Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Deniz Kandiyoti

Deniz Kandiyoti is a professor emeritus in development studies at SOAS.

Gender, Politics and Scholarship—A Roundtable — A demonstration at the Third World Conference on Women, in Nairobi, Kenya, July 1985. (William F. Campbell/Getty Images)

MER Article

Gender, Politics and Scholarship—A Roundtable

On March 3, 2025, MERIP and the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies partnered with Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies to host a roundtable on the past, present and future of feminist approaches to Middle East and North African Studies. The event

Deniz Kandiyoti, Judith Tucker, Mounira Charrad, Suad Joseph, Maya Mikdashi, Nadje Al-Ali • 23 min read

MER Article

Transsexuals and the Urban Landscape in Istanbul

Few social groups can boast the visibility and media attention that male-to-female transsexuals have received in Turkey in recent years. At one point, hardly a month went by without some feature in a popular magazine or a television interview. The cartoonist Latif Demirci captured this frenzied inte

Deniz Kandiyoti • 5 min read

MER Article

Women, Islam and the State

Most commentary on gender and politics in the Middle East assigns a central place to Islam, but there is little agreement about the analytic weight it carries in accounting for the subordination of women or the role it plays in relation to women’s rights. [1] Using the Qur’an,

Deniz Kandiyoti • 14 min read