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Call for Papers: Dignity, Piety, Revolution: Towards New Political Understandings of the Body Middle East Studies Association, October 10-13 2013, New Orleans, LA Scholarship on the Middle East has produced important insights about the body as a site for cultural transmission and as a symbolic register for its traditions and values. The body—and especially—the gendered body has been described and studied across so many disciplines that the discursive space occupied by the gendered body in the Middle East has exponentially grown over the last 50 years. The sheer size of this corpus of work however, with its academic authority, often seems more a daunting hegemonic challenge than a resource for our understanding of the material body itself—fluid and ever-changing—as it responds to social, political and economic change, as opposed to being unitary and fixed. In light of the most recent events of the so-called Arab Spring and other resistance movements in the region, the body – broadly understood – has emerged once more, as a site for resistance, piety, dignity, gendered struggle and other forms of collective action. This panel invites papers that seek to problematize the heterogeneous, displaced, destabilized and disruptive body in the Middle East, to question, critique and build upon previous scholarship on the corporeal dimensions of the gendered and multi-layered body. We are interested in bringing together new theorizations of the body as a simultaneous site of resistance, piety, political and collective action but also as a sight of discontinuity, disruption and instability. What meanings can we discern from recent events in the region that impose new trajectories on the body? How do bodies respond and intervene in these newly emerging forms of governance? Where are the sights of intervention? And, how can we grapple with these emerging meanings, spaces and forms of expression that are mediated and transformed by people’s uses and understandings of the body in the Middle East. Please send an abstract to Sherine Hafez (sherine.hafez@ucr.edu) and Sami Hermez (hermez@pitt.edu) by Feb. 14, 2013.
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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