Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This book offers a compelling examination of women's role in the construction of national identity in the Gulf, with a focus on Qatar. It both interrogates and engages with global frameworks of nationalism and nation-building through the concept of the 'ideal woman,' set against the complex, diverse lived realities of Qatari women themselves.
Zarqa Parvez shows how Qatar's national identity is shaped through a hybrid model negotiating local authenticity with modern socio-political imperatives, located within the broader experience of postcolonial nation-building globally. Women are central to this project, yet their genuine agency remains consistently underrepresented in dominant narratives.
Drawing on mixed research methods and rich ethnographic research, the book brings forward new concepts and understandings of how national identity is understood in the region, uncovering the concept of the jundi makhfi as a result of her fieldwork — insisting on women's voices and self-understandings as constitutive of Qatar's national identity, not merely reflective of it.
Introduction
Part I: Frameworks and Histories
1. Women, Nation, and Identity: Situating Gulf Women in Middle Eastern Scholarship
2. Navigating Tradition and Modernity: Women's Evolving Role in Qatar's National Identity
3. Women's Historical Agency and the Making of National Narrative
Part II: Representations and Realities
4. Beyond the 'Mother of the Nation': Sheikha Moza bint Nasser and the Reimagining of Women's Role in Qatari Nation-Building
5. Beyond the Ideal: Lived Realities and National Identity in Qatar
6. Lived Realities Beyond Binaries: Women's Voices and Everyday Agency
Conclusion