Product Description: In the shops of London's Oxford Street, girls wear patterned scarves over their hair as they cluster around makeup counters. Alongside them, hip twenty-somethings style their head-wraps in high black topknots to match their black boot-cut trousers...read more

Product Description: Modest dressing, both secular and religious, is a growing trend across the world, yet so far it has been given little serious attention and is rarely seen as fashion. Modest Fashion uniquely studies and addresses both the consumers and the producers of modest clothing...read more

Product Description: Grace Ellison (d. 1935) actively encouraged dialogues between Turkish and British women at the outset of the twentieth century. Despite an impressive legacy, Ellison and her work have almost disappeared from the historical record; the republication of this 1915 work aims to address this neglect...read more

During the nineteenth century, the figure of the passive, oppressed, yet highly sexualized female of the Muslim harem became the pivotal figure of Western orientalism. Despite recent challenges to orientalist thinking, however, an enduring mystique continues to surround Western perceptions of Eastern women.In Rethinking Orientalism, Reina Lewis makes a major contribution to correcting the prevailing stereotype of the subjugated, silenced woman of the harem. Bringing together published autobiographical accounts of self-identified “Oriental” women at the turn of the twentieth century, she reveals that these women were, in fact, able to intervene in orientalist culture and manipulate cultural codes. Lewis shows how the writings of Demetra Vaka Brown, Halide Edib, Zeyneb Hanum, Melek Hanum, and Grace Ellison were part of a social and textual dialogue with Western women, and how their contentious engagement with Western feminism was an important facet of regional modernization.Exploring the complicated ways that these writers addressed topics such as seclusion, the veil, and polygamy, Lewis vividly illustrates the possibilities and limitations of resistance that women from Islamic societies have experienced and continue to work within.  

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Product Description: This study challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze. It argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implictly male position of Western superiority. Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference...read more