Politics of critique: Understanding gender in contemporary Middle East

•Urges reflexive attention to spatial production of critical knowledge.•Underscores how critiques of “the exotic Muslim woman” discourse expose racisms in the West.•Invites attention to the implications of these critiques in places with different power inequalities.•Calls for closer attention to political construction of cultures and cultural differences.•Highlights the need to make the “exotic” seem familiar without exoticizing the familiar. This paper explores the implications of spatial production of academic knowledge on the Middle East, through the critiques of Orientalist discourses on the “Muslim woman.” It begins with an examination of the success of postcolonial studies and scholarship on democratization in challenging racist perceptions and politics in the West. Then it reflects on the ways in which this knowledge production travels and is reconfigured in places where power inequalities are different. This requires a consideration of the regional consequences of either an over-emphasis on differences in agencies of “Muslim women” or a relative silence on issues of gender inequality. The paper’s suggestion is to shift the focus from representation and discourse to the structural circumstances in which ordinary men and women’s agencies play out; various political mechanisms which participate in the production of acceptable cultural practices; and patterns of resistance, which may defy arguments about culturally specific definitions of agency. This is a quest for making the “exotic” familiar, without exoticizing the familiar.