'REAL BEDOUIN WORDS': ORALITY, MORAL AUTHORITY, AND BEDOUIN WOMEN'S POETRY IN CONTEMPORARY JORDAN

Jordanian Bedouin women performing Arabic Nabati poetry use oral and 'masculine' poetic genres to communicate politically with a wide audience, as the poetry's distance from women's personal lives preserves their modesty and morality as Bedouin women while providing a means of challenging their exclusion from public life. By focusing on individual poets and poetesses2 and their works within a dispersed international community, locating content and performance in its social setting, I examine poetry as a category-constructing practice where the gendering of expression and moral authority may be contested and reconfigured.