Gender, Textile Work, and Tunisian Women’s Liberation: Deviating Patterns

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In this book, author Claire Oueslati-Porter describes her field research in Binzart, Tunisia’s sprawling factory zone and in the surrounding city. She blends conventional ethnography with auto-ethnography, leading readers inside a textile factory, among the women and men workers who navigate intensely gendered labor. While there is pressure to adhere to gendered codes of behavior in the factory, some women engage in subversive gender performances. Oueslati-Porter elucidates a phenomenon that is oft-neglected in studies of women in the Middle East and North Africa: gender-queerness. Further, Oueslati-Porter explores her own perceptions of being a researcher while also being a daughter-in-law in a Tunisian family, and a mother to a toddler-aged son while conducting field work. This ethnography centralizes women’s waged and unwaged labor in the understanding of women’s rights

Gender, Textile Work, and Tunisian Women’s Liberation will be of interest to students andscholars of anthropology, sociology, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ+ studies,and Middle East and North Africa studies.