Bøger af Fedwa Malti-Douglas

"Speaking in Tongues is a very honest autobiography of a celebrated scholar. Fedwa Malti-Douglas chronicles her life and her struggles from her birth to the present day. Fedwa carries us on a journey that crosses landscapes of sadness, of happiness, of pain and peace, of alienation and acceptance, toward a healing enlargement of the soul. The book is a deeply moving account of her painful but heroic journey from a Christian childhood in a Lebanese village (where her father was a physician and her mother had deserted the family), to teen-age life in Ithaca, New York, where her Cornell professor uncle regularly beat both her and her brother, to a brilliant university career in Middle Eastern Studies, made difficult by the onset of an hereditary muscular dystrophy that Fedwa Malti and her historian husband Alan Douglas have battled with extraordinary bravery. The narrative shows that through all of her hardships, Fedwa retained her sense of humor and optimism, and her love of nature and art"--Publisher description.

The investigation of power, marginality, sex and the body, and "taboo" subjects in this book provide a road into medieval Arabo-Islamic mentalities and a way of coming to grips with the textual strategies society used for grappling with them.

"e;What is this strange book"e; asks Fedwa Malti-Douglas, "e;that can bring the American presidency to its knees?"e; In this probing study of Kenneth W. Starr's influential and historic work, she reveals how The Starr Report exposed the cultural tendencies, desires, and taboos of Americans while it disrobed the most powerful man in the world. Unveiling the political and ideological implications of the report's relentless pursuit of corporeal and prurient detail, Malti-Douglas underscores the document's ground-breaking nature-both for its legal and cultural content. What does the report imply about American values when it repeatedly points to the dates on which trysts occurred? Why does gender seem so unstable in the report? And how do such varied objects as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass or Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon or a Hugo Boss tie or Vox, a novel about phone sex, fit into the legal discourse of the report? Fraught with assumptions about gender and sexuality, the report reflects a strategy to use Clinton's "e;body natural"e; to undermine his "e;body politic."e;

These autobiographic writings of three leading women in the Islamic revival movement reveal dramatic stories of religious transformation. As interpreted by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, the autobiographies provide a powerful portrayal of gender, religion, and discourses of the body in Arabo-Islamic culture.