Paperback: If you really want to know a people, start by looking inside their bedrooms.
As political change sweeps the streets and squares, parliaments and presidential palaces of the Arab world, Shereen El Feki has been looking at upheaval a little closer to home - in the sexual lives of men and women in Egypt and across the region. The result is an informative, insightful and engaging account of a highly sensitive, and still largely secret, aspect of Arab society.
Sex is entwined in religion and tradition, politics and economics, gender and generations, so it makes the perfect lens for examining the region's complex social landscape. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the Arab region and gives us unique and timely insight into everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing in front of our very eyes.
Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life In A Changing Arab World (2013) has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award and longlisted for the Orwell Prize.
About the author: Shereen El Feki is a British-Canadian-Egyptian academic and author, best known for her book, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World. She is an expert on the intersection of political and intimate rights in the Arab, and wider Islamic, world.
Shereen started her career in medical science, with a PhD in immunology from Trinity College, Cambridge, before going on to become a healthcare correspondent with The Economist and a presenter with Al Jazeera English. She is the former vice-chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and the Law, as well as a TED global fellow.
Shereen is currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She is also incoming professor of Global Practice at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. As a senior fellow with Promundo, under the aegis of UN Women, Shereen is also leading IMAGES-MENA, a pioneering study of men, masculinities and gender equality in four countries in the Arab region.
No comments:
Post a Comment