Academic literature on the topic 'Eastern Women's Headwear Association'

AbstractAlthough a favourable position for women is usually anticipated where they occupy important economic roles in the context of matrilineal descent, such a position may well exist in a patrilineal society, especially if women organise as in West Africa. Here there exist well-organised women's cult associations which are well known from Liberia and Sierra Leone and occur also in western Cameroon and south-eastern Nigeria. The present article demonstrates the existence of a comparable women's association in middle-belt Nigeria among the Kulere. The article focuses mainly on the manner in which through the cooperation of certain men's and women's associations ‘gender symmetry’ was ritually expressed in the sphere of agriculture and fertility. The practical foundation of this symmetry in fertility cults was a relatively even division of labour between the sexes and a favourable position for women in marriage, since they could decide independently whether to stay with a husband or leave him. Cult associations were predominant in public life. Women were strictly excluded from men's associations which held political–ritual offices and channelled advantages in ritual consumption to men. Notwithstanding this exclusion, women had their own association in which they could regulate their own affairs as well as pass decisions for the whole community including the men. The women's organisation held major responsibilities for the protection and the fertility of the fields, both practically as well as ritually. In this responsibility the women's association cooperated with a men's association which otherwise intimidated women. This association of males protected the fields through the presence of supernatural guardians which was sometimes staged in masquerades. The corresponding duties and cooperation of both associations were enacted ritually through the use of common shrines and when the women contacted water spirits to increase the harvest under the protection of male masqueraders. The Kulere case shows a patrilineal society where women had a relatively independent position which was publicly acknowledged through gender dualism in the ritual organisation of agriculture in which their special capabilities with respect to fertility and sustainability were recognised.

Middle East gender studies is a lively and fascinating field. With two very different journals (HawwaandJournal of Middle East Women Studies) and dozens of panels at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference and the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, we have come a long way over the last two decades. Women's, queer, and masculinity studies are now part of how we understand gender studies in the region. Middle East gender studies does, however, remain marginal in two fields—Middle East studiesandgender studies. It is normally assigned to the end of a Middle East studies conference (“and gender”), or, conversely, to the end of a gender studies conference or edited volume (“and elsewhere”). But can a discussion of technology or World War I in the modern Middle East weave in insights gained from gender or queer studies? And can a discussion of women's movements or women's labor incorporate what we know about the Middle East? I believe that more can be done to mainstream gender in Middle East studies, and to mainstream the Middle East in gender studies. Transnational history is a particularly promising direction for this endeavor.

SummaryThis study examines local heterogeneity in the aptitude of Sardinian mothers towards late reproduction, and explores its temporal persistence and association with both post-reproductive longevity and propensity to consanguineous marriage. Data on women's fertility from 1961 and birth records for 1980–1996 from Vital Statistics were analysed by means of the following indicators: the incidence of old mothers at last childbirth, female mortality (1980–2001) at 80 years of age and over and the proportion of consanguineous marriages (1930–1969). A variable kernel-smoothing method was used to create interpretable representations of the true spatial structure of the indicators, and to highlight areas of higher than expected intensity. In particular, an area of reproductive and post-reproductive longevity was identified where the traits combine with a higher tendency to relatedness. Intriguingly, this area corresponds approximately to the geographically and historically well defined central-eastern zone, which was the refuge of Sardinians during past invasions, and overlaps the Ogliastra region, which has been widely studied for its genetic homogeneity.

The cultural association of Queensland with a condition of imagination or unreality has a strong history. Queensland has always ‘retained much of its quality as an abstraction, an idea’, asserts Thea Astley in her famous essay on the state's identity (Astley 1976: 263). In one of the most quoted descriptions of Queensland's literary representation, Pat Buckridge draws attention to its ‘othering’, suggesting that Queensland possesses ‘a different sense of distance, different architecture, a different apprehension of time, a distinctive preoccupation with personal eccentricity, and . . . a strong sense of cultural antitheses’ (1976: 30). Rosie Scott comes closest to the concerns of this present article when she asserts that this so-called difference ‘is definitely partly to do with the landscape. In Brisbane, for instance, the rickety old wooden Queenslanders drenched in bougainvillea, the palms, the astounding number of birds even in Red Hill where I lived, the jacarandas, are all unique in Australia’ (quoted in Sheahan-Bright and Glover 2002: xv). For Vivienne Muller, Buckridge's ‘cultural antitheses’ are most clearly expressed in precisely this interpretation of Queensland as a place somewhere between imagined wilderness and paradise (2001: 72). Thus, as Gillian Whitlock suggests, such differences are primarily fictional constructs that feed ‘an image making process founded more on nationalist debates about city and bush, centre and periphery, the Southern states versus the Deep North than on any “real” sense of regionalism’ (quoted in Muller 2001: 80). Queensland, in this reading, is subject to the Orientalist discourse of an Australian national identity in which the so-called civilisation of the south-eastern urban capitals necessitates a dark ‘other’. I want to draw out this understanding of the landscape as it is imagined in Queensland women's writing. Gail Reekie (1994: 8) suggests that, ‘Women's sense of place, of region, is powerfully constructed by their marginality to History.’ These narratives do assert Queensland's ‘difference’, but as part of an articulation of psychological extremity experienced by those living on the edges of a simultaneously ideological and geographically limited space. The Queensland landscape, I argue, is thus used as both setting for and symbol of traumatic experience.

SummaryThe practice of consanguineous marriage has been the culturally preferred form of marriage in most Arab and the Middle Eastern countries, including Oman, but due to a paucity of population-based data in the past there is a dearth of information about its form and dynamics in Oman. Recent national-level surveys allow this gap to be filled. This paper examines the prevalence, trends and determinants of consanguineous marriages in Oman using data from the 2000 Oman National Health Survey. The results indicate a very high prevalence of consanguineous marriage in Oman, as more than half (52%) of marriages are consanguineous. First cousin unions are the most common type of consanguineous unions, constituting 39% of all marriages and 75% of all consanguineous marriages. The study observed various patterns of consanguinity, some of them common with other Arab nations, and some unique in nature. Women's age at marriage, employment, place of childhood residence and geographical region appear to be significant determinants of consanguineous marriages. Consanguineous marriage shows a strong association with marital stability, early age at marriage and early-age childbearing. There has been no appreciable change in the prevalence of consanguineous unions in Oman over the last four decades despite massive socioeconomic development and modernization. However, recent marriage cohorts show slight declining trends. The results suggest that consanguinity is likely to remain stable in the future or decline at a slow rate. Specific health education and genetic counselling should be followed in line with WHO recommendations to minimize the negative health consequences of consanguinity for child health.

The 46th NERA Congress was held on March 8th to 10th 2018 at the University of Oslo. NERA is the Nordic Educational Research Association that brings together researchers in the field of educational sciences in the Nordic countries. An essential part of the association and of the congress are NERA’s 24 networks that are organised around different subject areas in educational sciences like early childhood research, youth research etc.. There is a network also for social pedagogy. Its aim is to develop and strengthen the cooperation between researchers and professional groups, engaged or interested in the field of social pedagogy, in the Nordic countries and even wider in Northern Europe like in Poland and Germany. It is currently coordinated by six researchers from five different countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Sweden. The theme for NERA2018 congress was Educational Research: Boundaries, Breaches and Bridges. The Social pedagogy network had organized altogether four sessions during the congress dealing with topical issues in the field of social pedagogical research. These sessions included two roundtable discussions, the first one dealing with sensitive research and the second one on social pedagogy at schools. In addition to the roundtables there was one symposium considering research in the area of asylum seekers and refugees, and one session was for traditional paper presentations. The countries that were represented in network sessions were Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, and Poland. The sessions awakened animated conversations between participants. One common topic of the discussed issues related to the role and transformation of social pedagogy in changing societies. The sessions of the social pedagogy network were opened up by the roundtable discussion on sensitive research. The leading question for the short presentations of the roundtable participants was: how to research in cooperation with extremely vulnerable people. We heard two interesting presentations by Irena Dychawy Rosner from Malmö University and by Aneta Ostaszewska from the University of Warsaw that giuded us to a discussion about how to support the participation in social pedagogical research of e.g. women working in prostitution so that not just their anonymity and well-being during the research process are secured but also their autonomy and agency could be supported. The research examples shown in the presentations were so fascinating that the discussion around them filled up all the time of the roundtable although we had planned to have four presentations instead of two but there had been two cancellations. The second session following the roundtable was a traditional paper presentation session. Even this session had one last minute cancellation – we assumed it was because of the flue season – so we had two presentations by Jan Arvid Haugan from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Vilborg Jóhannsdóttir from the University of Iceland. Jan Arvid’s presentation was on ’Coping strategies and resilience in upper secondary school’. He shared with us some social pedagogically interesting findings about the background factors behind school drop-out. He himself told us that he was not familiar with the social pedagogical discussion but he had thought that his research findings could be of use in our field when we are trying to find out ways how to support the integration of young people. And he certainly had right. Vilborg’s presentation on the other hand was very interesting for another reason: it was about Icelandic social pedagogy, which differs quite a lot from the understandings of social pedagogy in other Nordic countries. In Iceland, the social pedagogical practice concerns almost only work with people with disabilities. The professional education, role and perspectives of social pedagogy have developed in line with the paradigm change rooted in the CRPD (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), which has replaced the medical understanding of disability by the social relational understanding of disability. For example in Finland, the social pedagogical discussion and practice have focused very little on people with disabilities. The second roundtable was on social pedagogy at schools. There were four short presentations leading to a common discussion about the role that social pedagogy and social pedagogues have and could have at schools in different Nordic countries. Vilborg Jóhannsdóttir shared us more thoughts on social pedagogy in Iceland concentrating now on the work that the social pedagogues are doing in inclusive schools. Their role seems to be very essential in supporting the education of disabled children and young people in ’normal’ schools but it is at the same time quite controversal. Amela Pacuka from the Oslo Metropolitan University asked us in her presentation: What social pedagogy is for? She had a very critical perspective towards social pedagogy as it is practiced in Norway at schools: trying to find a balance between measurement, quality assurance, testing and relations work. Margareta Fehland and Mikael Boregren from Malmö University presented a project that they have been working on developing a new way of listening to kids in school. Their presentation roused a lively discussion about empathy and about the possiblity to teach empathy in social pedagogical studies. Interestingy, discussion about empathy and about teaching empathy has just recently awaken in the Finnish social pedagogical discussion. Eija Raatikainen, Leigh Anne Rauhala and Seija Mäenpää from Metropolia University of Applied Sciences have published an article about professional empathy called ’Qualified Empathy: A key element for an empowerment professional’ in the Finnish journal of social pedagogy. It is available online in English (Raatikainen, Rauhala, Mäenpää 2017). The last peresentation in the roundtable was about social pedagogical thinking at schools in Finland, presented by Elina Nivala from the University of Eastern Finland. It described social pedagogy as an approach rather than a profession meaning that different professionals at school can have a social pedagogical orientation in their work: A teacher, a special education teacher, a school social worker and even a school nurse can have a social pedagogical mindset in their work e.g. when building pedagogical relations and working holistically with the pupils, supporting their participation and finding ways to strengthen the school community and well-being of everybody at schools. All of them can be considered social pedagogues at schools if they want to develop their work based on social pedagogical thinking. The last session organised by the Social pedagogy network was the symposium called ’How to research in the area of asylum seekers and refugees’. It included originally six presentations: two from Finland and four from Denmark but two of those from Denmark were cancelled. The two presentations from Finland were ’Acts of citizenship in reception centre’ by Päivikki Rapo, and ’Life on hold? – A research project on agency and belonging of asylum seekers’ by Elina Nivala, both of them from the University of Eastern Finland. The Danish presentations were ’How do asylum-seekers experience a sense of meaningfulness in their everyday life in asylum-centres’ Anna Ørnemose, Lene Løkkegård and Lis Leleur, and ’Creating a sense of meaning in connection to school attendance of unaccompanied asylum seeking children’ by Nadia Klarsgaard & Kasper Drevsholt, all of them from the University College of Northern Denmark (UCN). The symposium had a wonderful opportunity to provide an arena for comparative discussion about social pedagogigal asylum research, which is a relatively new field in both countries. Discussions were animated but there could have been more time for comparative perspectives. This shows the need for more research and discussions on this field between different countries. One of the discussed topics concerned asylum seeker women and their possibilities to participation. According to observations of Danish researchers in an asylum center in Denmark, asylum seeker women were denied to get their own spaces. This was argumented with ideas of gender equality in Danish society. In Finland, the challenges on physical spaces of reception centres have also been discussed. Rapo (2018) made an ethnographic research in a Finnish reception centre for her master's thesis. In the observed reception centre, women's fragile position was understood and it was taken into account but even then some restrictions of spaces were noticed only later. It will be interesting to follow how practicies related to gender will transform in reception centres, as questions concerning gender, religion, culture and participation in Western societies are challenging. It is obvious that knowledge on participation and agency of asylum seeker and refugee women is much needed, and social pedagogical research could provide valuable perspectives and tools to produce it. All in all, the presentations and discussions during the sessions showed us very clearly that there is a lot of interesting research and work done in the field of social pedagogy in the Nordic countries. They also illustrated explicitly that the traditions in social pedagogical discussion and practice do differ quite a lot between different Nordic countries. Due to this, there should be more discussion about how social pedagogical practicies have developed historically in different societies and how they are defined theoretically. It is important to discuss critically how social pedagogical work is in practice but it would be of utmost importance to discuss as well how the practices are understood and represented in theory: what is it that makes something social pedagogical, how can it be conceptualised and what makes it different from other fields of practice. And the same goes to research: are there some elements that make research social pedagogical. We hope that the next NERA congress in Uppsala, Sweden on March 6th to 8th will provide an as lively arena for discussions than the previous one did and even more opportunities for critical reflection and shared moments of new understanding. We welcome all new researchers interested in social pedagogy to join us there.

Abstract Background In Germany, a higher life expectancy of women coincides with shortages of health professionals. Besides gynecologists (Gyns), the main providers of ambulatory healthcare for women 50+ are general practitioners (GPs), which do not provide gynecological care. However, GPs and Gyns willingness share tasks has not yet been analysed systematically. The aim of this research project is to explore approval among and consent between GPs and Gyns for task sharing in women 50+. Methods In a quantitative postal survey (March-May 2018), a random sample of 66% of all GPs (n = 3,514) and all Gyns (n = 1,031) in the three German states was interviewed. The response rate was 25.5% for GPs and 51.2% for Gyns. The approval for task sharing (yes/no) was collected for 21 medical consultation themes (83 sub items) regarding women's health and general health of women 50+. For each sub item, the approval rates among and consent between the professional groups was calculated and sub items were group into medically coherent modules for interprofessional care. Multivariable regressions were calculated in order to explore the association of professional group with the medically coherent modules adjusted for covariates. Results In both professional groups, highest approval was reached for shared care of urinary incontinence, vaginal complaints and recurrent urinary tract infections. High approval and consent was present only for the sub items counselling for sexual health (GP = 52.30%, Gyn=48.91%) and colorectal cancer screening (GP = 48.66%, Gyn=44.70%). Approval was higher for counselling as compared to diagnostics and therapy. Cancer related task went along with low approval rates in both professional groups. Approval towards task sharing was higher among Gyns for all modules except for cancer screening. Conclusions The analysis identified single tasks for sharing in both groups and allows setting priorities through the classification according to approval and consent. Key messages Task sharing among GPs and Gyn could be an opportune answer to improve access to care of women 50+. Knowledge on GPs and Gyns attitudes towards task sharing can serve as common empiric ground for meaningful dialogues between research, policy and practice.

Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). 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