Translating Muslim Women's Bodies

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-62
Author(s):  
Alina Isac Alak
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Social Convention ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Object A ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
Feminist Practice

In the chapter, the author briefly analyzes the turbulent semantic and semiotic confrontation that accompanies the process of decoding the significances of the hijāb. The current mythologization of the hijāb unveils diverse mechanisms of constructing and regulating Muslim women's bodies and their right to autonomy. In the first part of this chapter, eight meanings attributed to the hijāb by Muslim interpreters are discussed: a local social convention, a symbol for and a protection from the fitnah of women's bodies, a manifestation of religiosity, a feminist practice, a political statement, a cultural tradition, a subversive strategy of regaining autonomy, an artistic expression. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to some peculiar translations of hijāb that are usually validated by non-Muslim interpreters: hijāb as a religious symbolic object, a symbol of alterity, a sexist cultural manifestation, a reminder of terrorism. The chapter ends with a succinct analysis of the transformation of hijāb into a condensation symbol that manifests a mobilizing emotional power.

Women's Bodies Giving Time for Hospitality

Hypatia ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosalyn Diprose
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Lived Time

This paper explores the gendered and temporal dimensions of the political ontology of hospitality that Derrida has developed from Levinas's philosophy. The claim is that, while hospitality per se takes time, the more that hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time it takes is given by women without acknowledgment or support. The analysis revisits Hannah Arendt's claim that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is disclosure of “natality” (innovation or the birth of the new). This can be described as accounting for the “temporalisation of time”: the disruption of the past (cultural tradition) in the present that is a condition of agency and political hospitality. On the other hand, the unpredictability and instability of human affairs that this temporalization of time engenders can, in times of heightened insecurity and fear, give birth to political conservatism that would contain “natality” and dampen the hospitality that characterizes democratic pluralism. The paper examines the connection between this idea of the temporalization of time and feminist observations, overlooked by Arendt, that “lived time” is gendered, that is, that the condition of “natality” and political hospitality is an unacknowledged stability provided by women giving lived time to others, beginning with reproduction in the “home.” The inequities that result are exacerbated, and democracy is further compromised, if this re-gendering of domestic space is accompanied by the deregularization of labor time.

scholarly journals Teatralidades, espacio comunitario y culturas de la subalternidad

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-92
Author(s):  
José Olivari
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Critical Essay ◽  
Cultural Base

En Latinoamérica y Chile en particular, los sectores populares provienen de una larga, rica y compleja tradición cultural. Salvo excepciones venidas desde la literatura, la expresión artística y el ensayo histórico-crítico, tal “espesor cultural” ha sido contenido y reproducido preferentemente en la experiencia vital de los sujetos mismos, y vehiculizada a través de la llamada tradición oral, y a su vez encarnada en diversas formas de productividad material y simbólica. La necesidad de construir y consolidar una base cultural significante donde puedan reconocerse e interactuar en un marco de tolerancia y valoración simbólica sus distintos sectores, sensibilidades y expresiones, es el marco general de este trabajo que incluya a la ciudadanía en su conjunto, y dentro de ella a los sectores de origen popular, y las culturas regionales, locales y étnicas. In Latin America and Chile in particular, the popular sectors come from a long, rich and complex cultural tradition. Except for exceptions coming from literature, artistic expression and historical-critical essay, such "cultural thickness" has been contained and reproduced preferably in the life experience of the subjects themselves, and conveyed through the so-called oral tradition, and in turn embodied in various forms of material and symbolic productivity. The need to build and consolidate a significant cultural base where they can recognize and interact in a framework of tolerance and symbolic appreciation of their different sectors, sensibilities and expressions, is the general framework of this work that includes citizens as a whole, and within it to sectors of popular origin, and regional, local and ethnic cultures.

Reconstruction of Objects from their Projections Using Orthogonal Functions

1973 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 268-269
Author(s):  
Elrnar Zeitler
Keyword(s):  
Unit Area ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Spatial Density ◽  
Dimensional Representation ◽  
Orthogonal Functions ◽  
Object A ◽  
Plane Normal ◽  
Dimensional Object ◽  
Spatial Density Distribution

Considering any finite three-dimensional object, a “projection” is here defined as a two-dimensional representation of the object's mass per unit area on a plane normal to a given projection axis, here taken as they-axis. Since the object can be seen as being built from parallel, thin slices, the relation between object structure and its projection can be reduced by one dimension. It is assumed that an electron microscope equipped with a tilting stage records the projectionWhere the object has a spatial density distribution p(r,ϕ) within a limiting radius taken to be unity, and the stage is tilted by an angle 9 with respect to the x-axis of the recording plane.

Aristotle's Formal Identity of Intellect and Object: A Solution to the Problem of Modal Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Robert C. Koons
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Modal Epistemology ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Object A ◽  
Formal Identity ◽  
Identity Thesis ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Objects ◽  
Aristotelian Metaphysics

In De Anima Book III, Aristotle subscribed to a theory of formal identity between the human mind and the extra-mental objects of our understanding. This has been one of the most controversial features of Aristotelian metaphysics of the mind. I offer here a defense of the Formal Identity Thesis, based on specifically epistemological arguments about our knowledge of necessary or essential truths.

Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Industry

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.

Active Coeliac: Disassembling Gluten and Coeliac Disease

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 188-205
Author(s):  
Sofia Varino
Keyword(s):  
Coeliac Disease ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Food Additive ◽  
Gluten Free ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Dietary Practices ◽  
Object A ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
New Materialisms

This article follows the trajectories of gluten in the context of Coeliac disease as a gastrointestinal condition managed by lifelong adherence to a gluten-free diet. Oriented by the concept of gluten as an actant (Latour), I engage in an analysis of gluten as a participant in volatile relations of consumption, contact, and contamination across coeliac eating. I ask questions about biomedical knowledge production in the context of everyday dietary practices alongside two current scientific research projects developing gluten-degrading enzymes and gluten-free wheat crops. Following the new materialisms of theorists like Elizabeth A. Wilson, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, I approach gluten as an alloy, an impure object, a hybrid assemblage with self-organizing and disorganizing capacity, not entirely peptide chain nor food additive, not only allergen but also the chewy, sticky substance that gives pizza dough its elastic, malleable consistency. Tracing the trajectories of gluten, this article is a case study of the tricky, slippery capacity of matter to participate in processes of scientific knowledge production.

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