This article locates imaginative aspects of human subjectivity as a feminist issue by reviewing the concept of agency in the genealogy of Muslim and Middle Eastern women in anthropological and ethnographic literature. It suggests that, if feminist scholarship of the Middle East would continue approaching to Muslim women's agency -as it has been doing for decades-, it should do so as an epistemological question and thus expand the limits of ethnographic and analytical focus beyond the broader systems, such as family, nation, religion, and state. As an example to this proposition, the article then discusses the recent work on aspects of selfhood that escape from the structures, rules, systems, and discursive limits of life but captures imaginations, aspirations, desires, yearnings, and longings.Keywords Agency . Muslim women . Anthropology of the Middle East . Desire . Feminist theory Women's Agency in Anthropology of the Middle EastIt would be reasonable to suggest that women's agency has been the primary focus in the anthropology of the Middle East since feminist anthropologists have entered into the area studies in late 1960s. Like much early feminist scholarship, the feminist anthropology of the Middle East also took a critical distance to the former scholarship and its Bmale bias^ (Reiter 1975, Moore 1988. As I discuss in following pages more extensively, the particular type of Cont Islam (2018) 12:73-92

Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with dynamics of sensual and affective attachments and forms of desire. It is therefore integral to the formation of human selves and subjectivities, as well as communities, publics, collectives and socialities. The articles in this Special Section all offer an anthropological inquiry into intimacy, seeking a conceptual formulation that might capture its actual operations, the ways intimacy is done in talk and action. They thus contribute ethnographically to ongoing anthropological debates about intimacy, and explore how multiple domains and forms of intimacies are defined, shaped, constructed and transformed across different social worlds.

At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as "the West" (referring here to North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was considered newsworthy in relation to "Muslim sportswomen," and what this reveals about popular mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed's (2000) discussion of 'strange encounters' is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically, discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant 'Othering'. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place. By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what Ahmed calls an 'ontology of strangeness' but also add to and lend further support to the work of post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport. Islam, Muslim Women and the MediaDespite contested opinion on the Islamic underpinnings for the segregation of the sexes, veiling of women and expectations of how women should embody modesty, honor and piety, veiled Muslim women are frequently depicted as being 'religion-bound, ' 'passive' and 'oppressed' (M. McDonald 2006). L. Navarro (2010) found that Spanish mass media perpetuated and reinforced essentialist stereotypes about Muslim women as the 'Other' meanwhile French media adopted the veil issue to purport claims about human rights abuses and legitimize discriminatory attitudes towards diaspora Muslim communities.

No abstract

Women’s control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive body movements it requires, problematizes women’s ability to control their public sexualities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in Istanbul, this article explores the everyday concerns of Istanbulite women who seek rahatlık (comfort) during exercise. The interviewees frequently used the word rahatlık when referring to women-only spaces in the culture of mahremiyet (intimacy, privacy). This article furthers the scholarship on Muslim sexualities by examining the diversity of women’s concerns regarding their public sexualities and the boundary-making dynamics in the culture of mahremiyet. I argue that mahremiyet operates as an institution of intimacy that provides a metacultural intelligibility for heteronormativity based on sexual scripts, normative spaces, and gendered acts.