In the Red Sea Hills of eastern Sudan, where poverty, famines, and conflict loom large, women struggle to gain the status of responsible motherhood through bearing and raising healthy children, ...especially sons. But biological fate can be capricious in impoverished settings. Amidst struggle for survival and expectations of heroic mothering, women face realities that challenge their ability to fulfill their prescribed roles. Even as the effects of modernity and development, global inequities, and exclusionary government policies challenge traditional ways of life in eastern Sudan and throughout many parts of Africa, reproductive traumas—infertility, miscarriage, children’s illnesses, and mortality—disrupt women’s reproductive health and impede their efforts to achieve the status that comes with fertility and motherhood.     In Embodying Honor Amal Hassan Fadlalla finds that the female body is the locus of anxieties about foreign dangers and diseases, threats perceived to be disruptive to morality, feminine identities, and social well-being. As a “northern Sudanese” viewed as an outsider in this region of her native country, Fadlalla presents an intimate portrait and thorough analysis that offers an intriguing commentary on the very notion of what constitutes the “foreign.” Fadlalla shows how Muslim Hadendowa women manage health and reproductive suffering in their quest to become “responsible” mothers and valued members of their communities. Her historically grounded ethnography delves into women’s reproductive histories, personal narratives, and ritual logics to reveal the ways in which women challenge cultural understandings of gender, honor, and reproduction. 
The case of Lubna Al-Hussein, dubbed “the pants journalist,” who was sentenced to flogging after an arrest by public-order police in Sudan, in July 2009, became one of the most widely reported ...narratives about the subordination of Muslim women in the world. Her case mobilized human rights advocates, politicians, and diplomats to contest discrimination against Sudanese women and to shame the government of Sudan. In this article, I show that beyond media sensationalism and the logic of saving and shaming that characterizes human rights practices exists a feminist opposition politics concerned with equal citizenship rights and invested in protesting both local and global hegemonies and oppressions. I argue that Lubna’s pants served as a symbolic site for competing visions about morality and freedom. One vision represents a transnational hegemony anchored in a neoliberal moral ethos and in discursive practices of universal humanitarianism and human rights, and the other represents a translocal political order grounded in religiosity and bodily containment. Both visions, however, render women’s struggles visible on exclusionary moral terms. I suggest that Lubna’s transnational visibility be situated in a critical historical moment, a state of vulnerability and moral panic that characterizes the present location of Sudan in the global political map. At this historical juncture, feminist politics lend legitimacy to Sudanese translocal dissent politics and highlight women’s multiple alliances and the competing hegemonies that constrain their political struggle.
The tradition of the veil, which refers to various cloth coverings of the head, face, and body, has been little studied in Africa, where Islam has been present for more than a thousand years. These ...lively essays raise questions about what is distinctive about veiling in Africa, what religious histories or practices are reflected in particular uses of the veil, and how styles of veils have changed in response to contemporary events. Together, they explore the diversity of meanings and experiences with the veil, revealing it as both an object of Muslim piety and an expression of glamorous fashion.
The case of Lubna Al-Hussein, dubbed 'the pants journalist,' who was sentenced to flogging after an arrest by public-order police in Sudan, in July 2009, became one of the most widely reported ...narratives about the subordination of Muslim women in the world. Her case mobilized human rights advocates, politicians, and diplomats to contest discrimination against Sudanese women and to shame the government of Sudan. In this article, I show that beyond media sensationalism and the logic of saving and shaming that characterizes human rights practices exists a feminist opposition politics concerned with equal citizenship rights and invested in protesting both local and global hegemonies and oppressions. I argue that Lubna's pants served as a symbolic site for competing visions about morality and freedom. One vision represents a transnational hegemony anchored in a neoliberal moral ethos and in discursive practices of universal humanitarianism and human rights, and the other represents a translocal political order grounded in religiosity and bodily containment. Both visions, however, render women's struggles visible on exclusionary moral terms. I suggest that Lubna's transnational visibility be situated in a critical historical moment, a state of vulnerability and moral panic that characterizes the present location of Sudan in the global political map. At this historical juncture, feminist politics lend legitimacy to Sudanese translocal dissent politics and highlight women's multiple alliances and the competing hegemonies that constrain their political struggle. . Adapted from the source document.
“Why did this pandemic take so many people by surprise here in America?” asked Amina, a friend from New York whom I’ve known for many years. Since 1 February 2020, when most Americans suddenly became ...part of the global world they had previously only consumed from a distance, Amina has not let a single week pass without calling to check on me. “Why do people think this has not happened here before, that this disease has come from somewhere else? But what do I know? I am an African immigrant, and Africa has always been the source of blame.” Amina’s
This article examines the cultural construction of difference, danger, and disease among the Muslim patrilineal Hadendowa-Beja of eastern Sudan and focuses on the ways in which gendered discourses, ...together with symbolic and ritualistic practices, diagnose historical relationships of power, powerlessness, and social conflict. In particular, I show how the female body, viewed as a "fertile womb-land," is the locus of anxieties about foreign dangers and diseases, which are perceived to be threatening to collective identity and well being. By using "foreignness" as a double-edged category linked to both power and danger, I examine how Hadendowa's feminization of social vulnerability draws attention to their own political history of exclusion and displacement.
Images and horror stories of Sudanese refugees in the Middle East, Australia, and North America abound. Sudanese websites regularly post commentaries about refugees' subordinate position and their ...resistance to unjust treatment and forced assimilation in host countries. In this paper I trace a transnational narrative about the suffering experiences of Sudanese refugees used by activists and media alike to contest political violence and border control in the language of universal solidarities and humanitarian compassion. I argue that such humanitarian discourses often employ images of womanhood, motherhood, and infantilization to legitimate a hegemonic neoliberal /neoconservative narrative about rescue and compassion that render the other visible on claims of charity and compassion rather than on claims of entitlement and socio-economic rights. I also show that, despite the rhetoric of unbounded transnational solidarities, some activists have strategically used discourses of nationness to draw the borders of civility and humanness by pushing claims of political violence outside their national borders. Further, representations of Sudanese refugees (mostly Darfurian and Southern Sudanese) in places such as Egypt, Israel, and the U.S. present good examples of how activists' and refugees' agentive practices are shaped and constrained by humanitarian discourses and practices.
Images and horror stories of Sudanese refugees in the Middle East, Australia, and North America abound. Sudanese websites regularly post commentaries about refugees' subordinate position and their ...resistance to unjust treatment and forced assimilation in host countries. In this paper I trace a transnational narrative about the suffering experiences of Sudanese refugees used by activists and media alike to contest political violence and border control in the language of universal solidarities and humanitarian compassion. I argue that such humanitarian discourses often employ images of womanhood, motherhood, and infantilization to legitimate a hegemonic neoliberal/neoconservative narrative about rescue and compassion that render the other visible on claims of charity and compassion rather than on claims of entitlement and socio-economic rights. I also show that, despite the rhetoric of unbounded transnational solidarities, some activists have strategically used discourses of nationness to draw the borders of civility and humanness by pushing claims of political violence outside their national borders. Further, representations of Sudanese refugees (mostly Darfurian and Southern Sudanese) in places such as Egypt, Israel, and the U.S. present good examples of how activists' and refugees' agentive practices are shaped and constrained by humanitarian discourses and practices.
IN JULY 2009, the transnational media circulated news about yet another grave human rights violation perpetrated by Sudan’s Islamist regime, the latest in a series of violent crimes against ...humanity.¹ Lubna Al-Hussein, dubbed “the pants journalist” for wearing pants in public and hence countermanding the prevailing dress code of modest body covering, was sentenced to flogging after an arrest by the public order police in Sudan. This case became one of the most widely reported narratives about the subordination of Muslim women in the world.² Lubna was arrested, along with twelve other women, in a public restaurant in Khartoum and
