Women, Islam and the State
Abstract
Political projects of modern nation-states, the specificities of their nationalist histories and the positioning of Islam vis-a-vis diverse nationalisms are addressed in this volume with respect to their implications and consequences for women through a series of case studies.
Chapters (7)
It is commonly conceded that among Muslim nations Turkey distinguishes herself by comprehensive, and as yet unparalleled, reforms with respect to the emancipation of women. These reforms, initiated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, were part of a spate of legislation which amounted to a radical break with Ottoman Islam and its institutions. World War I had resulted in the dismemberment of the defeated empire and the occupation of the Anatolian provinces by the Allied powers. The active hostility of the last Ottoman Sultan-Caliph to Kemal’s nationalist struggle in Anatolia, and his collaboration with the Allies, culminated in the abolition of the Sultanate by the Ankara government in 1922. The Turkish Republic was proclaimed on 29 October 1923. A few days earlier, on 24 October, the Istanbul head of police had taken an administrative decision desegregating public transport, so that men and women would no longer be separated by curtains or special compartments. Thereafter, a systematic onslaught on Ottoman institutions took place.
There are two periods in modern Iranian history in which the terms of the ‘woman question’ (mas’ale-ye zan) have been shaped as a central part of an emerging climate of political ideas and social concerns. The first, in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century, ushered in the era of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’, an era during which, despite an underlying animosity towards European intrusion, Europe’s social and political achievements provided the model for modernity and progress. It was generally thought the intrusion itself could be resisted through becoming like the European Other. The ‘woman question’, meaning the now problematic place of women in a modern society, was for the first time posed in that context. The second period, from the mid-1960s to the present time, marks the rejection of the previous paradigm and the creation, reappropriation, and redefinition of a new Islamic political alternative.1
The relationship between women and the state in Pakistan has been both compelling and paradoxical. After nearly a decade of state-sponsored attempts at stifling women’s voices in the public arenas and pushing back the boundaries of their social visibility, Pakistan has become the first state in the Islamic world to have a woman prime minister. A state media which until yesterday poured scorn upon articulate and assertive women is today faithfully and respectfully projecting the voice and person of Benazir Bhutto. In so far as the role of women in Muslim societies has symbolic connotations, it is tempting to see Benazir Bhutto’s advent as something of a psychological ‘revolution’. A Western cartoonist hinted as much while portraying her in an impish mood asking a line of attendants veiled from head to toe: ‘How do you like your new outfits, Gentlemen?’1
This chapter examines the process through which communal identities have been created in India and its implications for women. It argues that processes affecting Muslim women in India cannot be understood in isolation but must be set in the broader context of communalism, emerging fundamentalism and the dynamics of the relation between the post-colonial state, capitalist development and patriarchal control.
Investigation of the relationships among women, families, religions and states in the Middle East has been stimulated in part by the problematisation of the concepts of ‘women’,2 ‘the family’,3 ‘religion’,4 and ‘the state’5 in political sociology, anthropology and feminist scholarship. The rethinking of these concepts has produced a body of case studies mainly focused on individual countries and with a contemporary emphasis. This has been a necessary process for building the empirical foundations for comparative and theoretical endeavours.
In Egypt the ‘woman question’ has been a contested domain involving feminists, Islamists, and the state. This chapter explores their competing discourses and agenda in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt and how they have shifted over time.1 Divergent discourses arose in the context of modern state and class formation, and economic and political confrontation with the West. These multiple discourses have been sustained in strikingly different political and economic cultures as state and society continually negotiate changing realities.
No discussion of state policies towards Islam and women would be complete without consideration of how attempts at socialist transformation have affected Muslim Societies.1 While the great majority of the world’s Muslims have lived under regimes opposed to socialism, there have been a significant number of cases in which revolutionary socialist states have ruled over Muslim populations. This has been true for the sizeable Muslim minorities in the USSR and China, and for two third-world states committed in the 1980s to a form of revolutionary change, officially termed ‘socialist orientation’, Afghanistan and the PDRY, where the populations were almost entirely Muslim. Between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of the population of what was one of the most important other ‘socialist oriented’ states, namely Ethiopia, was also Muslim. This commitment to revolutionary change turned out to be temporary: by 1990 all three ‘socialist-oriented’ states — Afghanistan, the PDRY, and Ethiopia — had abandoned their earlier policies. Their records of social transformation nonetheless merit informed analysis, if only because of the impact these policies had. Whatever the eventual fate of socialism and ‘socialist orientation’ it would appear that in the 1980s at least, between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of the world’s Muslims lived under socialist or ‘socialist-oriented’ regimes.
... The codes govern men's and women's behaviour and rights, such as divorce, marriage and inheritance. While there is great religious diversity in personal status codes across the region, some basic similarities emerge, particularly in the way that nationhood is integrally tied to patriarchy (Kandiyoti 1991). The patriarchal norms embedded within personal status codes demonstrate the centrality of male privilege as established and justified through Islam (Ahmed 1992: 242). ...
... In addition, there was strong political tension and public debate around the necessity of reform, particularly between liberal feminists and progressives and the far right and Islamists, who claimed that the charge to reform was culturally inauthentic. The notion of cultural authenticity has been discussed in depth by Deniz Kandiyoti (1991), who highlights the way in which Western colonial projects in Muslim societies created tensions around family and cultural values, specifically those relating to women. The opposition was incredibly persuasive and barred reform from taking place for many years. ...
... Thus, the aim of this study is to approach this already acknowledged impact of social media -mainly blogging-on self-formation practices from the perspective of women in a patriarchal country like Turkey. As the studies of prominent Turkish feminist scholars indicate, patriarchy is embedded in the laws, state institutions and social norms of Turkey, affecting women's self-formation in private, socio-economic and political life (Kandiyoti, 1991;Kogacioglu, 2004). There are many determining factors of women's economic empowerment including, the welfare state policies in Turkey, family-oriented care regime-based on the patriarchal male breadwinner model (Ilkkaracan, 2012;Kılıç, 2008) and the confinement of women to traditional gender roles (Dedeoğlu, 2012). ...
This study investigates the blogosphere in Turkey from a gendered perspective, focusing on how blogging reshapes women’s cultural and social environment. Based on a quantitative approach, a snowballing survey method is conducted, to explore the spaces within which women seek “self-realization,” “self-formation” and “publicity” in the digital world, particularly, through the practice of blogging. There are two main questions that undergird this project: “Do women, performing in social media, unintentionally become subjugated to a form of exploitation and alienation, as the literature on digital labor suggests?” “Is hope labor is influential in female bloggers’ blog usage and content writing? Research findings demonstrate that these women, while constructing their identities as bloggers, incorporate to the neoliberal restructuring of Turkey via articulation of blogging with the global market system. Although blogs provide employment opportunities and economic gains, main motivation behind women’s blogging practices remain to be self-realization and self-fulfillment, leaving hope labor less influential in blog writing. Traditional views like unemployed women participate to public sphere via blogging activities wriggling out of their inherited gender roles also remain to be an over determination since employed women feel more emancipated through blogging.
... Even if women play key roles in the armed and political resistance, patriarchal systems that predated independence struggles tend to be further entrenched by war and militarism and women are often pushed back into the private sphere post-conflict (White, 2007: 864). The debate whether nationalism is a hindrance to feminist activism or if nationalisms can enable women's movements engages scholars to this day (Abu-Lughod, 1993Al-Ali and Tas, 2018a;Chatterjee, 1993;Cockburn, 1998Cockburn, , 2007Jayawardena, 1986;Kandiyoti, 1991;O'Keefe, 2013). ...
The Cambridge History of the Kurds is an authoritative and comprehensive volume exploring the social, political and economic features, forces and evolution amongst the Kurds, and in the region known as Kurdistan, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Written in a clear and accessible style by leading scholars in the field, the chapters survey key issues and themes vital to any understanding of the Kurds and Kurdistan including Kurdish language; Kurdish art, culture and literature; Kurdistan in the age of empires; political, social and religious movements in Kurdistan; and domestic political developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other chapters on gender, diaspora, political economy, tribes, cinema and folklore offer fresh perspectives on the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as neatly meeting an exigent need in Middle Eastern studies. Situating contemporary developments taking place in Kurdish-majority regions within broader histories of the region, it forms a definitive survey of the history of the Kurds and Kurdistan.
... Notes 1. It is important to note here that this Christian hegemony was in line with a gendered enforced secular-religious binary, one that was common across postcolonial settings (Al-Ali 2000;Kandiyoti 1991). This remains beyond the scope of this paper, see Maldonado-Torres (2014). ...
Informed by the theorization of the modernity/(de)coloniality studies collective, this paper thinks alongside hijabi women in Lebanon – a small Arab Mediterranean country – and their lived experiences in “mainstream Lebanese society”. Drawing on six-months of qualitative fieldwork through in-depth interviews and focus groups with photo-elicitation, the paper documents and analyses lived experiences of discrimination, exclusion and erasure. Identifying dehumanization, civility and progress, and a present potent wider rejection of Islam in Lebanon, it argues for a framing of participant’s shared experiences as anti-Muslim racism under modernity/coloniality and highlights the need to de-exceptionalize the region and the analytical tools mobilized to understand it.
... There is a range of literature relating to the relationship between traditional attitudes and social norms and gender-based constraints on female participation in the labour market in Bangladesh geographically and culturally Bangladesh may be located in what is referred to in gender studies literatures as the 'patriarchal belt' (Caldwell, 1982;Kandiyoti, 1988Kandiyoti, : 1991. Despite significant progress in facilitating access to education for girls Bangladesh is considered a patriarchal society (Littrell & Bertsc, 2013). ...
Bangladesh has the highest overall ranking in Asia for gender equality (World Economic Forum 2017). The tourism industry is frequently promoted as a global driver for the economic empowerment of women (UNWTO 2010). The aim of this research is to examine if a gender gap exists in the domestic tourism industry in Cox's Bazaar. Bangladesh has a large domestic tourism sector centered on the Cox's Bazar district. This paper analyses labour market participation by female residents of Cox's Bazar in the (i) hotel and (ii) restaurant sectors. A mixed methodology approach is employed. Quantitative techniques are used to analyse gender differentials in labour market participation. A qualitative approach using interviews is used to identify factors contributing to the gender gap. The results of the research indicate low levels of representation by women in workforce in the hotel and restaurants sector. The research indicates that the key causes of this gender gap are social norms, the concept of gendered spaces, harassment in the workplace and lack of access to training opportunities. This research aims to contribute to knowledge relating to the gender dimension of tourism and specifically the relationship between the tourism industry participations and gender equality in Bangladesh
... It is argued that the relative position of Muslim women and their 'Islamic norms' is embedded in 'post-independence trajectories of modern states' and variations in Islam linked to 'different nationalisms, state ideologies and oppositional social movements' (Kandiyoti 1991). In Somalia, new Islamic norms that emerged in the late 1990s clashed with parallel contradictory trends in women's roles in society that had begun during the civil war when women 'acquired new importance as merchants, providers, and heads of families' as a result of the absence of men (Bryden and Steiner 1998: 4). ...
... Modesty codes regulate women's dress and behavior. As a woman, I must conform to modesty principles to guard and protect my honor and my family honor to avoid stigma (Banihani & Syed, 2017;Kandiyoti, 1991). ...
Intersectionality allows better understanding of the differences between individuals’ experiences. In this paper, I use intersectionality to explore how my lived experience of marginalisation is different from one context to another. I reflect on how the nature of intersectionality and the intensity of oppression are altered by context. Grounded in a brief reflection of my fragmented experience in two different contexts, I explore how my identities and their intersection ‘mutate’ from the Egyptian context to the UK context. Then, I reflect on how the intensity of oppression changed with this alteration in my intersectionality. In
contextualising my intersectional experience, first I problematise viewing intersectionality as a fixed acontextual ontology. Second, as a student immigrant and racialised minority in the UK, I seek to extend intersectionality and move beyond the traditional categories of race,
class, gender, religion, and sexuality to include precarity as a pivotal social category that amplifies the intensity of oppression and marginalisation, especially when intersected with race and gender. Finally, in sharing my reflection as a Middle Eastern woman, I contribute my unique experiences into the conversation, and a voice that has been muted, invisibled, marginalised and excluded from the literature.
... Given the patriarchal nature of the country, insufficient female education, lack of social security and income gap between men and women, female labor force participation has been a problem. As feminist scholars indicate, patriarchy is embedded in the laws, state institutions and social norms of Turkey, affecting women's self-formation in private, socio-economic and political life (Kandiyoti 1991, Kogacioglu 2004). Many factors determine women's economic empowerment including the welfare state policies in Turkey, family-oriented care regime-based on the patriarchal male breadwinner model (Ilkkaracan 2012, Kılıç 2008) and the confinement of women to traditional gender roles (Dedeoğlu 2012). ...
This paper is about the preliminary ethnographic fieldwork of a work-in progress conducted on the female blogging practices and the female blogosphere in Turkey, focusing specifically on how blogging reshapes women's cultural and social environment. The study attempts to understand the role of blogging as a medium in women's self-formation processes and explore how female bloggers construct their identities via online media representations and negotiate disclosure, fame and labor in an age of extreme self-display. Based on an anthropological approach, the study explores the spaces within which women seek "self-realization", "publicity" and "employment opportunities" in the digital world, particularly, through the practice of blogging. Taking female blogosphere as a field, the study examines how blog production is manifested in Turkey, through the female bloggers' struggle for hope. Preliminary research demonstrates that blogging acts as a medium of hope for many female bloggers. Given the heterogeneous nature of female blogosphere, experiencing this hope shows differences. At times, upper mobility opportunities are expected, but sometimes hope is realized to provide feelings like happiness, appreciation, self-realization and usefulness. Networking and socialization opportunities are also other motivations of bloggers. The aim of the study is to see how these women use blogging as a media practice to explain themselves in social media platforms. Thus, through the framework of hope (Hage 2004), relatability (Kanai 2019), fame and visibility notions, material formation of identities, the nature of labor production in blogs, the construction of female subjectivities within celebrity culture will also be discussed.
... Türkiye'deki kadın çalışmalarında özellikle dindar kadınlar, sürekli olarak, "denetim", "aşk", "özgürlük" ve "toplumsal cinsiyet" gibi ödünç alınmış terimlerin sağladığı bir sığınağın içerisine sığdırılmaya çalışılırlar. Bu konuda Nilüfer Göle'nin, Aynur İlyasoğlu'nun ve başkalarının çalışmaları arasında herhangi bir farklılık görünmemektedir ( Göle, 1991;İlyasoğlu, 1994;Kandiyoti, 1991). Buralarda daima ötekileştirilen bir islam hukuku iddiasından hareket edilir ve Alain Touraine ve Michel Foucault'ya bağlı kalınarak, insan olmalarına müsaade edilmeyen dindar kadınların aydınlanma yolundaki özgürlük sorunları dile getirilir (Türkmen, 2009:130-156). ...
Muslim women who are forcibly displaced from their homophobic parent culture are further oppressed within the structures of Islamophobia in the host culture. Discursive re-imaginations based on their Islamic authenticity have skewed them as either veiled or unveiled women from other homogeneous ethnic cultures. Such cursory representations have cemented perceptions about them as outsiders and so a source of constant threat. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to aid discursive reconfigurations of partial representations affecting transculturally or forcibly displaced Muslim women at the intersections of racial, gender or religious persecutions. Through a reading of the life-narratives by similarly displaced Muslim women in the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa, this article examines two key questions: 1) How do these women negate discursive conceptions of single stories? 2) How do they reach a unique discourse that addresses such partial representations? The article proposes heterotopia and hypomnemata as two transversal possibilities. Heterotopias are worlds within worlds which mirror what is outside. They can contain differences and undesirable bodies. Whereas hypomnemata refers to personal notes used for later reading and meditation. There has been little work bringing together the transcultural and the transversal. While the transcultural is a system of thought that conceives of cultures as an ongoing flux of confluences,[1] transversality endorses plural possibilities. It offers tools to deterritorialize closed logics.[2] This article therefore calls for revisiting the collaborative dynamics of these concepts as contested through the life-narratives of displaced Muslim women. [1] Arianna Dagnino, ‘Manifesto for a Transcultural Humanism’, (2014) <https://blogs.ubc.ca/ariannadagnino/research/manifesto-for-a-transcultural-humanism> [Accessed 27 May, 2022]. [2] Gary Genosko, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2002), p.55.
In the MENA region, women still get fewer opportunities than men in regard to facilities that help journalists improve their skills, as well as having less access in the hierarchies of the media and continue to be discriminated at large across the region’s newsrooms. Many female journalists continue to be treated differently and to be seen, by many men in position of editorial power, as not capable of producing work of as high a quality as men do. Furthermore, some news sources avoid giving information to female journalists because they do not believe in their journalistic abilities, especially when the woman mentions her name on the news. In this chapter, the authors explore gender imbalance in the region and how this affects the overall reach and quality of science journalism. Women practising journalism do so in the context in which they also face additional challenges and problems relating specifically to the activities they carry out when reporting STEM news. Overall, the empowerment of women in journalism in Arab countries still faces important challenges that range from lack of professional autonomy, limited access to sources, absence of appropriate training and education towards specialisation and lack of economic incentives. There are undoubtedly common issues that one can observe across the region in which issues such as culture and politics play a central role in shaping gender and participation in the gathering and production of science news in MENA.
Literature on women’s economic empowerment argues that women’s income builds resilience and leads to reduction in intimate partner violence (IPV). We challenge this by showing a positive (statistically) insignificant link between women’s economic status and IPV, but significant positive links between women’s economic contribution and IPV, and men’s intergenerational violent behaviour and IPV. Based on a sample of 553 married women drawn from Nepal, we find that paid or precarious work is positively but insignificantly associated with IPV. Findings however reveal that after controlling for other factors, women contributing equally or more to household income are significantly at higher risks of IPV. Similarly, if a man has witnessed domestic violence while growing up, he is more likely to commit violence within his own marriage. We therefore argue for the need to transform men’s attitude and behaviours through targeted programmes to break the cycle of violence.
El texto presenta una introducción temática a los debates propuestos en el artículo “Dilemas feministas: ¿Cómo hablar de violencia de género en Medio Oriente?” de Nadje Al-Ali desde una perspectiva latinoamericana. Se presentan conceptos y definiciones para el abordaje de la construcción patriarcal de esa región y la influencia del colonialismo en la construcción de los Estados-nación. Complementariamente, se recogen cuestiones relativas a la preminencia de la familia y la religión, así como su influencia en las posibilidades de participación política de las mujeres para destacar, finalmente, el rol fundamental de las organizaciones feministas en la transformación de la sociedad.
Women’s political leadership is one of the abiding controversial issues among Muslim scholars. The question of whether a Muslim woman can lead in her country is generally answered negatively by Muslim scholars, but some modern scholars explicitly support women’s political leadership without any restriction. Where the scholars stand on the issue is influenced by their social context. With the intent of examining the interaction between social context and Islamic legal methodologies in fatwās —Isalmic legal opinions—related to women, the author discusses as exemplary texts the fatwās issued by two well-known religious institutions, the Dār al-Iftā’ in Saudi Arabia and the Diyanet in Turkey. The institutions function in different social contexts: Saudi Arabia is a theocratic monarchy that applies Islamic law; Turkey is a democratic country whose legal system is based on a secular law. Through a detailed analysis of the spatio-temporal fatwās regarding women’s political leadership, the author provides insight into the influence of contextual elements during the process of issuing fatwās , suggesting that these differences of opinion among Muslim scholars and religious institutions will continue.
This study examined the characteristics of class activism in a community college as demonstrated by single mothers, first-generation students from peripheral regions. Building on theories of class and intersectionality, we wished to understand the ways in which single mothers conceptualize their experience in academia, as individuals and as a group, and which coping mechanisms they, as a marginal group, employ. The study utilized a qualitative methodology of semi-structured interviews to examine the coping strategies and class-group creation process by the single mothers in a special academic program designed for underprivileged populations. The findings suggest that the single-mother students in the program managed to find their own voice in a space initially foreign to them. They managed to create a class-based group and consciousness, develop critical thinking patterns through their studies, form connections with senior officials and utilize their unique position to better serve their own interests. This paper offers a new perspective in examining the processes of class awareness construction in groups that have been traditionally excluded from the academic sphere. The findings in our research contribute to the discourse on class definition, particularly of the lower classes and their introduction into spaces that have been undergoing change in the neo-liberal age.
This article evaluates the concept of ‘emotivescapes’ as a way of addressing digitally emotional processes of belonging among conflict-generated diasporas. It examines the empirical potential of the concept based on the Sahrawi refugee diaspora in Spain and Mauritania and the connection of its members with their ‘home-camps’ in Algeria. To this end, the article explores everyday digital media practices that reveal the circulation of emotions among the Sahrawi community outside of the refugee camps at the intersection of intimate, community, and national spheres. The research focuses on the experiences of 32 women, considers Sahrawi gender roles, and argues for enriching emotional debates in the diaspora space. The findings demonstrate how female media practices in protracted situations of displacement are negotiated through emotional attachments in not only direct social interactions but also memories and imaginations that are reformulated from the intimate to the national levels.
Although violence against women is widespread, its frequency—and responses to it—vary from country to country. The Thomson Reuters Foundation (2018) Annual Poll indicates that the most dangerous countries for women to live in, in terms of being subjected to
aggressive treatment, are India, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Nigeria, and the United States of America. It might be suggested that the majority of these countries with the exception of the US tend to share such features as: the preservation of patriarchal norms, which entails male privilege and gender inequality; high poverty levels, which implies unemployment; corruption; and a weak education system (Conant 2019; Olowoniye 2020). While Kazakhstan is not listed in this unfortunate ranking, domestic violence remains an all-too-common tradition that remains to be addressed properly by the authorities.
Diese Dissertation untersucht die Auswirkungen der Vertreibung auf die Geschlechterrollen und -beziehungen bei syrischen Flüchtlingsfamilien im Libanon und in Deutschland. Sie basiert auf einer achtzehnmonatigen ethnografischen Feldforschung, die zwischen 2017 und 2019 durchgeführt wurde. Die wichtigsten Fragestellungen, die diese Studie geleitet haben, sind wie folgt: Welche Art von Geschlechterrollen- und Beziehungstransformationen erleben syrische Familien im Libanon und in Deutschland? Wie verhandeln syrische Männer und Frauen Beziehungen in der Vertreibung neu? Können unterschiedliche Fluchtsituationen ähnliche Erfahrungen erzeugen? Es wird die These aufgestellt, dass syrische Familien aufgrund der besonderen rechtlichen und bürokratischen Bedingungen im Libanon und in Deutschland eine langwierig-vorübergehende Vertreibung erleben. Dieser Bereich wird als Liminalität konzipiert, einen nichtstrukturellen Kontext, der alternative Dimensionen der „Agency“ ermöglicht. Für jede Fallstudie werden vier Typologien von Transformationen in Geschlechterrollen und -beziehungen bestimmt und anschließend analysiert, wie syrische Männer und Frauen diese neu verhandelt haben. Abschließend werden beide Situationen des Flüchtlingsdaseins verglichen und vorgeschlagen, dass drei Dimensionen der Agency in diesem Schwellenbereich aufgedeckt werden können - eine iterative Dimension, in der die Agency in Richtung Vergangenheit positioniert ist; eine projektive Dimension, die die Agency auf die Zukunft ausrichtet und eine praktische Bewertungsdimension, in der situative Urteile unter konkreten Umständen in einen Kontext gesetzt werden. Diese Dissertation liefert drei Beiträge: Auf theoretischer Ebene verwendete sie die Agency als Linse zur Analyse der Geschlechterverhältnisse bei Zwangsmigration; auf methodischer Ebene verwendet sie eine relationale Perspektive, um verflochtene Beziehungszusammenstellungen zu untersuchen, und auf empirischer Ebene werden zwei Vertreibungssituationen vergleichend analysiert.
Based on extensive interviews and oral histories as well as archival sources, Women and the Islamic Republic challenges the dominant masculine theorizations of state-making in post-revolutionary Iran. Shirin Saeidi demonstrates that despite the Islamic Republic's non-democratic structures, multiple forms of citizenship have developed in post-revolutionary Iran. This finding destabilizes the binary formulation of democratization and authoritarianism which has not only dominated investigations of Iran, but also regime categorizations in political science more broadly. As non-elite Iranian women negotiate or engage with the state's gendered citizenry regime, the Islamic Republic is forced to remake, oftentimes haphazardly, its citizenry agenda. The book demonstrates how women remake their rights, responsibilities, and statuses during everyday life to condition the state-making process in Iran, showing women's everyday resistance to the state-making process.
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Republic in 1923 under the rule of Atatürk and his Republican People's Party, Turkey embarked on extensive social, economic, cultural and administrative modernization programs which would lay the foundations for modern day Turkey. The Power of the People shows that the ordinary people shaped the social and political change of Turkey as much as Atatürk's strong spurt of modernization. Adopting a broader conception of politics, focusing on daily interactions between the state and society and using untapped archival sources, Murat Metinsoy reveals how rural and urban people coped with the state policies, local oppression, exploitation, and adverse conditions wrought by the Great Depression through diverse everyday survival and resistance strategies. Showing how the people's daily practices and beliefs survived and outweighed the modernizing elite's projects, this book gives new insights into the social and historical origins of Turkey's backslide to conservative and Islamist politics, demonstrating that the making of modern Turkey was an outcome of intersection between the modernization and the people's responses to it.
This article examines women’s lives, scholarship, and memory in premodern Morocco through the life of Umm Hani al-ʿAbdusi (d. 1456). Biographical sources describe Umm Hani as a faqīha (legal scholar), placing her in an elite category of women who engaged with Islamic law at the level of legal interpretation. Tracing Umm Hani’s inclusion in biographical works over 500 years, this study demonstrates the respected space she occupied in these collections, as well as how her memorialisation evolved in the late twentieth century, reflecting the increased interest in women’s historical participation in Moroccan society. Rather than discounting the traces preserved in the sources as evidence of women’s lack of participation, this study argues that we should take these glimpses as hints at what might have been, what women’s lives and learning could have looked like outside of the biographical mentions recorded by men and institutional structures dominated by male scholars. Moreover, Umm Hani’s preservation in the sources stakes out a precedent for women’s interpretive authority in Islamic law in the premodern Islamic world.
An anthology of 11 texts by foreign authors, both classic and new, written for this collection, gathered in three parts: "Family and kinship", "Gender and the nation, state and tribal organization", "Gender in the postcolonial world". The book contains both theoretical articles and texts analyzing the results of ethnographic field research in various parts of the world.
This article examines the relationship between space and transnational Turkic identity in Sevinc Çokum's novel, Hilal Görününce (1984; The Crimean Times, 2015), published in the early 1980s when a deep-rooted social change began in Turkey. This article draws attention to the role of the hinterland of the Ottoman Empire in how the author used distant Turkic communities to construct a Tatar national identity among ethnic Tatars in Turkey, utilizing geography and linguistic, historical, and blood ties. By imagining a community based in both tangible and intangible cultural spaces, the novel nurtures a cultural identity of the Turkic community and highlights the trauma that was created by mass migration from the periphery of the Ottoman Empire to Anatolia. The novel additionally integrates Turkish identity into a broader Turkic identity. I argue that the author makes the sites and spaces in Crimea familiar to a Turkish audience while mirroring transnational Turkish identity.
Im Zuge tiefgreifender Umbrüche ist der Vordere Orient fundamental politisch in Un-Ordnung geraten. Auch die patriarchale Geschlechterordnung geriet unter Druck und ist teilweise erodiert. Frauenrechte werden in der Krise zum machtpolitisch umkämpften Terrain, auf dem autoritäre Regime, regionale, substaatliche und transnationale Kräfte um Legitimität und Kontrolle wetteifern. Frauenbewegungen sehen sich mit vielfältigen Strategien ‚maskulinistischer Restauration‘ konfrontiert. Am Beispiel des Irak analysiert der Beitrag in historisch-struktureller Perspektive, wie Geschlechterpolitik im autoritär zentralisierenden Staat des alten Regimes wie auch im fragmentierten konfessionalistisch verengten politischen System im ‚neuen Irak‘ herrschaftspolitisch instrumentalisiert wird und Frauenrechte jeweils strategisch erweitert oder eingeschränkt werden. Die innen- wie die geschlechterpolitischen Dynamiken im neuen Irak sind eng mit regionalen und internationalen Machtkämpfen verwoben.
This essay takes the growing popularity of “hijab/refugee porn” in the West as a point of departure to revisit the historical feminist debate on pornography. While Catharine MacKinnon criticizes pornography as an eroticization of violence and advocates state intervention, Judith Butler warns of the dangers of state censorship, alternatively proposing nonjuridical forms of opposition. Instead of taking up unequivocal positions for or against the state, this essay addresses the political costs of evacuating the state as a site of redress of racial and sexual injustice and examines the risks of state phobia for postcolonial queer--feminist politics.
Labor markets are still heavily gendered everywhere, even when women's participation in the labor market is greater now than at any other time in history. Existing research shows poor women's participation in the informal economy is higher than men's in many parts of the Global South. However, this is not the case in Bangladesh. Poor Muslim women's participation, particularly where they require access to public space, is lower than men due to persistent patriarchal norms, reflected in social and religious expectations of women. Drawing on interview data with female street vendors from a slum in Dhaka, this article explores the dynamics of social and religious norms that constrain poor Muslim women's access to public space to earn income. This article contributes to the literature on gender, religion, and work by highlighting that the parochial realm offers a safer space for operating businesses without breaking social norms and by arguing that poor Muslim women experience social and religious barriers rather than legal ones. Non-legal barriers are more amenable to change as a result, which is important for empowering women.
Extending the theoretical framework of gender boundaries, this research investigates female programmers’ IT practices and identity negotiations in a Chinese context. Based on a one-and-half year fieldwork in Shenzhen, China, the article generates a typology of the different identities female programmers have employed in and out of their IT work performance. It is argued that female programmers strategically address diverse and sometimes contradictory identities in their negotiation with gender and technology boundaries. The fluid and shifting gender identities of female programmers may allow them to readjust the gender boundaries and to pose challenges to the patriarchal social arrangement, even if overall male-dominant situations persist.
The events that followed the revolution of 25 January 2011 demonstrated the tenacity and resilience of gendered dissent and its centrality to collective action and civil disobedience, thus enriching the transnational feminist archive with the experiences and praxis of gendered revolutionary action. Paying particular attention to women’s activism during the uprisings in Egypt, this article focuses on the broader themes of gendered political resistance and the intersections of gender ideology, state policing, Islamism and militarism with protest and collective action. The aim is to take count of the challenges and gains of gendered resistance and women’s political participation during times of political upheaval.
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