's negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participants in religious, cultural and nationalist movements. This book gathers Signs essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora to explore how women negotiate identities and attempt to gain political, economic, and legal rights.

This collection shows Islam to be a diverse set of variable practices and beliefs shaped by region, nation, ethnicity, sect, and class, as well as by responses to many cultural and economic processes. In examining women's participation in religious and nationalist projects, these critics debate controversial issues: Does Islamic feminism provide an alternative, revolutionary paradigm to Eurocentric liberal humanism and western feminism? Is Islam more oppressive to women than the modern secular state? How are the lives and texts of Arab and Muslim women constructed for local or western consumption? These essays expose the shortcomings of the secularist assumptions of many recent feminist analyses, which continue to treat religion in general and fundamentalism in particular as a tool of oppression used against women, rather than as a viable form of feminist agency producing contradictory effects for its participants.

The essays in this book first appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Contributors:

S. M. Shamsul Alam
Amal Amireh
Mary Elaine Heglund
Shahnaz Khan
Anouar Majid
Val Moghadam
Julia Peteet
Elora Shehabbudin
Gabriele vom Bruck.