Transnational Gender Studies and the Migrating Concept of Gender in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

This article is an attempt to capture aspects of ramifying networks that are transporting the fluid concept of `gender'. Assuming that transnationality is a central feature in diasporic contexts, how does it manifest itself in diasporic practices? If one of these practices is knowledge production, then what are the processes of migrating epistemologies and how are these gendered? This begs the question of whether or not gender is still an important site from which to view the fluid phenomena of postcolonial/transnational processes or if the contemporary valences of transnationalism require, instead, a fluid gendering of the contemporary categories of empire that operate differently through space. By reading the transnational through the local, with particular reference to Ahfad University for Women (Sudan), the article interrogates the ways concepts of women/gender and feminist ideas travel across boundaries and how these concepts are changed in the process.