New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire Comparative and Global Approaches (original) (raw)
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Syllabus: Theories of Coloniality and Gender (Graduate Seminar)
2022
Course Description: What is the relationship between coloniality and historical and contemporary constructions of gender and sexuality? How are the processes of racialization and gender formation coconstitutive? This seminar takes a critical look at the theoretical intersections of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, race, gender and sexuality by introducing students to foundational and current writing in decolonial thinking, postcolonial studies, transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and Black trans studies. As we explore the debates between postcolonial and decolonial theories, we will examine the major epistemic interventions and possible futures in the study of how empire and race mediate and shape the gender binary. We will also consider what counts as "theory" as we encounter the theoretical implications of novels, short stories, memoirs and political manifestos. Some key theorists we will read include Maria Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Audre Lorde, Jasbir Puar and C. Riley Snorton.
A Journey into Women's Studies
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2014
During 2011-12, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Istanbul. In 2012-13, she became a Humboldt Fellow working on her book project, Gendered Memories of World War I in Turkish Egodocuments and Fiction, in Berlin. She has published extensively on gender and sexuality, nationalism and national myths, Turkish literature and autobiographies, the Ottoman Armenians in Turkish egodocuments and fiction. With Erika Glassen, she is the editor of Hundert Jahre Türkei: Zeitzeugen Erzaehlen (Turkey), an anthology on the cultural history of Turkey explored through multifarious memoirs, autobiographies, articles and fiction. She is also the editor (with Ayşe Gül Altınay, Esin Düzel and Nilgün Bayraktar) of the book of monologues on women's sexuality in Turkey: işte böyle güzelim. .. (See also http://myweb.sabanciuniv.edu/hadak/su\_yayinlar/ for bibliographic references.
MSc Gender History Option: Gender and Empire: Contested Meanings and Divergent Practices
Drawing on recent historical research that introduced gender as an analytical concept into the study of empire, this course seeks to explore a variety of discourses and practices that forged the notions of masculinities and femininities in imperial consciousness and redefined the roles of men and women in colonised societies. Moving between pre-colonial, colonial and contemporary times, the course examines the continuities and changes in gender relations in the context of the variety of economic, social and cultural systems which developed in Africa, India and Australasia.
The course explores women’s contributions to global history and contemporary society between c. 1800 and 1950. Explaining why women’s history exists and why it complicates our understanding of the past, the course critically engages with debates about the role played by women across time, space and cultures. Using family structure, gender ideology, racial and social hierarchy as analytical lenses, it considers key developments in the history of the modern world – and in the particular in the colonial world – that are still largely analysed through a masculine lens such as industrialisation, nationalism and colonialism. Other thematic foci are the emergence of feminist movements and the role of women in the birth control movement and eugenics; women’s activism in social reform and colonial ‘civilising missions’ with a focus on their role as medical doctors and scientific experts; women’s achievements in the scientific and academic fields and how these contributed to challenge the ideology of gender. Using primary sources and secondary material and considering the intersections existing between gender, race, class and ethnicity, students will reflect on how gender and sexuality have been socially and culturally constructed by global historical developments into different and historically shifting systems of power relations, and have, in turn, shaped structures, institutions and events.
This chapter examines the significance of gender and 'race' for female-Jewish anthropologists in the context of Nazism in Vienna. By focusing on two anthropologists, Eugenie Goldstern and Marianne Schmidl, I propose that they died a 'triple death': their social-professional death as a result of anti-Semitism and racism was followed by physical death by assassination in a Polish concentration camp. Subsequently, however, they died an 'institutional death' by being 'forgotten', neglected and ignored in their professional field, anthropology, for an extended period of time. It is argued that their 'institutional death' largely corresponds with the organisation of academia and anthropology, areas that require more critical reflection.
Book Forum: History Matters by Judith M. Bennett
Journal of Women's History, 2008
A t a conference on African women's studies held in the early 1990s, the virtual absence of interest in the past was striking. As speakers from across the continent outlined the state of research in their respective countries, history was mentioned rarely, and then only as a hypothetical baseline for change. At the time, I attributed this divide between history and activism to the dependence of African universities and their scholarly activities on funding from present-oriented development agencies. Yet reading Judith Bennett's provocative, wide-ranging new book, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, has convinced me that African feminists are not alone in their inattention to history. Whether the key to mending this divide lies in focusing on the history of patriarchy and the "patriarchal equilibrium," as Bennett proposes for Western feminism, is not as clear. African women's history developed in a different context than the history of women and gender in Europe and the United States. Relatively new as an accepted academic field, African history grew rapidly in the late 1950s and early 1960s as former colonies discarded the bonds of over a half century of foreign rule. Like all national entities, these emerging countries tied their legitimacy in part to a reimagined past, both precolonial and colonial. With a natural tendency to build an identity around ideas of unity, nationalist historical writings rarely entertained the idea of "women" as a social category, ignoring the abundant evidence of African women's activist and organizational strength in many parts of the continent. An interest in women as historical actors developed only in the early 1970s from the cross-fertilization of feminism, the general growth of women's history as a field of scholarly inquiry, and an interest in women and development sparked by Ester Boserup's pathbreaking 1970 study, Woman's Role in Economic Development. 1 In response to Boserup's bold hypotheses, many researchers designed local and regional studies to investigate her ideas more closely. Most important for Africa were two core themes: colonialism and imperialism had led to a decline in women's status, and in Book Forum: Iris Berger 2008 131 most societies, women farmers played central economic roles. At a time when feminists in Europe and the United States were grappling with the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres that had siphoned women out of public life and into the household, an understanding of Africa's different legacy (and how it changed under colonial rule) helped to mold a new era of historical research. Relying on Boserup's model that traced women's subordination to colonialism, many of these accounts portrayed precolonial Africa as a "golden age" of gender equity tarnished by the abrasive effects of colonialism and capitalism. Unlike the glorification of medieval Europe Bennett highlights, this idealization of precolonial gender relations was short-lived. From its expansion in the 1970s, African women's history has developed in ways that parallel women's history in the United States and Europe, while also reflecting trends particular to African historiography. Similar to women's history elsewhere, a compensatory concern with forgotten heroines-queen mothers, merchant princesses, spirit mediums, and participants in resistance struggles-yielded to an interest in peasant and working-class women (under the strong influence of Marxist-feminism and underdevelopment theory), and later to a focus on the meaning of gender in African historical contexts. 2 Rather than attributing women's oppression and inequality primarily to colonialism, the newer works began to explore the "entanglement" of indigenous and external patriarchies, often arguing that new regimes of domination emerged from the collusion of colonial officials and African male elders. 3 More recent studies have continued to challenge mainstream scholarship in new ways, both by proposing revisionist women-centered narratives on such key topics as the emergence of African nationalism and by foregrounding such issues of central concern to women as motherhood, sexuality, and childbirth, rather than perceiving them as dependent variables of other socioeconomic changes. 4 The vitality of African women's history since the 1970s notwithstanding, unlike in Europe and the United States, large numbers of women's activists on the continent did not consider themselves feminists, dismissing feminism as a Western import with little relevance to southern African liberation movements or to poor women's daily struggles for survival. While many African scholars have now embraced a feminist identity, the interest in history is more mixed. 5 The pioneering journal Feminist Africa (launched in 2002), published by the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, confirms Bennett's point on the gap between feminism and history. The journal's website describes it as "the first journal on gender with a continental focus" whose aim is to promote African discourses on the gendered implications of "African political, educational, cultural and historical concerns" in the humanities and social sciences. 6 Yet the "history" in its articles rarely transcends the postcolonial past. 7 The few exceptions