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ajnabieh(I love this icon; it's a photo I took of a store on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge. The store sells clothing; a mixture of hijab/jilbab combinations and standard outer-borough, low-income, body-revealing clothing: Baby Phat, tank tops, short skirts...it's a great example of the ways in which fusions of different norms and practices happen in diasporic communities.)
I'm teaching an online class right now called The Middle East in Diaspora at my university. It's a full-credit class, and I have a mix of students from both our traditional small liberal arts college and our non-traditional BA program. Teaching online is...a thing. It's got problems and benefits which I won't go into here, though I might later if folks are interested. Suffice it to say that I'm looking forward to teaching face-to-face in the fall.
Anyway, this week we began our unit on gender and feminism in Middle Eastern diasporas. Every week, I begin the class by posting lecture notes, laying out some framework for analyzing the week's readings. I think two of the things I put in my lecture notes this week were particularly useful, and I wanted to share them with this blog. This is the first time I've written them down in exactly this form, but they're principles I take to be core to my personal study of gender in the Middle East and in Middle Eastern communities elsewhere.
The first thing is a set of key assumptions that I assume at the beginning of any of my research. They're things I'm happy to defend, but that I also want to take as background and agreed.
The second is a section on the "symbolic centrality" of gender to conflicts between Middle Eastern diasporic communities and their host societies (or between the Middle East and the West, for that matter).
It felt good to write this down, and get it on paper. I can see myself using the first set of assumptions (altered out of the diasporic framework) as a starting point in my fall class on Gender and Politics in the Middle East. I'm not certain where I'll use the second text again, but even working through it concretely is useful for when I want to develop this contrast again. (And, as I have a whole chapter on gender in Arab New York to write, I'll most certainly be developing it again.)
I also had to write down the distinction between the "women" and "gender" frameworks for talking about gender injustice and the life experiences of women and men, as well as different frameworks for writing about men as men and not as the human default; I'm less satisfied with how I teased that out, though I hope it got through to my students. We'll see...
I'm teaching an online class right now called The Middle East in Diaspora at my university. It's a full-credit class, and I have a mix of students from both our traditional small liberal arts college and our non-traditional BA program. Teaching online is...a thing. It's got problems and benefits which I won't go into here, though I might later if folks are interested. Suffice it to say that I'm looking forward to teaching face-to-face in the fall.
Anyway, this week we began our unit on gender and feminism in Middle Eastern diasporas. Every week, I begin the class by posting lecture notes, laying out some framework for analyzing the week's readings. I think two of the things I put in my lecture notes this week were particularly useful, and I wanted to share them with this blog. This is the first time I've written them down in exactly this form, but they're principles I take to be core to my personal study of gender in the Middle East and in Middle Eastern communities elsewhere.
The first thing is a set of key assumptions that I assume at the beginning of any of my research. They're things I'm happy to defend, but that I also want to take as background and agreed.
Throughout this section, I am proceeding with the following assumptions:
1) That there are real gender injustices experienced by women in Middle Eastern diasporic communities.
2) That those injustices have multiple and complex causes, which include constructions of gender roles in Middle Eastern communities, constructions of gender roles in receiving countries, and discriminatory attitudes towards Middle Easterners in receiving countries.
3) That the gender injustices experienced in Middle Eastern communities are not inherently 'worse,' more severe, or more endemic than those in other communities and sub-communities in the receiving countries, but that they do have specific elements that mean it makes sense to treat them collectively.
4) That feminism and a Middle Eastern identity are not mutually exclusive.
5) That there are multiple equally valid ways of being a feminist, and that differences between Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern diasporic feminisms and Western feminisms does not mean that one of them is "not feminism" or "bad feminism."
The second is a section on the "symbolic centrality" of gender to conflicts between Middle Eastern diasporic communities and their host societies (or between the Middle East and the West, for that matter).
The title of this week is "the symbolic centrality of gender." What do I mean with that title? To be simplistic: gender is a key area of contestation between Middle Eastern diasporic and majority communities in the West, and one that is frequently seized up by those who want to highlight the differences and incompatibilities of the two groups. Gender matters not just to those of us who are interested in it for itself, but for anyone studying conflicts between Middle Eastern communities and majorities: it's core to all the ongoing political conflicts we're interested in here.
There are several tropes here. The first is that the gender constructions of Middle Eastern communities are completely and totally 'other' than Western constructions. Women are to be confined to their homes, deprived of movement, denied access to the public sphere; they are compelled to cover their bodies, to be subservient and silent to others, to be apart from men at all times. Now, with my own, American critical feminist eye, I'd like to note that many of these have strong parallels in American gender constructions: the assumption that women do the majority of care work, that women who are dressed provocatively are "asking" for sexual harassment and assault, that women who speak too much in classrooms or boardrooms are pushy bitches. I'd argue that Middle Eastern gender constructions are different than Western ones; though they share some ideological elements (unsurprising, given the common base of cultural elements shared on both sides of the Mediterranean--there's been a lot of traffic back and forth through the years), their particular instantiation is different.
The second is the idea that the gender constructions of Middle Eastern communities are incommensurable, and inherently worse, than their Western analogues. Middle Eastern women, particularly Muslims, are terribly, horribly oppressed: by their culture, by their religion, by their fathers, husbands, and brothers. This oppression is directly and linearly tied to their identities. If they were to leave their families, their religion, their culture, they would inherently become free. Again, I'd like to destabilize this: plenty of non-Muslim, non-Middle Eastern women are also oppressed by the gender constructions they are subject to. "Honor crimes" (the killing of women and girls for violating gender norms in ways that are seen to undermine the honor and respectability of the woman and her family) sound a whole lot like domestic violence to me; lots of family structures have differential expectations for their male and female members; equality in child-rearing, waged work, and unpaid household labor are a long way off for most people. What's happening here is that these oppressions are called an effect of culture, not of, say, the overarching patriarchal framework of most human societies.
The way these two discourses are put to work is plain. The idea that "they" have entirely different gender norms ends up marking Middle Eastern communities as unassimilable, unable to be incorporated into a general liberal consensus, unable to be made a part of the norm, unless they give up entirely on their culture. The idea that "their" norms are worse by several degrees of magnitude than ours--that theirs are unsupportable and terrible--ends up allowing mainstream communities to label Middle Eastern diasporas as wrong, terrible, frightening--groups that shouldn't be allowed to bring any of their own identities into daily life.
As I've tried to do here, I think we can destabilize these notions by talking about the continuities between Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern women's experiences. Without erasing the differences, the specificity of the experiences of many different types of women with systems of gender, I think we can find ways to treat them as different species of the same thing, not totally foreign objects. (This requires being convinced that all is not perfect for women in the contemporary West. I have no problem believing that, having spent the past *coughcoughmumble* years being a woman in the West.) Nevertheless, understanding the way these constructions are deployed is essential to understanding the way that Middle Eastern diasporic communities are othered in the political discourses in their countries of residence.
It felt good to write this down, and get it on paper. I can see myself using the first set of assumptions (altered out of the diasporic framework) as a starting point in my fall class on Gender and Politics in the Middle East. I'm not certain where I'll use the second text again, but even working through it concretely is useful for when I want to develop this contrast again. (And, as I have a whole chapter on gender in Arab New York to write, I'll most certainly be developing it again.)
I also had to write down the distinction between the "women" and "gender" frameworks for talking about gender injustice and the life experiences of women and men, as well as different frameworks for writing about men as men and not as the human default; I'm less satisfied with how I teased that out, though I hope it got through to my students. We'll see...