gender - secondary literature Flashcards
Heschel - written documents
- all written documents = male authored
- how can we understand female motivations?
- ‘Were all the women who refrained from entering a synagogue during periods of menstrual “impurity” motivated by a piety born of rabbinic Judaism that imagines menstruation as incompatible with the sanctity of synagogue? Or is it possible that at least some women engaged in a kind of “strike,” taking a vacation from synagogue attendance as long as male-authored laws forbidding marital intimacy during menstrual “impurity” were in force?’
heschel - moments of female agency
- ‘As feminist scholars, we look for traces of liberation in women’s engagement in religion as signs of historical progress, or as explanations for why women were drawn to religions that are, in so many respects, patriarchal and oppressive. Finding moments of agency also reassures us that women were not necessarily willing participants in their own subjugation but were religious agents even when masking their agency in a rhetoric of submission, passivity, and piety. At the very least, we historians are restoring women to agency by writing about them’ (586)
Herschel - danger with feminist history
- ‘The role of the feminist historian is further complicated because the task is not simply one of recovering women’s voices and ascribing agency to women who may emphasize their own submission and passivity but also that of recognizing the limits to feminist historiography and the danger of feminist scholars writing an emancipatory narrative that may distort the reality of women’s lives.’ (590)
rinaldo on mahmood
- ‘Anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s study of Muslim w in Egypt has been especially influential in this regard. She maintains that such women demonstrate a “nonliberal” pious agency as they work to conform to religious ideals and transform themselves into virtuous Muslim subjects. Such agency, according to Mahmood challenges the assumptions of Western feminism. Yet at a time of religious piety among women in many parts of the world, this beg question: Is pious agency necessarily incompatible with feminism women’s rights?’ (825)
rinaldo - turkey
♣ e.g. some women in Turkey choose to veil as resistance against Western ideas of modernity (Göle 1996)
♣ ‘Recent scholarship adds complexity to this perspective by emphasising how religions can simultaneously constrain and empower women. Veiling provides urban Egyptian women greater mobility and access to job also upholds gender norms that define public space as masculine (Macleod 1992)
- should understand agency outside of secular liberal frameworks
rinaldo on Jakarta case study
o rahima = organisation promoting gender equality
o Islamic revival in 1980s in Indonesia – women began wearing veil etc.
o 1998-9, series of bombings after first democratic election
o new generation of pious women emerged
o women involved in Rahima argue that jilbab do not necessarily indicate higher piety. However, others view it as a symbol of political resistance
- islamic piety = used for feminist aims
charrad on turkey
- ‘In 1919, Turkish nationalist Halide Edip unveiled publicly to rally Turks to resist the Greek invasion’ (429)
Saktanber and Corbacioglu, 2008 on irony of agency
to view veiling as a woman’s choice is ironic given these groups are also ‘extremely critical towards the democratic ideals of western modernity’
Fatima Mernissi
Muslim feminist sociologist.
She writes with deliberate intentions of recovering the Islamic past in order to understand women’s rights and counts herself as an insider.
- “Rather than using the ‘experience-distant’ language of either comparative religion or sociology, she uses the ‘experience-near’ language of Islam” – particularly in relation to the hijab.
- “She wishes to make clear to other Muslims that taking up the cause of women’s rights does not place her outside Islamic tradition or Muslim society.”
