The 2026 Joseph and Libby Bonfield Memorial Lecture in Middle Eastern Studies

This talk explores how struggles over bodies, gender, and sexuality are central to contemporary politics in the Middle East. Against a brief historical backdrop, Nadje Al-Ali examines recent protest movements and wider struggles for change. She traces how gendered forms of mobilization - on the streets, online, and in intimate spaces - both challenge and are shaped by authoritarianism, militarism, and sectarianism.  Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in relation to Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and the Kurdish movement, Al-Ali discusses gendered mobilization as a crucial lens for assessing governance, social transformations and visions for justice and peace. Al-Ali also reflects on the politics of knowledge production: how can scholars write about gender-based violence and resistance in the Middle East without reproducing culturalist exceptionalism or erasing local forms of violence and contestation? The talk makes the case for feminist scholarship as indispensable to understanding the region’s current crises and futures.

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books), and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000. Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar entitled We are Iraqis: Aesthetics & Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press) won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction. More recent publications include (jointly with Deniz Kandiyoti and Kathryn Spellman Poots) Gender, Governance & Islam (University of Edinburgh Press, 2019) and Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques (ed. With Tunay Altay and Katharina Galor, University of Edinburgh Press, 2024). 

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Streaming live on Zoom (registration is required): register here