WOMEN IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA: AGENTS OF CHANGE (eds) Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, Routledge,2011.
the book is a collection of 16 chapters, an Introduction and a Conclusion and Bibliography. it covers the following countries: Morocco, Algeria, Israel, Palestine, Tunisia, Iran,Egypt Oman,and Spain. it covers five major saspects of Agency: Political agency, civil Society activism, legal reform, cultural and social agencies and religious and symbolic agencies.
the notion of agency permeates the whole chapters depending on context and specificities. this capoacity to act in differnt cultural, historical and socio-economic settings made the ask of theorizing the concept very challenging. I argue that agency without performance and resistance is futile and pointless because the goal of action is to change the status quo;when we study women's resistance through their performances then we can capture the dilemmas of agency; reconsidering agency from these two heoretical constructs lead to a reconceptualization of the concept itself and women themselves before they are minimized only to agents of change. the same story happende to gender; when gender appeared sex and sexuality became untheorized; when agency appeared, women will disappear again!
