Engineering gender, engineering the Jordanian State: Beyond the salvage ethnography of middle-class housewifery in the Middle East
dc.contributor.author | Hughes, GF | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2022-11-22T11:39:05Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2022-11-21 | |
dc.date.updated | 2022-11-22T10:42:42Z | |
dc.description.abstract | The figure of the middle-class housewife or ‘rabbat bayt’ emerged in the late 19th-century Arabic-language public sphere amidst the colonial encounter. This gendering of middle-classness responded to a perceived cultural ‘lag’ yet now itself increasingly signifies backwardness in relation to ideals of middle-classness emphasizing women’s education and community service over older norms of purity and propriety. Today, amidst unemployment, discrimination, lack of childcare, lack of safe and reliable public transportation and a highly suburbanized built environment catering to male breadwinners, contemporary Jordanian families must navigate multiple class and gender paradigms. Against a tendency towards salvage ethnography that misrecognizes these constraints as manifestations of deeply held ‘traditional’ values, I emphasize their historicity, arguing that it is only by recognizing housewifery itself as a state project characteristic of the 20th century that we can appreciate how state-building projects drive the gendering of class roles – and the classing of gender roles. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | National Science Foundation | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | National Endowment for the Humanities | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | University of Michigan | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | London School of Economics | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | Council for British Research in the Levant | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan | en_GB |
dc.format.extent | 359-380 | |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 42(4), pp. 359-380 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x221139151 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/131829 | |
dc.identifier | ORCID: 0000-0002-4311-373X (Hughes, Geoffrey F) | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | SAGE Publications | en_GB |
dc.rights | © The Author(s) 2022. Open access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). | en_GB |
dc.title | Engineering gender, engineering the Jordanian State: Beyond the salvage ethnography of middle-class housewifery in the Middle East | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2022-11-22T11:39:05Z | |
dc.identifier.issn | 0308-275X | |
dc.description | This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record | en_GB |
dc.identifier.eissn | 1460-3721 | |
dc.identifier.journal | Critique of Anthropology | en_GB |
dc.relation.ispartof | Critique of Anthropology, 42(4) | |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | en_GB |
rioxxterms.version | VoR | en_GB |
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate | 2022-11-21 | |
rioxxterms.type | Journal Article/Review | en_GB |
refterms.dateFCD | 2022-11-22T11:35:45Z | |
refterms.versionFCD | VoR | |
refterms.dateFOA | 2022-11-22T11:39:05Z | |
refterms.panel | C | en_GB |
refterms.dateFirstOnline | 2022-11-21 |
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as © The Author(s) 2022. Open access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).