Abstract :
When I was asked to participate in this forum, I thought it was clear what I was getting myself into. As [then] Acting Director of the Institute for Women s Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW) and a media scholar, I thought this was going to be a presentation on media and gender, the intersection of two fields I am quite familiar with from an academic perspective. Easy, I thought. However, when I talked a few weeks ago with Ms. Nakash concerning the details of the presentation, she explained that she expected something personal. I wasn t so sure anymore. Not because I can t be personal, but because I have never done that in public, especially in relation to politics. This is indeed one situation, I thought, where I was not sure I wanted the personal to be political, no offence to sister feminists intended
