Journal: Al-Raida

Photography has been traditionally used to document the past such as in
family albums as well as to identify human typology such as in passport
photographs. It has also been used as evidence in police records and
courtrooms. Recent scholars have been interested in photography not as a
record of reality, evidence and traces of the past but rather to
understand its social function and the role photography has played in
‘regulating’ modern societies through its various modes of
representation.

Photographic visuality can be fraught with meaning. For example,
photography can be a platform to analyze the problems of working in a
culture in which the feminine is defined as object for the masculine
gaze. On the other hand, signs of modernity, sexuality and patriarchy,
to site a few, can be identified in photographs to reveal gender, social
and racial issues within a particular community.

Not only can photography provide evidence for the presence of women in
salient historical and social events but it can also serve as a means to
analyze representation strategies and to examine complex gender
relations in a particular context. Furthermore, photography can be read
as a medium that empowers women by representing them as subjects/agents
contrary to the broader representations of women as passive objects in
the photographs.

This special issue of al-Raida on Women & Photography in the Arab World
seeks papers addressing photography as a medium that challenges assumed
gender roles/positions/attributes as seen in the media. It seeks
contributions that examine the practice of women photographers in the
Arab region as well as how women are represented in the photographs from
a variety of perspectives and disciplines including arts,
photo-journalism, history, anthropology, the social sciences and
cultural studies.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

- Re-inventing “women” through photography

- The female as object/subject in the photograph

- Seeing through a woman’s lens

- Female authorship and subjectivity

- Female identity, the construction of self-image through photography

- Photography and feminism

- Visual autobiography through family albums (analog or digital)

- Photography and the archive

- Photography and memory

- Photography and its relationship to the public and the private

- Female desire reflected in photographs

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent by 1 November, 2011,
simultaneously to the following addresses:
myriam.sfeirlau.edu.lb
ynachabegmail.com

All abstracts submitted are reviewed by Al-Raida 's editorial staff and
are subject to its approval.
Once the abstract is approved contributors will have to submit their
paper to an external peer-review process no later than May 1, 2012.
Submissions are accepted in English, Arabic or French.
All non-English submissions will be translated by IWSAW, Institute for
Women’s Studies in the Arab World, and published in English following
the approval of the author.