This course explores the impact of war on women from the Middle East. Students will engage with a variety of feminist and LGBTQ perspectives and disciplinary methodologies, including history, anthropology, film and video, and literature. In Part One, we will study the relationship between gender, colonialism, and national liberation in the context of British and French colonialism in the Middle East with a focus on the cases of Egypt and Algeria. In Part Two, we will study the cases of Palestine/Israel and the Lebanese Civil War in the context of U.S. expansion and the aftermath of the Cold War. In Part Three, we will focus on the significance of gender and sexuality to understandings of the “war on terror” post September 11th. We will focus on the U.S.-war on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq and the backlash against Arab, South Asian, and Muslim immigrant communities in the U.S. We will address the intersections between gender, sexuality, imperialism, and militarism; the significance of representations of gender and Islam to the “war on terror;” and feminist and LGBTQ organizing and resistance to the “war on terror.”