Recently I was asked to participate in a panel discussion on “Islamophobia” in the United States. Although I declined due to a scheduling conflict, I was also ambivalent about the event. I wondered: if journalists, opinion-makers, and academics boil down Americans’ perceptions of the Muslim world to a collective, primal fear of “Islam,” won’t we be diverted from asking more introspective questions about the American experience?

Consider this: many New Yorkers are currently engaged in a public argument over plans to build an Islamic Center called Park51 a few blocks from Ground Zero. Some accuse those opposed to the project of being Islamophobes who vent their stress over the recession by placing guilt for the attacks of 9/11 on innocent American Muslims. Others contend the naysayers are rightfully still traumatized from those events nine years ago. To them, the Islamic center would be salt in the wound, not a symbol of American religious freedom. In fact, what New Yorkers are really trying to figure out is this: with its millions of Muslim citizens and declining middle class, how will Americans come to terms with the fact that the United States itself is now part of the Islamic world?

More to my point, how do the New Yorkers from TV’s Sex and the City navigate this reality? This may sound like a strange question, but the DVD of Sex and the City 2 is set to be released this October, about three weeks after the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Its coexistence with the roiled political climate in lower Manhattan shows how confused many Americans are about the complexities of globalized living. The film is a sequel to the 2008 film and highly successful cable show of the same name depicting the changing lives and fashion of four New York women, Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda. The latest installment sees these familiar characters working through new feelings about babies, marriage, and Islam by way of a luxury vacation to Abu Dhabi. “I’ve always been fascinated by the Middle East. Desert moons, Scheherezade, magic carpets,” says Carrie. “Like Jasmin and Aladdin?” asks Charlotte’s young daughter Lily. Replies Carrie wryly: “Yes, sweetie. But with cocktails.” “I can hear the decadence cal-ling!” Samantha joyfully declares.

And sure enough, the film recasts today’s affluent Middle East in the age-old American genre of the Oriental tale. The girlfriends are initially charmed by Abu Dhabi. Their opulent seven-star hotel provides them with handsome butlers, spacious suites, and bottomless cocktails. The women take an excursion into the desert à la Sex and the City, riding camels over golden sand dunes in impossibly fashionable and impractical clothes. Thereafter they take their repose in a desert tent, playing Eastern by lounging on soft cushions, feasting, drinking, and relishing the romantic setting and the many attendants there to ensure their happiness. (In How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream you can find artwork from an 1885 American edition of the Arabian Nights employing this exact trope and an 1837 poem on the same theme, on pages 43 and 28, respectively—see how versatile and long-lived this American interpretive tradition is!)

At the same time, the Sex and the City ladies are unsure about the political and social realities in the modern Arab Gulf. Charlotte travels by her maiden name to avoid discrimination she believes her Jewish married name, Goldenblatt, would invite. They wrestle over the status of Middle Eastern women, Miranda encouraging cultural relativism with careful explanations of the niqāb while Samantha fights against local customs of modesty at every opportunity. Eventually the ladies’ trip is cut short when Samantha is arrested for kissing a man in public. But before their disappointed departure, the group gets into an altercation with a group of men in the market offended by Samantha’s clothes, the contents of her handbag, and, well, just about everything about her. The four attempt to flee and are taken in by a group of veiled women. Once in private, each of the women pulls off her black niqāb to reveal she too is wearing “this year’s Spring collection” from New York City, as Carrie narrates.

The take-away lesson? Men may cause international conflict but women around the world are united by a love of style that can solve any problem. Maybe those foreigners don’t really want to harm us, they don’t want to dominate America. They just secretly want to go to Bloomingdale’s.

Carrie’s Arabian Nights fantasy is a comforting one. Certainly, the whole Sex and the City content brand evokes the carefree, credit-card-propelled 1990s rather than the misery of the last few years. Such imaginings can be culturally useful because they seem to offer a well-meaning alternative to Islamophobia. And equally, they help us cope with self-inflicted economic problems, the fear of global terror, and the increasing diversity of the American population. Yet they do so by reducing the Middle East to a mode of consumption.

Cross-cultural understanding through shopping? That approach is no more insightful than the blanket reduction of American unease to Islamophobia. We should understand these tendencies for self-distraction and instead ask ourselves: do we have the nerve to take a more nuanced, honest look at the raw emotions and real anguish caused on all sides by the globalization of American military, economic, and cultural power over the last century?

Susan Nance is associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Guelph in Ontario. She is author of How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1835 and blogs at www.susannance.com.

Seven years later, Clinton declared June as National Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, though people were celebrating long before. This past summer, President Barack Obama added a few more words to reflect increased openness: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Pride Month continues to be celebrated through the month of June.

This June, the LGBT community has even more reason to celebrate: in late May of this year, Congress voted to repeal DADT with a 234-194 vote, and the Senate is expected to debate the bill this summer. These are monumental steps in civil liberties, a change President Obama vowed to make during his 2008 campaign.

Back in 2008, we mentioned Steve Estes’ book Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out, which documents the stories of servicemen and women from different generations who struggled with their homosexuality during their time of service. Estes analyzes the challenges of the ban in the context of the evolving gay rights movement.

He said in an interview:

The U.S. stands nearly alone among developed nations in banning the service of openly gay troops. Among the original members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, only the U.S. and Portugal ban gay and lesbian service personnel. Nine of the countries with troops fighting along side American forces in Iraq and twelve of our allies fighting in Afghanistan allow gays to serve. Countries that have lifted the ban since the 1970s include Australia, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.

The recent House vote is a sign of positive change for the minority LGBT community. Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), who voted in favor of DADT in 1993, said in May, “My strong belief is that if Americans seek to put their lives on the line to serve this blessed country of ours, we should not deny those patriots that opportunity because of their sexual orientation. The action which the Committee took today makes our country stronger and better.”

UNC Press is publishing another great book on the subject, available this September and now for pre-order. In Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, Allan Bérubé examines how gays in the military were treated during one of the biggest conflicts in United States history. Originally released in 1990 just before the controversial DADT compromise, the new version of Coming Out Under Fire includes a foreword by historians John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman.

Both books are essential for learning about the issues encompassed by gays serving in the military. The authors examine the problems from the inside out, with interviews and stories from veterans who were in the military as homosexuals before and after the 1993 federal law. We’ll be looking forward to what the Senate says this summer.

-alyssa

As the tally of Palin-endorsed women candidates has climbed higher and higher this primary season, the future of Republican leadership is certainly going to include more women. But will it be more feminist? Lisa Levenstein, author of A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia, takes issue with Russ Douthat’s assertion in the New York Times that the wave of Republican women primary winners means that the Republican party supports “working mothers.”

Says Douthat in his 6/13 column:

The question of whether conservative women get to be feminists is an interesting and important one. But it has obscured a deeper truth: Whether or not Palin or Fiorina or Haley can legitimately claim the label feminist, their rise is a testament to the overall triumph of the women’s movement.

What Tuesday’s results demonstrated, convincingly, is that America is now a country where social conservatives are as comfortable as liberals with the idea of women in high office. More strikingly, they’re comfortable voting for working mothers — for women publicly juggling careers and family obligations in ways that would have been unthinkable for the generations of female leaders, from Elizabeth I’s Virgin Queen down to Margaret Thatcher’s Iron Lady, who were expected to unsex themselves before being entrusted with the responsibilities of state.

Levenstein replied in a letter to the editor published 6/18:

To the Editor:

Electing women who hold jobs to public office by no means signals Republican support for “working mothers.”

A party that refuses to support increases in the minimum wage and opposes paid maternity leave, expansions in health care, and government support for child care, housing and other social welfare programs actively undermines parents’ abilities to combine employment with family responsibilities.

Lisa Levenstein
Greensboro, N.C., June 14, 2010

I, for one, am looking forward to more discussions about feminism, leadership, left/right, and old school/new school in the months and years to come as more and more women step up and speak out. What do you think? What does feminism mean today?

–ellen

Leavitt is Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of Medical History and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her book illuminates how the father-to-be and father have changed over the 20th century with images from television, films and magazines to illustrate the times.

UNC Press interviewed Leavitt. An excerpt of the interview is below:

Q: Why have men been omitted from traditional histories of childbirth?

A: Historically, childbirth took place at home. The birthing woman was attended by her female family members, woman friends, and a midwife. Then, beginning in the late eighteenth century, male physicians began to attend urban middle class women in their homes. This trend to have medical birth attendants increased during the nineteenth century. Husbands waited outside the birthing room. Because men were excluded from the birth itself, historians — including myself — also ignored them when writing about the event. When childbirth moved to the hospital in the twentieth century, men still were not allowed to be with their wives. They waited in hospital waiting rooms, sometimes called stork clubs, while their wives labored and delivered without them.

Q: As a historian, why do you feel the subject of men and childbirth is significant?

A: As it turns out, despite being excluded from home and hospital birth rooms, laymen historically have been very involved in their wives’ births. Emotionally they eagerly followed events inside the rooms and worried about outcomes. They also often had specific tasks — like the classic image of men gathering wood for the fire to boil water — and sometimes kept journals or wrote letters that today make it possible for historians to reconstruct events.
But even more important, childbirth is a central concern of all men and women because the event constitutes the basis for our very existence. Today, most partners of birthing women do participate in labor and deliveries and understand how joining together for this life cycle event is central to the couple’s relationship and family building.

Q: Who do you hope will read this book?

A: I hope men and women of all ages and family configurations will find this history of men’s participation in childbirth a fascinating and riveting story with meaning for their own lives.

You can read the full interview here. Leavitt was also featured in a radio interview on WUNC’s The State of Things, which can be heard here.

–alyssa

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