Andrea Fischer-Tahir:
Brave men, pretty women? Gender and symbolic violence in Iraqi Kurdish urban society

This book is a pleasant change from the recent streams of books on Iraqi Kurdistan that are focused almost exclusively on political developments.

Andrea Fischer-Tahir describes the daily practices of well-educated middle-class men and women and identifies concepts of masculinity and femininity as negotiated in social discourse. She discusses phrases and incidents of everyday-life that at first sight seem innocent enough but are then shown to exemplify typical cases of symbolic violence.