300 words essay and 100 words peer review

Arab American Femininities: Beyond Arab Virgin/ American(ized) Whore Author(s): Nadine Naber Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 87-111 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20459071 Accessed: 02-08-2017 19:47 UTC

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Arab American

Femininities:

Beyond Arab Virgin/ American (ized) Whore

Nadine Naber

It was a typical weeknight at my parents' home. My father was asleep

since he wakes up at 4:00 a.m. to open his convenience store in down

town San Francisco. I joined my mother on the couch and we searched

for something interesting to watch on TV. My mother held the remote

control, flipping through the stations. Station after station a similar pic

ture of an Anglo American male and female holding one another in

romantic or sexual ways appeared on the screen. As she flipped the sta

tion, my mother remarked, "Sleep, Slept . .. Sleep, Slept . .. THAT is

America!" She continued, "Al sex al hum, zay shurb al mai [Sex for them is as easy as drinking water]."

-Nadine Naber, journal entry, December 2, 1999

A s I L I S T E N E D to my mother,' I recalled several experiences growing up

within a bicultural Arab American familial and communal context. Al

Amerikan (Americans) were often referred to in derogatory sexualized terms. It was the trash culture-degenerate, morally bankrupt, and not

worth investing in. Al Arab (Arabs), on the other hand, were referred to

positively and associated with Arab family values and hospitality. Similarly,

throughout the period of my ethnographic research among middle-class

Arab American family and community networks in San Francisco, Cal

Feminist Studies 32, no. 1 (Spring 2006). C 2006 by Nadine Naber

87

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88 Nadine Naber

ifornia,2 between January 1999 and August 2001, the theme of female sexu

ality circumscribed the ways my research participants imagined and con

tested culture, identity, and belonging. The theme of female sexuality

tended to be utilized as part of some Arab immigrant families' selective

assimilation strategy in which the preservation of Arab cultural identity

and assimilation to American norms of "whiteness" were simultaneously

desired. Within this strategy, the ideal of reproducing cultural identity was

gendered and sexualized and disproportionately placed on daughters. A daughter's rejection of an idealized notion of Arab womanhood could sig

nify cultural loss and thereby negate her potential as capital within this

family strategy. In policing Arab American femininities, this family strate

gy deployed a cultural nationalist logic that represented the categories

"Arab" and "American" in oppositional terms, such as "good Arab girls" vs.

"bad American(ized) girls," or "Arab virgin" vs. "American(ized) whore." I

coin the term Arab cultural re-authenticity to contextualize this process

within Arab histories of transnational migration, assimilation, and racial

ization. Arab cultural re-authenticity, I suggest, is a localized, spoken, and

unspoken figure of an imagined "true" Arab culture that emerges as a reaction or an alternative to the universalizing tendencies of hegemonic

U.S. nationalism, the pressures of assimilation, and the gendered racializa tion of Arab women and men. I use the term hegemonic (white) U.S. nationalism to refer to the official discourses of the U.S. state and corpo

rate media and the notion of a universalized abstract American citizen that "at the same time systematically produces sexualized, gendered, and

racialized bodies and particularistic claims for recognition and justice by

minoritized groups."3 This article focuses on the narratives of three of the thirty interviewees

who are specifically activists who have worked within or supported Arab

homeland struggles (i.e., Palestine and Iraq), radical Arab and Arab American feminist, queer Arab, and/or women of color feminist move

ments. Their location on the margins of both hegemonic U.S. nation alisms and Arab American cultural nationalisms provides a rich site from

which to explore dominant discourses on gender and sexuality that cir cumscribe Arab American femininities. Their narratives represent histori

cally specific contexts in which the gendered and sexualized discourses of

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Nadine Naber 89

assimilation, anti-Arab racism, and U.S. Orientalism emerge, as well as the

multiple points at which they break down. Counter to dominant colo nialist Western feminist approaches that highlight "religion" (Islam) as

the primary determinant of Arab women's identities, this article demon

strates that religion (Christian or Muslim) alone does not determine the

processes by which Arab American femininities are imagined and per formed. Instead, it situates discussions on religious identity within the

context of intersecting coordinates of power (race, class, nation, and so

forth) and historical circumstances. Moreover, I do not present their nar

ratives as sites from which to universalize the experiences of all Arab American women, but to provide an opportunity to think beyond mis perceptions and stereotypes. I locate myself in the context of multiple,

contradictory loyalties, such as Arab daughter, sister, and cousin, anthro

pologist, researcher, community activist, and feminist. This location rendered me at once "insider" and "outsider," collaboratively and individ

ually deconstructing, contesting, and often reinforcing the cultural logics

that circumscribed my research participants' identities.

This article focuses on the tense and often conflictual location of Arab

American femininities at the intersections of two contradictory discourses:

Arab cultural re-authenticity and hegemonic U.S. nationalism. I explore

the ways that the theme of sexuality permeated many Arab immigrant

families' engagements with the pressures of assimilation vis-a-vis a series of

racial and cultural discourses on Arabness and Americanness. I argue that

although my research participants (and their parents) perceived their cul

tural location within a binary of Arabness and Americanness, when lived

and performed, this binary constantly broke down, particularly along the

lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation. Yet binary terms

for expressing the themes of family, gender, and sexuality persisted throughout my field sites as a discursive mechanism for explaining more

complex processes that implicate my research participants and their par

ents within a desire for a stereotypical "Americanization" that is predicated

on "Arabness" as the crucial Other. A binary cultural logic of "us" and "them" that was gendered and sexualized was then a discursive reaction to

the complex dichotomies of hegemonic U.S. nationalism that at once pres

sure racialized immigrants to assimilate into a whitened middle-class U.S.

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90 Nadine Naber

national identity while positioning them outside the boundaries of "Americanness." Both generations were mutually invested in expressing

the two racial-ethnic-national categories (Arab and American) in dichoto

mous terms because it provided a discursive mechanism for engaging with

the processes of immigration and assimilation in which Arabness and Americanness absolutely depend on each other to exist-as opposites and in unison. My research is based on intensive interviews and participant observation

among thirty second-generation women between the ages of twenty and

thirty, both Muslim and Christian, of Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, and

Syrian descent.4 My research participants' parents emigrated to the U.S. in

the 1960s, during a period of heightened secular Arab nationalism in the

Arab world. Although most of my research participants were raised within

secular families, religious affiliation (Muslim or Christian) was a key mark

er of identity and difference throughout my field sites. Most of my research participants of Muslim descent, for example, explained that growing up they understood Islam as part of their cultural identity. Most

of my research participants who were from Christian backgrounds gener

ally agreed that they were raised as "Christian Arabs" or that the "Arab

community" that their parents identified with was comprised predomi nantly of Christian Arabs.

Before coming to the United States, most of my research participants'

families were traders involved in small business enterprises who were either displaced to the San Francisco Bay area as a consequence of colonial

ism, neocolonialism, and war (i.e., Palestinians and Israeli colonization, or

Lebanese and the Lebanese civil war) or emigrated to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1960s in search of economic mobility. Their parents did not

integrate into culturally whitened middle-class corporate communities

upon migration, but relied on familial and communal financial networks

and support to eventually buy their own grocery and liquor stores. The

internal pressures of tight-knit, familial, and communal networks and the

external pressures of Americanization, assimilation, and racism have fostered an often reactionary bourgeois reproduction of Arab cultural identity. Cultural authorities-including parents, aunts, and uncles as well

as the leaders of secular and religious community-based institutions-tend

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Nadine Naber 9I

ed to generate a socially conservative and essentialized notion of "Arab culture" alongside a contradictory desire for the "American dream" and

assimilation into American modes of whiteness.

This article, then, is not an analysis of all second-generation Arab Amer

icans, but of how locational conditions (especially when it comes to racial

ized, gendered, class, and religious identities) mediate and break down an

imagined "Arab" identity in the context of the San Francisco Bay area of

California. It is an exploration of how binary oppositions within Arab American discourses on gender and sexuality take on particular form among my research participants, a group of educated, middle-class, young

women active in progressive Arab, Arab feminist, and/or queer Arab politi

cal movements whose parents are ethnic entrepreneurs and immigrated,

or were displaced, to the San Francisco Bay area-a traditionally liberal,

racially/ethnically diverse location. Focusing on the narratives of three young Arab American women, this article highlights the processes by which discourses of Arab cultural re-authenticity and hegemonic U.S.

nationalism police Arab American femininities circumstantially, depending

on the types of "bad girl" behaviors to be controlled within a particular

location. I argue that the phenomena of intersectionality cannot be gener

alized as taking one singular form for all Arab Americans; that one must be

cautious about using the terms "Arab American" or "Arab American wom

en" in a U.S. national sense; and that feminist theory and practice vis-a-vis

Arab American communities should take the specific ways that the coordi

nates of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation intersect in differ

ent contexts seriously. For example, perhaps part of the motivation behind

the policing of an Arab daughter's behavior among middle-class business

entrepreneurs invested in economic mobility and the selective reproduc tion of patriarchal cultural ideals is that San Francisco is home to some of

the most vibrant progressive Arab, queer Arab, Arab feminist, and Arab

student movements alongside some of the most vibrant civil rights, racial

justice, feminist, and queer movements in the nation. In the San Francisco

Bay area, multiracial coalition building, transgressive sexual politics, and

critiques of classism, capitalism, U.S.-led imperialism, and war heavily inspire young people, such as my research participants, who are either

active in or loyal to progressive politics.

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92 Nadine Naber

Among my research participants, the performativity of an idealized "true" Arab culture emerged in the context of "regulatory ideals" that

they associated with "being Arab" and distinguished from the regulatory

ideals of "being American," such as: knowing what is 'abe (shameful); knowing how to give mujamalat (flattery); knowing what you're supposed

to do when someone greets you; drinking shai (tea) or coffee; talking about politics "sooo" much; getting up for an older person; respecting

your elders; looking after your parents and taking care of them; judging

people according to what family they are from; marrying through con nections; gossiping and having a good reputation.5

Articulations of "selfhood" among my research participants were key

sites where the oppositional logic of self/Other, us/them, Arab/American

was reproduced among my research participants. Selfhood was often artic

ulated in terms of a choice between "being an individual, being my own person, being an American," or "being connected, having family, and being 'Arab."' Yet what ultimately distinguished "us" from "them," or Al

Arab from Al Amerikan, among my research participants was a reiterated set

of norms that were sexualized, gender specific, and performed in utter

ances such as "banatna ma bitlaau fil lail" (our girls don't stay out at night). Positioning the feminized subjectivities within my field sites in between

the binary oppositions of good Arab daughter vs. bad American(ized) daughter, or Arab virgin vs. American(ized) whore, the discourse of Arab

cultural re-authenticity reproduced a masculinist cultural nationalist assumption that if a daughter chooses to betray the regulatory demands

of an idealized Arab womanhood, an imagined Arab community loses itself to the Amerikan. Jumana, recalling her parents' reinforcement of this

distinction while she was growing up, explains,

My parents thought that being American was spending the night at a friend's

house, wearing shorts, the guy-girl thing, wearing make-up, reading teen maga

zines, having pictures of guys in my room. My parents used to tell me, "If you go

to an American's house, they're smoking, drinking . .. they offer you this and

that. But if you go to an Arab house, you don't see as much of that. Bi hafzu 'ala al

banat [They watch over their daughters].

My research participants generally agreed that virginity, followed by heterosexual (ethno-religious) endogamous marriage were the key de

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Nadine Naber 93

mands of an idealized Arab womanhood that together, constituted the yardstick that policed female subjectivities in cultural nationalist terms.

Here, discourses around Arab American femininities allow for a cultural,

versus territorial, nationalist male Arab American perspective within the

United States that emerges in opposition to hegemonic (white) U.S. nationalism and in the context of immigrant nostalgia. Here, an imagined

notion of "Arab people" or an "Arab community" is inspired, in part, by a

collective memory of immigrant displacement and romantic memories of

"home" and "homeland culture." Among middle-class familial and com munal networks in San Francisco, Arab American cultural nationalism was expressed in terms of an imagined Arab community or people that

constituted "woman" as virgin or mother vis-a-vis an extended family context. Among Arab American cultural authorities in San Francisco, the

ideal of marrying within one's kin group within the discourse of Arab cul

tural re-authenticity was refashioned in terms of marrying within the kin

groups' religious group (Muslim or Christian); village of origin (Ramallah, Al Salt), economic class, national (Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, or Syrian), or racialized/ethnic (Arab) group. These categories

were hierarchical, as "religious affiliation" tended to supersede "national

origin" and "national origin" superseded "racial/ethnicity identity" as the

boundary to be protected through a daughter's marriage. Although the regulatory demands of Arab womanhood were often framed as an alter native to assimilation and Americanization, the cultural discourses that controlled a daughter's marriagability simultaneously enabled a family strategy of assimilation to an appropriate American norm of whiteness

that privileges heterosexual marriage-within particular boundaries of race and class-as capital. The following narratives epitomize the processes by which discourses on

Arabness and Americanness shifted depending on the kinds of power rela

tions that set the stage for a daughter's expression and/or transgression of

idealized notions of femininity within a given context. The first narrative

centralizes intersections of race and class in the policing of Arab American

femininities. The second narrative emphasizes intersections of religion and

sexuality. The third narrative draws attention to intersections of Orientalism and religion. Together, these narratives highlight three differ

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94 Nadine Naber

ent locations along a continuum of gendered experience among my research participants at the intersections of race and class; religion and sex

uality; and Orientalism and religion. In doing so, they point to the process

by which different sociohistorical circumstances produce shifting con structions of Arabness and Americanness in general and shifting construc

tions of Arab American femininity in particular. Although my research

also illustrates that Arab cultural re-authenticity articulates masculinity

and femininity as relational and mutually constitutive and implicates mas

culinity in binary terms that are contested, transformed, and often repro

duced along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation,

an analysis of Arab American masculinities is beyond the scope of this arti

cle. Overall, this article argues for a historically situated, anti-essentialist

approach to Arab and Arab American feminist studies that takes the loca

tional conditions that mediate and break down an "imagined Arab American identity" seriously.

RACE, CLASS, AND THE DOUBLE LIFE

Rime and I met at Arabian Nights, one of the few clubs in San Francisco

where the DJ spins Arabic music. A mutual friend introduced us to one

another and told her that I was doing research among young Arab Americans. As the DJ mixed hip-hop, reggae, and Arabic beats, Rime

described herself as "living in two worlds . . . the 'Arab' world of [her]

family ... and the 'American' world outside of home." The next time we met, she explained that her parents emigrated to San Francisco from Jordan in the late 1960s in search of economic opportunity, that

she was the oldest among five siblings, that her father owned a liquor

store in one of San Francisco's poor black neighborhoods for the past

fifteen years and that she graduated with a BA in nutrition and was per

suing a master's degree in public health.

-Naber, journal entry, June 18, 1999

EXCERPTS FROM RIME'S ORAL HISTORY: In hilgh school, my parents didn't want me hang

ing out with my brother's friends because they got paranoid about my virginity and they didn't

want me hanging out with my cousins'friends because they were Mexican and black. In high

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Nadine Naber 95

school, my mom got paranoid about my virginity. My dad used to tell me, "I had a nightmare

that my daughter would marry a black man." That was because my dad owns a liquor store in

the Tenderloin [neighborhood] and all his life he's been robbed and shot at, and his wife's been

robbed by blacks. He blamed poor black communities for their situation without understanding

it and he couldn't understand that I had a lot of black friends at school and that blacks were

always thefirst ones out there supporting Arab student movements at school.

I remember when my cousin got pregnant with a guy who was half Mexican and half black.

She lied and stayed out of the house for four years. Her family knew but kept it secret. The

couple got in a big fight and the guy kicked my cousin out and she moved back to her parents'

house. She did the most despicable thing a girl could ever do in Arab culture-and they took her

back.

I was with Roger until recently. He was someone who I thought was total instant love but he

was more of my support blanket because he was outside of the traditional Arab cultural realm.

I lived in his house, and his parents accepted that 100 percent. As far as my parents were con

cerned, I was living with my cousin. But there was always the anxiety about getting caughtfor

lying and I internalized hating being a woman. I would wake up at his house thinking about

my father seeing me with a black guy. It was pure panic. Roger would touch my skin and be

like, "You're so cold."

Because I was Arab I had to take care of my family's reputation and I was always reminded

of it. I think my parents knew about him, but their attitude was, "Do what you do ... don't let

anybody find out." Then it was always myfriends'fault-my American friends-'they're bad."

And I couldn't work at the family store, because "American" men picked up on me there.

When I was graduating from college, I was partying a lot and Ifelt I needed to be more

responsible. That's why I went back home to Jordan. In Jordan, my life completely turned

around. I met Omar. All my life, the message was that I had to marry an Arab Christian

man. Ifinally met an Arab Christian man who I love, and I thought the double life and the

lying could be resolved. . . but my parents are not accepting him. Before he told his family or

my family, he asked me to marry him, and traditionally, that was wrong. My mom is stuck on

that issue. The thing that was really bugging her is that he's a communist and an atheist and

against all the traditions. But what they focus on mostly is that . . . "the guy has no

money-and you're going to go live with his family."

Traditionally if an Arab man is going to get married he shouldfurnish and open a housefor

the girl and then get married, not get married and then worry about that stuff My motn keeps

saying "Batlee [stop]. You're not getting married." It all comes down to our traditions-hav

ing Arab traditions, and then being raised here in the US.... Why does it have to be so dif

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96 Nadine Naber

ficult? Is it because I'm Arab? Is it because of my mother?"

I'm planning on moving to Jordan and marrying him. My parents will get over it. My

cousin asked me, "Have you told him about birth control?" And when I said yes, she went

crazy and said I was crazy for telling him about birth control. They see him through a Western

image of Arab men. They think I'm going to go back therefrom this independent, free spirit to

be all the way across the world in this backward culture, like I'm going to be locked up at home

rolling grape leaves all day. He says, "Don't worry, it won't be like that."

If we get married and I move back to Jordan and it doesn't work, I'll say, I'm going to get

some milk, but then I'll get a ticket and go to New York. I won't even give them a phone num

ber. I'll call them once a month-and tell them that I'm okay. Then I'll go and get all thisfree

dom, but I'll be all alone. I'll be another lonely white CEO woman who's all alone and has no

one: has nofamily, no brothers, no nothing. 'Cause that's what it's like in American culture.

Sometimes it can all make you crazy because you can't get out. I have so many worlds and

every world is a whole other world. But in your mind they're totally separated, but then they're

all there in your mind together. You get to a point that you are about to explode.

When Rime speaks of living in "two worlds," fixity and singularity under

write her view of "culture." Rime speaks about "Arab culture" and "Amer

ican culture" as though they already existed, transcending place, time, and

relations of power. Yet as Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it, "categories always leak."6 Rime's family's Christian religious affiliation and Omar's economic

class, which disqualifies him as a suitable marriage partner, disrupt Rime's

homogeneous "Arab world." Moreover, Omar's position as a "disappoint ment" to Rime's parents and his ironic foreignness reflects the instability

of Arab cultural re-authenticity in that Omar bursts the bubble of "authentic Arabness" that they left in the homeland and have tried to recreate in the United States. Here, Omar's forced presence in Rime's fami

ly's life exposes the nostalgia underlying Arab cultural re-authenticity for

what it is.

Similarly, the racialized distinctions Mexican and black rupture Rime's

essentialized "American" world. These discontinuities drive the present

argument that while Rime sees herself between "two worlds," rupture and

difference position her along the two axes of sameness and difference. At a

critical distance from both "worlds," Rime decides to marry a Jordanian

man of Christian descent who is an atheist. Yet her narrative reproduces a

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Nadine Naber 97

good girl versus bad girl binary in which "bad-girl behaviors" are signified

by her desire to marry across lines of socioeconomic class and political

affiliation. As she crafts an alternative plan to move to New York alone in

case the marriage does not work, she invents tactics for transgression beyond the boundaries of a nostalgic "true" Arab culture.

Rime's "two (Arab and American) worlds" are not homogeneous or sta ble, but multiple and overlapping in the context of power, history and the

changing intersections of class, race, gender, religion, and politics in differ

ent locations. Rime implies that the unacceptability of interracial marriage

compounds the virginity ideal. Although prohibitions against mixed-race

unions are common in the Arab word, Rime's interpretation of her com

munity's prohibitions is mediated by historically based U.S. nationalist

anxiety about interracial marriage. Rime's father's positionality as a liquor

store owner in the Tenderloin neighborhood further shaped the racialized

and gendered imperatives that policed Rime's sexuality. His nightmare

over his daughter's potential interracial marriage emerges as a threat to

securing white middle-class norms and implies the forging of a critical dis

tance from the racial Other toward whiteness. Here, "Arab culture" is

invoked as a strategy for harnessing markers of middle-class whiteness.

Meanwhile, the regulatory ideal that forbids sex with the United States'

racialized Other controls Arab daughters' sexuality while protecting Rime's

family, and an imagined Arab people, from degeneracy in white middle

class terms. Binaries collapse in the context of a much greater complexity

in that her father's attitude fits comfortably when he seems to be speaking

(in his daughter's mind) to Arabness. Yet in fact, in policing Rime's sexuali

ty, he is reinforcing the new identity he has had to develop in the United

States, demonstrating the fiction of Arab cultural re-authenticity.

Rime's two worlds are similarly narrated in gendered and sexualized terms and her perception of a fixed and stable "Arab culture" is disrupted

when her aunt and uncle take her cousin back after she "got pregnant with

a guy who was half Mexican and half black." Here, her cousin's parents

seem to care less about her mixed-race relationship and illegitimate preg

nancy than with presenting the public face of an "authentic" or "tradition

al" Arab family. Through silence (that is, Rime's cousin staying out of the

house for years; Rime living with her cousin) both "traditionalist" parents

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98 Nadine Naber

and their "Americanized" daughters are mutually implicated in keeping

the idealized notions of Arabness and Americanness active and in opposi

tion. These silences allow them to keep the binary intact and mask the fact

that at different points the oppositions threaten to be one and the same.

Although Rime narrates herself as a split subject, her "worlds" "inside"

and "outside" (Arab and American) were not discreet. In bed, the bound

aries between "inside" and "outside" collapse as her father's disapproving

gaze interrupts the privacy of her boyfriend's bedroom while her boy

friend places his hand on her skin. Rime interprets the regulatory ideal of

marrying "an Arab Christian man" as the central act that would render

her embraceable or acceptable within the discourse of Arab cultural re

authenticity in between two seemingly distinct and homogeneous "Arab"

and "American" worlds. Yet in learning of Omar's unacceptability as a communist atheist from a different socioeconomic class, Rime comes to

terms with the heterogeneity of Arab cultural identity. Yet she also repro

duces the notion of a normative "Arab cultural identity" when she inter

prets her reality as a choice between "having a family and community," or

"being another lonely white CEO woman." Here, Rime's distinction be tween "having family and community" and "being a lonely white CEO woman" represents the reproduction of idealized notions of selfhood in the diaspora. As Rime critically receives cultural meanings, she associates

"Arab" cultural identity with love, community, cohesiveness, and control

and "American" cultural identity with individualism, autonomy, and alienation. Yet as Rime's parents render Omar unacceptable because he lives in the homeland, lacks money, and lacks Christian values, the fantasy

of a romantic notion of "cultural authenticity" located in the homeland

collapses along the lines of class, religion, and gender.

THE HETEROSEXUAL IMPERATIVE

Waiting for a friend at Caf6 Macondo, in San Francisco's Mission district,

graffiti reading QUEER ARABS EXIST caught my attention. Later, in

conversations among Arab women activists, I learned that the graffiti

artist was a Syrian American woman named Lulu. Lulu was also the

coproducer of a special issue of Bint Al Nas on the theme of "sexuality."

Bint Al Nas is a cyber magazine and network for queer Arab women and

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Nadine Naber 99

as part of this issue, Lulu designed the web art, "Virgin/Whore," where a collage representing herself as "virgin" (represented by drums, pita

bread, camels, Allah, a Syrian flag, and a photograph of her family

members wearing blindfolds) transforms into a second collage repre

senting her as "whore" (represented by images of dildos next to her girl

friend's name written in Arabic, handcuffs, a blurred image of the pic

ture that represents her parents, and a photo of Madonna). A few months later, Lulu and I made plans to meet at Cafe Flor, a queer hang

out in the Castro district of San Francisco. I recognized Lulu from the

tattoo of her girlfriend's name Amina in Arabic script on her arm and

the Palestinian flag sewn onto her book bag. We talked about the col

lage and she explained, "What I am doing with the two images is show

ing how they are dichotomous, or at least they have felt that way, and

how really, it has been an either/or situation. Also, I think it's how my mother would see my sexuality: dirty, sinful, dark. The reason for the

roll over of images is to show that the two states can't coexist."

-Naber, journal entry, December 28, 2000

EXCERPTS FROM LULU'S ORAL HISTORY: I grew up with this all the time: "Sex is an act

of love in marriage. If you're not a virgin when you get married, you're in trouble." I fought

that all the time. I would ask my mom about Syria. I would say, "Ifgood Arab women are not

having sex and Arab men can have sex, then who were the Arab men having sex with?" She

would answer, "The Christian women." So the Christian women were the whores. That is very

prevalent in my family, the Muslim virgin and the Christian whore. The whore is either

American or Christian.

My family is unique because we talked about sex. My sister was really vocal about having

boyfriends and they were always black, which was even more of a problem. My parents are into

the idea that Arabs are white. I think it's more of a Syrian-Lebanese thing. But I didn't have

the same problems with my parents about boyfriends as my sister because I knew I was queer

since I was thirteen orfourteen. It was when I came out when things eruptedfor me. It got to

the point where they were asking, "Don't you want to have a boyfriend?"

My mom won't come visit me at my house because she doesn't want to see that I live with a

woman. The bottom line is premarital sex. Lesbian sex doesn't happen because Arab girls

don't have premarital sex. When I came out, it was like, "That's fine that you're gay-but

don't act on it. We don't want you having sex." Everyday I heard, "Get married with a guy

and. . . " suppress it, basically. I said, "I can't do that. " And I still get that . . . " We (Arabs)

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100 Nadine Naber

don't do that". . . or "You're the only gay Arab in the world."

It became this thing that everyone was going tofix me. My uncles would come and take me

out to lunch. They would say, "Let's talk. This doesn't happen in our culture. You've been

brainwashed by Americans. You've taken too many feminist classes, you joined NOW, you

hate men, you have a backlash against men...." It was like . . . "This is what this American

society has done to our daughter."

When that was the reaction I received, I totally disassociated myselffrom Arabs. Ifelt I

couldn't be gay and Arab. Ifelt that either I have to go home and be straight or be totally out

and pass as white. But later, Igot a lot of supportfrom queer Arab networks.

One of the first people I met was Samah. She was doing some research and asked if she

could interview me. I did it and we both cried. Then I went to a queer Arab women's gather

ing. I was the youngest one and everyone knew that I came out a week after I turned eighteen

and was kicked out by my parents four months later. I was the baby. They all supported me.

Over the years, they've become myfamily.

Now my mom tells me, 'Just go have sex with a man-maybe you'll change, " and I say,

"Maybe you should try it with a woman." She keeps finding ways to say I'm too

Americanized . .. and when I tell her, "You don't know how many queer Arabs I know." She

says, "They're American, they're American born, they're not Arab . . . "or "They must be

Christian," or "Theirfathers must not be around because nofather would accept his daughter

being gay.

They blamed Western feminism and said I should go to a therapist. Then they changed their

mind and said not to go because they don't want it on my hospital records that I am

gay-because "You know, " they would say, "After you change-someone might see on your

hospital records that you were gay." Their idea was that they didn't want anyone finding out

"after I change" and "once I get married, " that I had this dark past. Then at the very end they

did try to send me to a hospital. That was when the shit hit thefan, our biSgfinalfight. I was so

strong in defending myself-and they thought that too was very American. So it became this

thing of like- and they make it very clear-"You chose your sexuality over us. Sex is more

important than your family." Which goes back to the tight-knit family Arab thing. It's all

about group dynamics.

When Lulu's mother replaces the "American whore" with the "Christian Arab" she reveals the gaps and fissures within the idea of a unified Arab

American nationalist identity and the ways that Arab cultural re-authen

ticity shifts depending on sociohistorical circumstances. Lulu's mother's

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Nadine Naber 101

association of the category "Syrian Christian" with the classification "Wes

ternized Other" signifies the ways that the categories "Islam" and "Arab

ness" have often been conflated throughout Arab history and in several

cases, juxtaposed against the notion of a Christian West. According to her

mother, the Syrian-Muslim self is to be protected from the corrupted,

Westernized, Syrian-Christian Other.

Intersections between national origin and racial identification in Lulu's

narrative further complicate Arab cultural identity in the United States.

Lulu, in remembering why her parents did not accept her sister's black

boyfriends, explains that identifying as white is "a Syrian-Lebanese thing."

The Syrian-Lebanese distinction is common within hegemonic Arab American discourses in San Francisco. Many of my research participants

agree that Syrian and Lebanese Arab Americans have had more access to

the privileges of middle-class whiteness compared to other Arab Ameri

cans.7 Steering Lulu's sister away from the racial Other, Lulu's mother, like

Rime's father, secures a white middle-class positionality. Yet when it

comes to Lulu's sexuality, the association of Syrians with whiteness is

quickly disrupted as a sexualized, cultural, nationalist logic disassociates

them as "Arabs" from the loose, sexually immoral American "feminist"

Other in the name of controlling Lulu's sexuality. In Lulu's narrative, then, the Al Arab/Al Amerikan boundary is permeable and shifting. As Lulu

explains, her parents uphold the normative demands of middle-class American whiteness to tame her sister's sexuality while they distinguish

themselves from Al Amerikan when it comes to taming Lulu's behaviors.

Fissures in Arab cultural re-authenticity also emerge when Lulu's moth

er suggests that Lulu "try sex with a man." In the case of Lulu's queer iden

tity, a heterosexual imperative becomes a more significant symbol of the

Arab virgin/American whore boundary than the "virginity" ideal. Gloria

Anzaldu'a writes, "For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can

make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior. She goes

against two moral prohibitions: sexuality and homosexuality."8 Lulu's queerness, the central marker of her betrayal, underwrites her marginaliza

tion as traitor-outsider-American by cultural authorities such as her moth

er, her father, and her uncle. The extent to which she is seen as "un acceptable, faulty, damaged," culminate in her family's attempt to send her

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102 Nadine Naber

to a hospital to fix her so that she might return "straight" home. Here, the

stance of their conservativism is made possible by their inculcation and

reproduction of white American middle-class norms, such as "therapy,"

within the discourse of Arab cultural re-authenticity. Lulu's parents thus

reinforce a particular kind of assimilation constituted by the ways that

Arabness and Americanness operate both as opposites and in unison in the

policing of Arab American femininities throughout my field sites.

In overriding the virginity ideal with the heterosexual imperative, Lulu's

mother reinforces the control over women's sexual and marriage practices

that underlie the heterosexual conjugal ideal in Arab and Western soci eties. Yet beyond reinforcing a heterosexual imperative, Lulu's mother is

also reinforcing family ideals critically inherited from Arab homelands

that are not only conjugal, but include extended kin that are inscribed be

yond household or nuclear terms. In attempting to reinstate Lulu's heterosexuality, Lulu's mother seeks to protect Lulu's father's honor as

well as the family honor of her nuclear and her extended family. Moreover, the intervention of Lulu's uncle can be interpreted in terms of

the refashioning of a patrilineal ideal in the diaspora, in which males and

elders remain responsible for female lineage members (even after mar riage) and men are responsible for providing for their families, which includes their current wives and underage children and may include aged

parents, unmarried sisters, younger brothers, and the orphaned children

of their brothers.9

As a form of political critique directed against patriarchy and patrilineal

ity, Lulu's chosen family is a sign of her resistance. In the act of choosing

her family, Lulu challenges Arab and Anglo-European ideologies that read

blood and heterosexual marriage ties as the key foundation of kinship,

demonstrating that all families are contextually defined. In undermining

the association of kinship with biology, Lulu overtly performs the social,

ideological, political, and historical constructedness of kinship. Yet when

she meets Samah and joins queer Arab e-mail lists, Lulu finds an alterna

tive to the Arab/American split in the coming together of what she under

stood to be her "queer" and her "Arab" identities. Lulu's insistence that

QUEER ARABS EXIST is an act in resisting racism, homophobia, and patriarchy on multiple fronts: it undermines the Arab virgin/American

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Nadine Naber 103

(ized) whore that seeks to control women's sexuality by marking women

who transgress the heterosexual imperative of Arab cultural authenticity

as "American" and it disrupts the dualistic logic of hegemonic U.S. nation

alist discourses that homogenize and subordinate Arab women as either veiled victims of misogynist terrorist Arab men or exotic erotic objects

accessible to white/Western male heroes. Yet cultural identity, for Lulu, is

more than "separate pieces merely coming together"-it is a site of tension,

pain, and alienation that is constantly in motion.

Lulu's narrative signifies the critical inheritance of the polarization be

tween Muslim and Christian Arabs from the homeland(s) to Arab San Francisco. It exemplifies the ways that this polarization took on local form

among many bourgeois Arab American Muslims with whom I interacted.

Throughout my field sites, hegemonic Arab Muslim discourses often privi

leged Arab Muslim women as the essence of cultural re-authenticity-as

opposed to Arab Christian women who were often represented as promis

cuous and therefore, "Americanized." Yet although cultural authorities

often deployed religion as a framework for policing feminized subjectivi

ties throughout my field sites, religious background alone did not deter

mine the extent to which my research participants upheld, reconfigured,

or transgressed the feminized imperatives of Arab cultural re-authenticity.

My research participants who transgressed "good girl" behaviors through

dating before marriage, interracial, and/or same-sex relationships were religiously diverse. In addition, religious affiliation alone did not determine

the extent to which parents, aunts, or uncles circumscribed their daugh

ters' behaviors and identities.

While Lulu explained that her mother deployed her Muslim identity to

reinforce the normative demands of virginity, her parents' self-identifica

tion as "white" complexified their understanding of a "normative feminin

ity." In addition, Lulu stated that her mother deployed a pan-ethnic "Arab" identity when she asked her to suppress her lesbian identity. Thus,

while the discourse of the "Muslim virgin" and the "Christian whore"

policed Lulu's femininity, the "virgin/whore" dichotomy was also consti

tuted by a series of intersecting and contradictory discourses such as white

versus non-white, Arab versus American. The ways that these discourses

operated to police femininities depended on the different ways that coor

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104 Nadine Naber

dinates of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and nation intersected in

each of my research participants' lives.

U.S. ORIENTALISM AND THE RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE

Nicole and I agreed on Kan Zaman in San Francisco as our meeting spot

since we heard they served argilah [an Arabic water pipe]. Little did we know that on Thursday nights, it was the place to be for ex-hippie yup

pies who enjoy mixing a little humus and a pita with a few drinks before

a night of partying on the town. As we walked in, I greeted the owner

Yousef, who goes by the name of Joe to his customers, as we watched

two Anglo-American women who went by the names of Laila and Amina belly dancing with nose rings and sequined bikini tops. Sitting

down on a bed of bright colorful pillows in a recreated imaginary Orient we began our first conversation. As daughters of Arab Christians, we had parents who similarly believed that emigration to

the United States would mean further distancing themselves from the

"backwards, uncivilized, Muslims." Over dinner, we confessed similar

stories about our parents' comments about the Muslim Other and pon

dered the irony that our immigrant parents view us as "more Arab"

than them because we interact with Muslims. For the following three

months, Nicole and I continued meeting for dinner as she shared with me her struggles over gender, culture, and identity between and among

the boundaries of "Arab" and "American."

-Naber, journal entry, August 16, 1999

EXCERPTS FROM NICOLE'S ORAL HISTORY:

One time I asked my uncle to send me an argilah from Lebanon. When it arrived in the mail,

my mom hid it in the closet and startedflipping out at me. She kept asking why her Western

educated, Lebanese, Christian, civilized, modern daughter-and she used all these adjectives

who they gave the privilege of having a Western education-wanted to go back and smoke an

argilah which is a backwards, dirty, horrible, uncivilized Muslim habit.

But when you grow up in the United States, all kinds of Arabs end up hanging out with

each other and the Muslim Christian thing isn't as big. In college, the biggest movement was

the Palestinian movement. I was involved because it was an Arab thing, even though growing

up Lebanese, the Palestinian struggle wasn't driven into you as much. In Lebanon, Pales

tinians, especially the Palestinian Muslims, were associated with being refugees, being radi

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Nadine Naber 105

cal politically, and trying to take over other Arab countries.

In college, my ethnicity bloomed. I felt more proud of being Arab-even though when I

would tell people I was Arab, they wouldn't believe me because I go to parties and drink and

they thought that if you were an Arab girl, you had to wear a veil and your parents never let

you do anything. I remember once, when I told someone I was Arab, they said, "And your

father let you go to college?" In college, my name and my look became cool because I was

viewed as exotic. All of a sudden, you turn around with dark curly hair and dark lips and

you're the item of the year. White men are confident to approach you. It's trendy. It's part of

the boy talk with other boys. This one guy said to me, "I've been with a Sri Lankan, a

Madagascan, a Somali. . . . It's like . . . I was with this Lebanese." People approach you

because you are the vision of this exotic Arab woman goddess.

My parents were really liberal about guys. I would tell them when I had a boyfriend. In

college, I started dating Ben. His mother is a Jewish lesbian. I told my father this over the

dinner table. He was upset, but he got over it. They accepted him because no one else would

have tofind out about his mother. We could have told my dad'sfamily that he is Christian.

Both my parents are Christian, but we were raised atheist. So why this reaction to

Mohammed? After college, I met the love of my life, Mohammed. He's a Palestinian Muslim,

and we've been dating seriously. My momfreaked out saying that meant he is Muslim and how

dare I date a Muslim. She went on to say, "Don't you know that there are 15,000 cases of

Christian Western American women married to Muslim men and the women are in the States

and the men have taken their childrenfrom them to the Muslim world and the women are in the

States trying to get their children backfrom those horrible men?"

She learned this on 20/20. Then she said, "Well you know, ifyou are sleeping with him, his

family is going to kill you." The stereotypes never stop. She says that he will force me to sleep

with him so I will have to marry him or that he will make me cover my hair, or he will marry

more than one wife. After afew months she said, "Your father isfreaking out because people

in the community are talking about you. Even his friends in Lebanon heard your are dating a

Muslim. He's saying that you've ruined his reputation." My dad called me and said, "You

have to stop dating him right now." I told him that this doesn't make sense. I have aunts mar

ried to Palestinians. But even though Lebanese think they're better than Palestinians, that

wasn't the issue. The issue was that he is Muslim. My dad is acting as if he's experiencing

absolute betrayal and they're losing their daughter to the enemy.

What's crazy is my mom is Armenian and her Armenian parents let her marry my dad, an

Arab! And my parents are atheists! So it's not really about religion per se, it's that they want

me to marry someone Westernized, and Lebanese Christian falls into Western. Then there's

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io6 Nadine Naber

this issue of land. My dad has all this land in the village. He's already discussed with my

brother and [me] what land we get. And in the future, I want to build a house on that land. I

know if I marry Mohammed my father is going to disown me and he won't give me that land.

But I know that my brother will undo it. My brother told me he would give me the land but I

know it's hard on him because he is also worried that he will get a bad reputationfor sanction

ing his sister to date a guy that is against hisfather's wish. I think my parents are doing all this

to save face. I'll neverforget the e-mail Mohammed sent me. It said, "How good is it that we

love each other if we're going to allow Ottoman conventions to kill it?"

I have to figure out for myself if I can endure being rejected by my society and excluded

from the social glue that keeps me tied to my roots and all the networks of social relations my

family built here even though they're so reactionary. If I make the decision to marry him, I will

be cut offfrom my lifeblood. Can I endure the pain and hardships of struggling against society

for the sake offollowing my heart? But personal happiness extends way beyond the bond that

ties man to woman. There are other ties . . . between an individual and her society, a daughter

and her mother, and a girl . . . and the community that nurtured her. When I think about giv

ing up Mohammed it's like giving up one kind of happiness to preserve another. My family and

community's love has roots and gives me stability, whereas Muhammed symbolizes risk and

daring and revolutionary uncertainty. That's what is causing my identity crisis. My life is

bound up in the lives of others.

Within Nicole's narrative, her peers' Orientalist representation of Arab women as simultaneously veiled victim and exotic goddess, coupled with her mother's associations of Muslim habits with the terms, "backwards, dirty, horrible, and uncivilized" and Muslim men with the themes of misogyny, illustrate the significance of Orientalism to middle-class U.S. notions of identity and modernity. Her peers reproduce an Orientalist logic that renders Arab women as requiring Western discovery, interven

tion, or liberation. Her mother, in aspiring to avoid identification with the

Orientalist's Other, refashions Ottoman distinctions between Muslims and

Christians and Lebanese nationalist distinctions between Lebanese and Palestinians in Orientalist terms. Here, Ottoman distinctions between Muslims and Christians are rooted in a framework for organizing social

difference according to religious categories that persists in Arab states,

despite the establishment of nation-states. (Within the Ottoman period of

Middle East history, the categories "Muslim and non-Muslim" [with mul

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Nadine Naber 107

tiple subgroups] provided the predominant framework for organizing dif

ference, and civil rights were assigned and administered by religious sect or

rite.)'0 At the intersections of Orientalism and Ottoman frameworks for orga

nizing difference, the terms of Arab cultural re-authenticity shift. Nicole's

mother deploys a selective assimilationist strategy that on the one hand operationalizes Arab cultural re-authenticity in terms of homeland notions

of cultural difference, such as Ottoman distinctions between Muslim and

Christians, while on the other hand, deploys Orientalist terms that deni

grate behaviors and identities that are associated with pan-Arabism and

Islam. This strategy disassociates Arab Christians from Arab Muslims, asso

ciates Arab Christians with the "West" and with "modernity," and articu

lates a desire for middle-class U.S. nationalist notions of identity that affirm

that to be "modern" and "American" is to be "Orientalist." Nicole's mother

thus pronounces a selective assimilationist strategy that reproduces the sex

ual politics of colonial discourse in terms of a rape/rescue fantasy in which

the figure of the dark Arab Muslim male rapist threatens Western (includ

ing Westernized Arab Christian women) and sex between Muslim men and

Christian women can only involve rape."'

For Arab Christians, the possibilities for disassociating themselves from

Orientalism have been made possible in that the "Western trope of the Muslim woman" articulated "as the ultimate victim of a timeless patri

archy defined by the barbarism of the Islamic religion, which is in need of

civilizing" has permeated Orientalist discourses.'2 The significance of Islam

within the refashioning of Orientalism among Nicole's Lebanese Christian

family is particularly clear when Nicole recalls the difference between her

parents' response to her ex-boyfriend Ben whose mother was a Jewish les

bian and their response to Mohammed. Although Ben's mother's Jewish and lesbian identities can be hidden, or conflated with Western or "American civilized identity," Mohammed's identity cannot.

Throughout her narrative, Nicole locates herself in between a series of

binaries, such as American vs. Orientalized Other, Western modernity vs.

religious discourse, Muslim vs. Christian, Lebanese vs. Palestinian, and indi

vidualism vs. "connectivity."'" While she uses binaries as a coding for articu

lating her struggle between different kinds of happiness, she simultaneous

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io8 Nadine Naber

ly articulates her identity at the intersections of a constellation of loyalties

that are multiple, contradictory, constantly shifting, and overlapping. As

these loyalties intersect, they produce a complex process that implicates

her (and her parents) within a desire for being with the man she loves in

the context of stereotypical Americanized norms such as freedom, individ

ualism, and loneliness, and for maintaining her ties to her family, which are

constituted by the multiple genealogies of Ottoman history, Western Christian modernity, and U.S. Orientalism, multiculturalism, and racism.

Nicole's narrative thus redraws the boundaries between "Arabness" and "Americanness" along multiple axes of power and control; affirms that

binary formulations such as "Arabs" vs. "America," or "Christians" vs. "Muslims" are "always more complex than the straightjacket of identity

politics might suggest";'4 and counters celebrations of hybridity that fail to

account for the ways that essentialist categories, while constructed and fic

tive, operate to support hierarchies of privilege and domination and power

and control.

CONCLUSION Walking down the street between one of San Francisco's largest popula tions of homeless women and men and the new dot-com yuppies, I did

my usual skim of graffiti on Cafe Macondo's walls. The "FOR" in LES BIANS FOR BUSH had been crossed out and replaced with the word "EAT." As I turned to the wall behind me to find out whether QUEER ARABS still EXIST[ed], my eyes followed an arrow, drawn in thick black marker that pointed to the words QUEER ARABS and was connected to the words, ONE OF MANY PROBLEMS. Looking closer, I noticed another message superimposed over QUEER

ARABS EXIST in faint blue ink. A line was drawn between the words QUEER and ARABS and the letter "S" was added to the beginning of the word "EXIST." I re-read it several times before I finally understood that

superimposed upon QUEER ARABS EXIST, the new message, in coupling the words ARABS and SEXIST, implied that ARABS are SEXIST. I thought

about my research and the resemblance between the images on the wall

and my research participants' everyday experiences. While Lulu's graffiti

confronted the lumping of Arabs into the homogeneous categories "veiled

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Nadine Naber IO9

victim" or "polygamous terrorist," the defacement of QUEER ARABS EXIST reinforced the binary construction of "the Arab" as Other. Similarly, while Rime, Lulu, and Nicole burst the boundaries of hegemon

ic Arab American and U.S. nationalisms on multiple fronts, they also re

articulate hegemonic nationalisms in binary terms as a coding for a more

complex process in which the categories "Arab" and "American" are mu

tually constitutive and exist both as opposites and in unison, in the context

of immigration, assimilation, and racialization.

As I took another glance at ARABS ARE SEXIST, superimposed over QUEER ARABS EXIST, I noticed another message, a much smaller message

written in black letters in Spanish and English that framed the top right side

of QUEER ARABS EXIST. It read ES ALGO BUENO. IT'S A GOOD THING.

-Naber, journal entry, June 2001

Notes I am grateful to Suad Joseph, Kent Ono, Ella Maria Ray, Martina Reiker, Minoo Moallem,

Andrea Smith, Rabab Abdulhadi, and Evelyn Alsultany for providing me with invaluable

feedback and support while I was developing this article. I would like to especially thank the editorial board members of Feminist Studies and the anonymous readers for their con

structive suggestions and the immense time and effort they committed to seeing this arti

cle in publication. I am indebted to each and every person who participated in this project

and I am grateful to Eman Desouky, Lilian Boctor, my mother, Firyal Naber, and my

father, Suleiman Naber for their persistent support and encouragement throughout the period of my field research.

1. This is not a literal translation, but conveys the message of my mother's words.

Throughout the rest of this article, I have edited my research participants' quotes into

a readable form, maintaining the originality of the quote as much as possible. This process included cutting repetitive words and statements, rearranging the order of

the narratives, and simplifying elaborate explanations. I have also altered names and

places in order to protect my research participants' privacy.

2. These networks included local chapters of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, the Muslim Students' Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Arab Cultural Center.

3. Minoo Moallem and Ian Boal, "Multicultural Nationalism and the Poetics of In

auguration," in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminism, and the State,

ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 243-64.

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110 Nadine Naber

4. I first became acquainted with my research participants by joining community orga

nizations and cultural/artistic collectives and by attending functions organized by

Christian and Muslim religious institutions, Arabic language schools, and Arab and Muslim student groups. Fifteen of the women research participants were Palestinian,

seven were Syrian, six were Jordanian, and two were Lebanese. The greater number of women of Palestinian descent whom I interviewed represent a pattern common with

in what my research participants refer to as San Francisco's "Arab American commu

nity," in which Palestinians make up the majority among those active in Arab American community affairs. Nevertheless, immigrants from the Levant (Lebanon,

Jordan, Palestine, and Syria) comprised the majority of early Arab immigrants to San

Francisco. They developed a variety of community networks through the establish ment of a series of clubs and community associations. These networks have organized

"difference" in terms of village of origin (i.e., the Ramallah Club), country of origin

(i.e., the Lebanese American Association) or pan-ethnic Arab identity (i.e., the Arab Cultural Center). Due to their early history of migration to San Francisco, the vari

eties of institutions they established, and their overall socioeconomic privileges com

pared to Arab immigrants and refugees living in the San Francisco Bay area from

other countries (such as Yemen, Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco), the term "Arab" or "Arab American" community often privileges Levantine Arabs, while either excluding

or marginalizing "other Arabs." 5. Here, I use terms that were reiterated among my research participants to illustrate the

ways that my research participants regularly associated "Americanness" with freedom

and individualism and "Arabness" with family and connectivity.

6. See Trinh T. Min-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Blooming

ton: Indiana University Press, 1989).

7. Throughout my field sites, Palestinian and Jordanian Arab Americans tended to view Syrian and Lebanese Arab Americans as more "assimilated" than themselves. Several factors have produced this "difference." Historically, Syrian and Lebanese emigrated

to the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1900s, before Palestinians and Jordanians,

who first immigrated in the late 1950s.

8. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 17.

9. Here, I build on Suad Joseph's definition of patrilineality in Arab families in "Gendering Citizenship in the Middle East," in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed.

Suad Joseph (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 3-32.

10. See Aaron Rodrigue, "Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by

Nancy Reynolds," ed. Nancy Reynolds and Sabra Mahmood, special issue, Stanford Humanities Review 5, no. 1 (1992): 81-92.

11. Here, I borrow from Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's three axes of sexualized, racial

ized, colonialist discourse. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism:

Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1992). 12. Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics

of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20.

13. "Connectivity" here is from Suad Joseph's definition of "patriarchal connectivity" in

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Nadine Naber III

Lebanon. See Suad Joseph, "Gender and Rationality among Arab Families in Lebanon," Feminist Studies 19 (Fall 1993): 465-86.

14. Ella Shohat, introduction to Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed.

Ella Shohat (New York: MIT Press, 1998), 6.

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