Introduction: Women, Wars and Weapons: Mapping the Cultural Battlefield of Ba‘thist Iraq
2020 ◽
pp. 1-22
Keyword(s):
W hen Saddam Hussein infamously proclaimed that the word and the bullet came from the same barrel, he created an embattled cultural space which would persist because of, and in spite of, his dominance of Iraqi politics for almost twenty-five years. This book is not an analysis of the status of women in Iraq under Saddam Hussein; nor is it exclusively about Iraqi women writers inside or outside the country, or about constructions of gender and gender identity. Instead the focus of the book is, to use the words of Abir Hamdar, on the ‘ongoing struggle for symbolic power in the Arab world’....