Middle Eastern Intersectionality

Though much has been written about women in the Middle East, literature on feminism seldom applies an intersectional perspective. In this paper, I assess how scholars address women’s issues in the Middle East. A deeper study of the scholarly work on women provides a fruitful starting point for theory. Building on two main concepts of “intersectionality”(Crenshaw 1989) and “matrix of domination” (Collins 2002), I conducted a content analysis on 170 papers and books about women and gender in seventeen countries of the Middle East. My results indicate that in almost all of the countries’ scholarly work, there is an emphasis on patriarchy, religion, and state/government. These findings highlight crucial axes of Middle Eastern intersectionality for feminist studies in the region.