Fatema Mernissi's writings as a gateway to postcolonial islamic feminisms and intersectionality in the Maghreb

Abstract

After decades of debate among feminist scholars, there is still a pervasive resistance to serious engagements between Western and non-Western perspectives on feminism and gender. This is even more symptomatic when it comes to islamic feminist scholars. With this in mind, I examine the work of Moroccan sociologist Fatema Mernissi. I argue that her “double critique” to representations of Muslim women in both Orientalist and Moroccan local authorities’ discourses performs an intersectional approach to gender that is attentive to how it interplays with class and race, but is also conditioned by cultural encounters. Mernissi’s attention to East/Orient and West cultural encounters as constitutive of contemporary gender relations in the Maghreb offers a more historically and culturally informed view on the gender question in Muslim majority societies, and helps to facilitate conversations between Western and islamic feminists.