https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3633-1218
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ABSTRACT
Jordanian women are expected to exemplify the multiple – and sometimes contradictory – values that their families, nations, and faiths espouse. Ethnographies of contemporary Jordan attend to the ways women articulate their own interpretations of what constitutes appropriate female behaviour within the discursive frame of these values. But how do women living within this discursive frame feel about living in, and thinking in, this discursive frame? As women engage with social expectations for female behaviour to consider how they should act, their nuanced considerations resemble the kind of reflection that can be taken as freedom. However, their reflections emphasise the ways in which they feel restricted. This felt unfreedom raises questions about the way relationships and the feelings that arise within them come to bear on ethical reflection.
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Notes
1 I use a simplified transliteration of Arabic here that is intended to preserve the sound of the urban Palestinian/Jordanian dialect spoken in Tal al-Zahra. Diacritics are omitted with the exception of ’ for hamza and ‘ for ayn. Ta marbuta is rendered as -eh rather than -a to reflect actual pronunciation. Readers familiar with this dialect will recognize the initial ‘b’ marking conjugated verbs.
2 A pseudonym.
3 Tal al-Zahra is a pseudonym.
4 Of course, women often did navigate the challenge presented by multiple invitations to actual parties, not only metaphorical ones.
5 The felt unfreedom inspired by society took a very different form than felt unfreedom imposed by religion. The latter was expected to lead to eternal salvation. The former, in contrast, might condemn one to the opposite of eternal salvation. The anxiety of the former, then, was intense in a different and distinct way.
6 This observation arises from my own experience of moving back and forth between the city’s different parts rather than from anything that I heard in Tal al-Zahra. A resident of the posh Abdoun neighbourhood whom I saw often remarked on my mobility across the city’s East/West divide, saying, ‘You lead a double life here in Amman’. It was not uncommon for people to move between the different parts of the city, but since I did so on grounds that appeared more social than professional the appearance was a bit odd.
7 Ruseifa, Jordan’s fourth largest city, borders Amman and is in the neighbouring governorate, Zarqa, where the country’s third-largest city of Zarqa is located. Both cities are known for their religious conservativism, large Palestinian population, and crumbling infrastructure.
8 The Amman-Zarqa-Ruseifa built-up area, a contiguous stretch of urban and peri-urban space that includes the cities of Zarqa and Ruseifa in the neighbouring governorate of Zarqa, is home to half of Jordan’s population (Ababsa Citation2013).
9 This characterisation is Musa Shtewei’s (Citation1996), and refers to Jordanians whose income comes from their labour, rather than from investments, inheritance, or other sources of wealth.
10 Younger women, who married later and often were able to achieve higher levels of education than their mothers, appeared to have more options in the kinds of employment they pursued.
11 Jordan has decriminalized homosexuality, and there are Jordan-based groups who advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. The cancellation of a concert in Amman by the Lebanese band Mashrou‘ Leila, whose lead singer is gay, in June 2017, underlines that the government is at best an inconsistent ally to LGBTQ+ Jordanians. Moreover, LGBTQ+ issues are all but invisible outside of the upper middle class, most of whom live in the capital, Amman. Outside of that group, homosexuality was not recognized as a socially legitimate category. In Tal al-Zahra, homosexuality was invoked in mean-spirited jokes, but no one I knew in that part of the city identified as gay or lesbian or knew anyone who did.
12 Even among this group, most cohabitation arrangements involved Jordanian men dating non-Jordanian women.
13 In educated circles of Jordanians, niswan is considered a less dignified word than nisa’. In Tal al-Zahra, this distinction was less carefully policed, and niswan was used to refer to married women, especially older women.
14 This perception might not correspond with all readers’ pictures of not having a social network. Hana had relatives with her in Amman. Her husband’s brother and his family, and his cousin and her family, lived nearby and visited often, and her mother lived with her. She maintained good relations with the neighbours and they checked in on her, by visiting or on the telephone, every so often. She had arranged a carpool for her daughter to get to school, and the other mother involved visited her on a daily basis. To my eye, she had a robust social network. For her, though, she was separated from the social network she had built since childhood in Baghdad, and she felt lonely at times.
15 Young women fought one another as well, but only in all-female environments. Women fighting in public would invite judgement in a way that young men fighting would not.
16 Christians account for three percent of Jordan’s population, and the dominant religion of Sunni Islam is practiced in different ways by people of different classes, geographical locations, ages, and political orientations. Nevertheless, May’s invocation of religion as a basis for a minimum standard of shared morals shows how central religion was to her and her friends’ notion that they were similar to one another. Christian morality was recognised on a religious basis: followers of the three Abrahamic faiths, or ‘people of the book,’ are considered to share both a god and a prophetic history.