North Africa and France: Imperialism, Colonialism, and Women, 1830–1962

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Clancy-Smith
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Household Economies ◽  
And Gender

The workings of modern empire can better be viewed through the lens of gender because gendered hierarchies illuminate broad, intersecting aspects of the colonial project. Community, kinship, household economies, religion, education, sexuality, social engineering, nationalism, and transnational reform movements were all inflected by imperial patriarchy in various guises. This perspective is especially rich for “French” North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco) from 1830 until 1962 since the region and its peoples were subjected to intense forms of “European” settler colonialism. From the start, the “woman question” assumed particularly fraught and contentious dimensions whose repercussions can be detected even today. Nevertheless, colonial North Africa did not represent a self-enclosed container. Transimperial and global processes shaped the sociopolitical terrain, and in turn. Policies, practices, and resistance in the Maghrib exerted a powerful torque far beyond its limits. Key to understanding women, gender, and settler colonialism is the state of the “archive,” the sprawling corpus of records, writings, words, things, and images left in an empire’s wake. The voices of women, children, and “ordinary” people, those labeled “the colonized,” have until recently been missing in conventional narratives. As Antoinette Burton observed, the archives themselves structure “the conceptual frameworks of women’s and gender history.” In the imperial historical context, the task of recuperating and restoring lost voices is all the more problematic, yet urgent. One might also add that the fundamental question is “whether ‘women’ is a category at all.”

British Women Amateur Filmmakers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes ◽  
Heather Norris Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Remote Communities ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
And Gender ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
Film Making

In the rapidly growing study of amateur film, this groundbreaking book addresses the development of British women's amateur visual practice. Drawing upon social and visual anthropology, imperial and postcolonial studies and British, Commonwealth and gender history, the authors explore how women in Britain and overseas, used the evolving technologies of moving imagery to create visual stories about their lives and times. Locating the making, watching and sharing of women's recreational film-making against wider societal, technological and ideological changes, British Women Amateur Filmmakers discloses how women from varied backgrounds negotiated changing lifestyles, attitudes and opportunities as they created first personal visual narratives about themselves and the world around them. Using non-fictional films and animations, the authors invite readers to view films through different interpretative lens and provide detailed contexts for their case-studies and survey of over forty women amateur filmmakers. Whether in remote communities, suburban homes, castles, missionary or diplomatic enclaves, or simply travelling as intrepid sightseers, women filmed their companions, other people and their surroundings, not only as observers but often displaying agency, autonomy and aesthetic judgment during decades when careers, particularly after marriage, were often denied in film and other professions. Research across Britain on films in private hands and specialist archives, interviews and extensive study of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC's) collections enable the authors to reposition an activity once thought of as overwhelmingly male and middle class.

Травелоги югославских писательниц первой половины ХХ века: в поисках идентичности

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
А. Г. БОДРОВА
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Egyptian Women ◽  
Dialogical Philosophy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Gender Boundaries

The paper considers travelogues of Yugoslav female writers Alma Karlin, Jelena Dimitrijević, Isidora Sekulić, Marica Gregorič Stepančič, Marica Strnad, Luiza Pesjak. These texts created in the first half of the 20th century in Serbian, Slovenian and German are on the periphery of the literary field and, with rare exceptions, do not belong to the canon. The most famous of these authors are Sekulić from Serbia and the German-speaking writer Karlin from Slovenia. Recently, the work of Dimitrijević has also become an object of attention of researchers. Other travelogues writers are almost forgotten. Identity problems, especially national ones, are a constant component of the travelogue genre. During a journey, the author directs his attention to “other / alien” peoples and cultures that can be called foreign to the perceiving consciousness. However, when one perceives the “other”, one inevitably turns to one's “own”, one's own identity. The concept of “own - other / alien”, on which the dialogical philosophy is based (M. Buber, G. Marcel, M. Bakhtin, E. Levinas), implies an understanding of the cultural “own” against the background of the “alien” and at the same time culturally “alien” on the background of “own”. Women's travel has a special status in culture. Even in the first half of the 20th century the woman was given space at home. Going on a journey, especially unaccompanied, was at least unusual for a woman. According to Simone de Beauvoir, a woman in society is “different / other”. Therefore, women's travelogues can be defined as the look of the “other” on the “other / alien”. In this paper, particular attention is paid to the interrelationship of gender, national identities and their conditioning with a cultural and historical context. At the beginning of the 20th century in the Balkans, national identity continues actively to develop and the process of women's emancipation is intensifying. Therefore, the combination of gender and national issues for Yugoslavian female travelogues of this period is especially relevant. Dimitrijević's travelogue Seven Seas and Three Oceans demonstrates this relationship most vividly: “We Serbian women are no less patriotic than Egyptian women... Haven't Serbian women most of the merit that the big Yugoslavia originated from small Serbia?” As a result of this study, the specificity of the national and gender identity constructs in the first half of the 20th century in the analyzed texts is revealed. For this period one can note, on the one hand, the preservation of national and gender boundaries, often supported by stereotypes, on the other hand, there are obvious tendencies towards the erosion of the established gender and national constructs, the mobility of models of gender and national identification as well, largely due to the sociohistorical processes of the time.

Islamic Feminism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Schröter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Islamic Historiography ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Transformation Processes

The aims of Islamic feminism are at once theological and socially reformist. Its proponents are often activists, as well as authors and scholars. It is linked to democratic reform movements within the Islamic world as well as to civil rights movements in Europe and the USA, and is supported by actors who resist the advances of patriarchal religious positions as well as Western secular definitions of modernity. Unlike secular feminists, proponents of Islamic feminism see the justification for their fight for women’s rights and gender equality in their own interpretation of Islam’s sacred text, the statements attributed to the Prophet, and his supposed life circumstances. In addition, they draw on approaches taken from new Islamic historiography. This chapter deals with the foundations of Islamic feminism and its transnational political dimension, and asks in what national and local transformation processes its proponents were able to have an impact.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Free Women

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

scholarly journals Age as a Category of Gender Analysis: Servant Girls, Modern Girls, and Gender in Southeast Asia

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 975-990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Leow
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Single Well ◽  
Complex Landscape ◽  
And Gender

Gail Hershatter's presidential addressat the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.

Gender, History and ‘Small Europe’

2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-700
Author(s):  
Jitka Malečková
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
European History ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
Good Place ◽  
European Dimension ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Gender is a good place from which to start reflections on European history: gender history deliberately transcends borders and, at the same time, demonstrates the difficulties of writing European, or transnational, history. Focusing on recent syntheses of modern European history, both general works and those specifically devoted to gender, the article asks what kind of Europe emerges from the encounter between gender and history. It suggests that the writing of European history includes either Eastern Europe (and, sometimes, the Ottoman Empire) or a gender perspective, but seldom both. Thus, the projects of integrating a European dimension into gender history and gender into European history remain unfinished. The result is a history of a rather ‘small Europe’.

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