Week 12

I am listening to the audiobook the Argonauts by Maggie Nelson right now in which she discusses the question of an individuals role in challenging heteronormativity. As a woman in a queer relationship, Nelson asks how wanting a family and love can both reify heteronormative ideals as well as disrupt them, and it is often unclear which is leading. She uses the example of a pregnancy, which she identifies as a radically intimate act that reimagines intimacy and identity through the body. And yet, is a pregnant woman still always participating in the sanctioned reproductive role for women? She also nods to the dilemma that straight people fret that queerness is dismantling society: marriage, family, love. And yet queer people fret that queerness as it is practiced will not be enough to break these systems down. This is where my mind was when I arrived at the Puar reading. Puar asks, in part, how queerness becomes sanitized so that it can reinforce national culture, and at times, heterosexuality. Another part of what Puar points to, however, is how queerness is racialized. I think what Nelson misses in part is how the seeming choice to participate or not participate in heteronormativity (or at least narrate choices in that way), may only be available to her because she is white. Muslim womanhood, especially motherhood, may already be queer in a way that it threatens the future that white America has envisioned for itself. Especially as Puar meditates on the question of giving and enfolding life on the last page, this example of pregnancy seems pertinent.

Week 11: Logic of likeness

A couple of months ago, I watched a BBC documentary called Wilders, Europe’s Most Dangerous Man?, which reviews the political life of the far-right wing party leader --Greet Wilders. His party, “The Party of Freedom” was established in 2006 in the Netherlands and is known for its vocal Islamophobic tropes against Muslim immigrant populations in Europe and generally for its promotion of the so called fundamental Islamic threat over the world. This movie follows Wilders’s election campaign and his ongoing trial for incitement of hate. The movie also sheds light on the short hatemongering movie that was written by Wilders in 2008 called Fitna. This movie encompasses Wilders’s ideology and some of the ideas circulating amongst far-right groups in Europe. In the movie Fitna verses from the Quran are cited with the objective of proving Islam is a threat, generalizing Muslim extremist discourse claiming it is shared by all Muslims and presenting Muslim immigration as a means of war. Furthermore, this movie shows pictures of hanged individuals that were supposedly punished for committing homosexual acts in Iran. These kinds of pictures are meant to present the treatment of homosexuals in Islam. As Scott Long suggests, the use of these kind of pictures in Fitna, is intended to create a form of Logic of Likeness on western viewers. Long claims that Wilders and the movement outrage! attempt to take advantage of the struggle against treatment of homosexuals in order to promote Islamophobia. 

Long’s criticism regarding the movie of Fitna has strengthened my opinion regarding whether it is necessary that movies such as Fitna be available for viewers online. This question was discussed by Emram Qureshi in his article "Misreading the Arab Mind" regarding the book of Patai, The Arab Mind. Qureshi cites a number of scholars regarding the benefits of using Patai’s book in academic circles. He examines weather citing Patai’s book can help refute his ideas or rather this proliferates them. I agree with statement of the article that it is better to use Patai’s work as a negative example of “anti-text”. Rather than disregard this type of literature, it is beneficial for students to learn how Patai’s book, like Fitna, is incredibly dangerous. 

 

Wilders, Europe’s Most Dangerous Man? part 1:

week 10/11

I watched the first half of A Jihad for Love. The early scene between the religious leader and Muslim gay self-help professional was really striking to me when he reinterprets the scene in Sodom and Gomorrah as a scene of rape. This moment is so crucial in condemning sexuality across the three major religions, I was surprised I had never heard this interpretation before, that perhaps the transgression was the violence and imposition of unwanted sex, not the gendering of the sex. The film also really personalized religion. The most emotionally wrenching part I think is the woman who is Iranian but comes to visit her girlfriend in Paris, but hopes to someday be relieved of her homosexuality through devotion. She even mentions making a pilgrimage as a way to stop feeling what she feels. I thought of my own Catholic upbringing and how sinning and guilt were personally processed. Within my family and the churches I attended, by and large, the belief was that many many things are condemned in the Bible, and many of them are agreed by church officials to be non-sensical. So long as you had faith in God, you would be saved, and avoiding sin was merely a way to communicate to others you were a believer and is the rational behavior if you do believe. Obviously, the people in the film relate to their religion differently and I think on of the large differences is highlighted in Mahmood's Politics of Piety and the role of self fashioning that she characterizes in Islam but not Christianity. And yet many of them also believed that if God is perfect, and he made me like this, I must be meant to be this way. I suppose more than anything, this film highlights the diversity of ways that gayness is experienced by Muslims in different places.

The film did seem to lean into the Massad's Gay International in some ways. It also heterosexualizes much of the Middle East by being filmed in large part in Paris, making Paris seem like the place that is safe for gays while the Middle East (Egypt and Iran are named) are hostile to gayness.

The counter to the Gay International is the idea that the "homosexual" identity was a historically specific idea that makes it difficult to compare sexual regimes across place and time. I was really drawn to page 19 where Najmabadi pushes Foucaudian thinking back. Most of the time, it seems like scholars take for granted that Foucault “got it right,” but Najmabadi argues that he did in someways, but his thinking about homosexuality also limits other modes of thinking. Specifically, saying that homosexuality is an identity category that emerged in a historically specific moment in the West makes it seem as though in other places and other times, same-sex acts and same-sex desire must have been divorced — since these times and places had not been exposed to the category of the homosexual. This push back I find really compelling but I also don’t know how to properly grapple with it. Should academics thus go hunt for the “existence” of a homosexual in premodern moments? This seems fraught because on our hunt we have to bring with us our preconceived notions of what we are looking for. Do we acknowledge that this identity likely existed in some form across history but allow it to rest at that? 

A Jihad for Love - Thinking of Intersectionality

I thoroughly enjoyed watching A Jihad for Love and gaining a better understanding of the struggles of trying to exist as a member of the LGBTQ+ community while being Muslim. As a proud believer in intersectionality and expressing every part of our identity as a culmination of ourselves, I was challenged by the consistent question presented in the documentary of whether or not one can be Muslim and gay/lesbian. This reminded me of a previous short video I had watched on YouTube titled "When will it be accepted to be Muslim and gay?" where a live audience and panel tackle the issue of homosexuality and Islam.

Link to Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05YuF73FRG8

Longer Version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6E2Q4INbmM

The biggest takeaway from these clips is that there while many may claim that there is a "mainstream", as described by one of the female audience members, take on homosexuality in Islam, there exists a lot of diversity of opinion and debate. Even when just discussing the issue of interpretation and modernity/liberalism in Islam, there is tension between people who believe that the Qur'an is to be read as-is and those who are willing to take more liberty to contextualize and reframe what is written. This connects to what A Jihad for Love touches on with the idea of ijtihad, translating to effort in English according to Britannica, which encourages the "right to exercise such original thinking:". I believe that ijtihad can be very beneficial for the Muslim community as a whole because I think it will challenge us to deconstruct patriarchal and heteronormative institutions within what is believed to be "mainstream" Islamic thought.

Even so, I think the Muslim community lacks general visibility of LGBTQ+ Muslims so I think in order to start the dialogue, the representation needs to exist. A Jihad for Love is an excellent example of uplifting these stories and struggles, but we also need to hear the stories of other LGBTQ+ Muslims in other careers/platforms. I think about people like Blair Imani who is a social media mogul of not just being a Black Muslim hijabi but also being Bisexual. Her presence alone can help to start the conversation of homosexuality and Islam by forcing the community to acknowledge the presence of LGBTQ+ Muslims.

However, I am not a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and visibility itself is a privilege that I take for granted because I can speak about my Muslim identity in a way that those who are LGBTQ+ may not be able to out of fear. As portrayed in A Jihad for Love, the mere act of coming out or actively being LGBTQ+ in Muslim countries can put the lives and families of people at risk. Just as there needs to be a conversation had on homosexuality and Islam, there also needs to be a Muslim community willing to listen.

Week 10 & 11: Mashrou Leila

The week’s reading and the movie Jihad for Love reminded me of the controversy regarding one of my favorite music bands – Mashrou Leila, a very popular Lebanese rock/indie band. I became familiar with this band after a friend of mine recommend their music. She also added, that this band not only produces great music, but also, protests for equal rights for the gay community in Lebanon. I found a unique musical and artistic group that creates great music (even for people that do not know a lot of Arabic or even none) and memorable video clips. I was also curios about the political side of the band that my friend told me about and read about the debates surrounding the content of their songs. In its very short life (created in 2008) the band had already had its fair share of political and religious controversies in the Middle East. The first and most known one is the band’s performance in Lebanon, where the lead singer, Hamed Sinno, waved the Rainbow Flag in front of the audience. This resulted in cancelation of several shows and music festivals featuring the band in Jordan and in Lebanon. These “controversies” made the band not only famous for its music, but also for being a symbol of a progressive political voice in the Middle East. Was that what the band wanted in the first place? In an interview, Hamed Sinno claims that he feels a burden, being portrayed as the sole voice of the Middle Eastern LGBTQ community. His biggest criticism is toward western media coverage that depicts the band as exceptional in its message – “It can’t be that absurd to the western imagination that there are many liberal Arabs inclined towards gender and sexual diversity.” 

Mashrou Leila Imm el Jacket live performance:

Western treatment of homosexuals in the Middle East is also criticized by Massad. Massad’s main criticism is pointed towards some western scholars and to the idea of “the international gay struggle”. As Massad argues, “the international gay struggle” is a notion that put gay men and women in one universal group that face the same problems. “The international gay struggle” is a political effort that divides the world to people how support gay rights and people who do not. The idea of the international gay struggle stems from an orientalist point of view that some male western scholars hold. According to them, the west possesses the knowledge of the problems that gay men and women face in Muslim countries and the solution that could help liberate the repressed gay community in Muslim countries. 

The struggle for achieving more rights in Muslim countries can be seen in the movie Jihad for love. This movie sheds light on stories of different gay Muslim men and women from all around the world that try to achieve acceptance for their sexual identity together with their Muslim identity. Their struggle exhibits the many different ways of protesting against the current treatment of Muslim gay communities. Their stories bolster the claim that Mashrou Leila is not an exceptional case.        

Link to the interview with the band - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/31/mashrou-leila-byblos-festival-concert-cancelled-after-pressure-from-christian-groups

Conflicting Masculinities

Yesterday, after I finished reading the Jacob’s study of Effendi Masculinity – a new species of masculinity that evolved out of an emerging bourgeois class in an attempt to create an indigenous modernity in Egypt – I get up to walk a bit and take a break. Naturally, under self-imposed quarantine, my options for where I can walk are somewhat limited, so I take to pacing the living room.

In any case, I find my father there and sit with him. For whatever reason, the conversation between us comes to my father’s brief time in the military, as part of the mandatory 2.5-year service required of all males in Syria. When he’s finished sharing, I ask why his parents hadn’t paid badal, a payment issued to the government to relieve males of their 2.5-year military duties. The option seemed like an obvious choice to me for anyone if funds were available. His response was that badal hadn’t existed at the time, and complained that even if there had been, his parents probably would have sent him anyway, so he could “become a man.”

To become a man. To undergo a process of turning into something else, something not necessarily who or what you are fundamentally.

I kind of like it when our language betrays the nature of how we might actually understand things. To “become” a man means that “man” is something created, fashioned by circumstance, certain features, signifiers, etc. This interpellated understanding of gender is a basis of gender theory, of course, so I am not gonna beat it over the head, but it was interesting to see how we always seem to implicitly recognize this. Even people who chose to rely on a bioessentialist view of gender will recognize it in the language they use since people “become” or are “made into” men. The moment reminded me of a song from one of my favorite movies as a child, Mulan (of course it would be a movie featuring a gender-bending heroine). Give it a listen. Sing along if you’d like, even. But it’s the title that’s what’s interesting here. The man training the troops tells his audience, “I’ll make a man out of you”. Turn these troops into men! In the army! Quite manly indeed, what with the physical bravado, honor and discipline it all entails.

The military as an agent in “creating the man” is somewhat similar to the formation of a modern-masculinity that we saw in Jacobs’ “Scouting, Freedom and Violence”, in which he discusses the first Egyptian boy’s scout as a “technology” used to create a modern masculinity. The other piece we read by Jacob, “Effending Masculinity” also examines the production of another modern masculinity, through the birth of a petit bourgeois Effendi class. This breed of “modern” man is rather different. Jacob explicitly notes how it seemed to diverge from the “warrior-hero” ideal of masculinity, which was even deified to an extent by the genealogical connection it was given to the prophet. This warrior masculinity did not disappear, as is evident in my father recounting his parent’s belief in the creation of a man through military service, or the song’s similar tilt. However, this category of “man” was different enough from the Effendi masculinity to warrant the creation of a new genealogy that connected the Effendi archetype to the prophet in order to legitimize its construction. And yet Effendi masculinity and warrior masculinity still coexist. The former did not replace the later, despite the former’s deviance from an existing narrative. And despite this deviance, both archetypes are still recognized as masculine.

What are the necessary-and-sufficient elements needed to create a masculinity in a “modern” country? Is it in the overlap of the warrior-hero and effendi, both of whom are providers and protectors with a disciplined demeanor? What ties a more archaic form of masculinity with the “modern” one, birthed in response to a very different set of conditions? I also wonder what “feminine” responses of postcolonial nations to exploitative world systems look like/could look like, seeing as how resistance is framed as a masculine enterprise. How do we move beyond the restrictions that this binary "masculine-feminin" axis present to begin with? 

P.S. Since I already brought up Mulan, it's interesting to read it in this longer tradition of female heroines earning respect and securing victory by perform masculinity. The movie then reverses this narrative and allows Mulan to be an "authentic" heroine, not a heroine in disguise. I think that by the end, the film does a pretty good job for a kid's movie at presenting a non-binaried resistance that isn't "fighting through masculinity" nor "through femininity" but I can't continue talking about the queerness of Mulan in this blog post as well. 

Maybe another one.

Week 9 - cultural threat

The engagement with the week’s readings reminded me of a study I came across before the break in another course I am taking this semester. A field experiment done in Germany was meant to test social norms and discrimination against immigrants. In this experiment, the researchers create a realistic “microenvironment” designed to observe the degree of assistance offered to women. Some of whom were supposed to fit the physical appearance of a “native” white German, and some were supposed to fit the physical appearance of Middle Eastern immigrants. The immigrant group in the experiment was divided to three different conditions. The first one was a non-white immigrant with no religious signs, the second was an immigrant with a cross and the third was an immigrant wearing a hijab. The results of this experiment provide evidence of non-statistically significant bias against immigrants and a strong statistical bias towards females wearing hijabs. As the study shows, the researchers argue that the “religious difference” between the natives and the immigrants is what promoted increased bias. Despite the many limitations in this type of experiment, reading the researcher’s argument for the first time made sense to me. As the hijab has religious connotation, it is plausible that religious difference is what drove the negative attitude towards women wearing a hijab in the experiment. But, after reading the piece by Louise Cainkar, I interpreted the results of this experiment in a different way. Cainkar argues that women wearing a hijab in a suburban area near Chicago were targeted after the events of 9/11 due to people seeing them as a cultural threat. She further explains that women wearing a hijab suffered more harassment than Muslim males because Arab Muslim men “did not live up to the stereotypes of being violent”. Though the experiment does not look at how "native" Germans treat male Middle Eastern immigrants, it provides reinforcement to Cainkar’s claim. 

In this experiment, the control group that consists of white and German speaking women are defined as native. The notion of native and nativism is explored by Cainkar as the motivation for aggression against women wearing a hijab. As she explains, in the United States, nativism is a collective fear and the zeal to destroy enemies of the “American way of life”. Profiling the group of white German speakers as “native” is a built-in misconception that makes it clear that the designers of the experiment hold. 

The aggression against women wearing a hijab by local mobs is part of a “culture war”. This figurative war led by people who believe that a hijab is a symbol of repression of women and thus represents the opposite of freedom. The notion of freedom also comes up in the text of Sima Shakhsari. As she points out, Canadian main-stream media focuses on the supposedly sexual revolution that is promoted by Iranian female bloggers living in western countries. As Shakhsari claims, though some of those bloggers write about a variety of issues, Canadian main-stream media seems to take a particular interest in anything related to their sexuality. When Iranian diaspora female bloggers write about sex, this is interpreted as expression of freedom and liberation. The effort of the media to represent these women as free relates to a western feminist idea that because these women are living in the western world, they enjoy more freedom than they would have enjoyed in a non-western country. The focus of media on the sexuality of women specifically also relates to the idea of femininity and its link with sexual expression. Shakhsari argues that sexual expression by women is wrongly interpreted as a feminine way of resistance- “The term, ‘sexual revolution’, as a form of resistance to the repressive Iranian ‘regime’”.       

Link to the research - https://www.pnas.org/content/116/33/16274

  

This week we read two autobiographical graphic novels about young girls growing up in the Middle East. Both girls narrate their lives through similar themes of family, education, independence, and lurking political turmoil that often interrupts their narratives. 

I was thinking about these books in relationship to the recent headlines about Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg meeting in the UK last week. The meeting was symbolic to many of a universal girl struggle. Malala is known for being shot in 2012 on a school bus in Pakistan by an extremist who opposed girls education. Greta has risen to fame in the past year for refusing to attend school to protest for legislators to start listening to scientists and take urgent action on climate change. While at surface level, it seems like Malala is in favor of education in a way Greta is not, Greta’s speeches emphasize that she wants to learn and have a future but that the climate crisis denies her a future to make the education meaningful. Thus, we see, her demand is for the legislators to fix the climate crisis so that she can do what young girls ought to be doing — going to school. The two icons share similar values of education and this motivates them to speak out against patriarchal oppressors.

The graphic novels in some ways succeed in resisting Orientalist stereotypes in narrowing in on one story, with all of its complexity. I think what the graphic novels accomplish well is showing that there is in fact barbaric violence within “Islamic Societies” but they do not characterize the entire population. For example, in Persepolis, Marji’s mom encourages her to forgive her school friend whose father participated in the torture of political dissidents (46). Later, when family friends are recounting stories of their personal experience of torture, Marji’s mother modifies her position and tells Marji “Bad people are dangerous but forgiving them is too. Don’t worry, there is justice on Earth.” These conflicting positions regarding Justice and forgiveness highlight the fogginess that accompanies normative opinions. Academic writing, which always seeks to abstract and generalize, can create moral bright lines for the sake of analytical clarity, but these bright lines often do not neatly map onto real life. This moral mapping is a task that creative projects and memoirs can handle with more nuance.

Yet, like Malala, there is a tendency to neutralize the politics of girls’ education as common sense, which I don’t disagree with, but frames Western education (which both girls in Persepolis and Growing up in Turkey participate in) as a universal good. Malala becomes not just a protagonist in her own story but a symbol of a Muslim girl rising out of Islamic oppression into Western enlightenment. In Growing up in Turkey, at one point Ozge is hit by her teacher and her mother dismisses it as common practice (53). The reader is compelled to empathize with Ozge who is horrified, and schemes many ways to destroy the pink ruler to erase the memory of violence (55). Ozge talks about how her university, by contrast, is modeled after Western education and thus, conducted in English. Ozge notes how some of her friends critique this, but the comic make the critic (Hakan) look crazy. He says “You are like Americans…All you care about is finding a high paying job. You don’t care about the politics of Turkey. You only fight for your space in the school’s parking lot” to which Pelin responds “None of us have a car” (140). This makes the critique of the Western university seem vapid and manic, as though Hakan is being silly.

In class I would love to discuss more:

The stories present narratives of how unmarried women are trapped in Iran and Turkey. How might this interact with last weeks readings about the Western “universal” desire for autonomy, and education as a tool towards that value?

What is significant about the form of the graphic novel? I am thinking about the Homi Bhabha quote in the Abu Lughod reading that “access to any sort of real “tradition” has been made impossible by the historical cultural encounter with the West” (261). Might forms like the graphic novel carve out important new intellectual spaces for thinking about experiences in the non-West? Especially if the audience is white? 

Week 8 Blog Post

CW: Child Abuse

Özge Samanci’s Dare to Disappoint is a compelling story, that it feels almost wrong to call it “creative nonfiction.” Creative nonfiction has the connotation of not being completely real, a sense that things may be a tad bit made up. Dare to Disappoint is a fast and easy read, but there is depth within the illustrations and the captions. Recently, as I’ve been thinking about my own creative process and my relation to the world, I’ve been contemplating how to “Write About Family” (there’s a whole course at Yale devoted to it). How do you recreate a world that you intend to share that is authentic, and acknowledges the complexity of your lived experience?

In her search for authenticity, Samanci turns to her math notes and her poster of Jacques Cousteau. This is something that resonates with me, because I’ve found that what drives me and gives me direction in life are not the “I should” thoughts that come from family, friends, outsiders, or what I “think” the world expects of me, but the places and spaces and activities that I give my energy to and are fulfilling for me. It’s what makes her title so powerful--understanding the system and structure that you are socialized into, and realizing that finding your own path does not have to equal a rejection of those who love and support you. 

Reading this also brought to mind three other memoir-like things that explore this relationship between authenticity and writing about family: The Broke Diaries by Angela Nissel, A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer, and Ugly by Constance Briscoe. 

Broke Diaries by Angela Nissel originally came from a series of blog posts that she wrote throughout college, but it is also a story about race, class and gender throughout time. It is both a collection of snapshots of Philadelphia in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and a historiography of racial identity formations in the United States. Like Samanci who balances her interests in art and theater with pride and a sense of duty, Nissel wrestles with majoring in medical anthropology to appease those “back home” and pursuing her creative interests. These works cannot be constrained to one category, which I find beautiful.

Dave Pelzer’s and Constance Briscoe’s books deal with much heavier content than Angela Nissel’s Broke Diaries. Both were severely abused and neglected by their various parents, guardians, and caretakers. But the purpose of these books is not necessarily to share pain or perpetuate trauma (Well, for A Child Called It that might not be completely true--the validity of his experiences have been questioned). Nor are they neatly packaged stories that promise to reveal something uplifting about society. They are a collection of experiences and reveal authenticity in the most brutal way, and are ultimately projects about writing about family.

I think for me, I’d like to know the role she expects her art to play in the world. Why does she feel like her life is worth sharing, in this way? What does she feel like her drawings contribute to her narrative, or what do they encompass that words could not say?

Blog 1: Comparing the Artistic Choices and Gender Analyses of Greta Gerwig, Özge Samancı, and Marjane Satrapi

A few weeks ago I saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. I was so excited to see the movie that I read the book for the first time in probably 10 years over winter break. Maybe it was because, after reading numerous articles about the end of the movie being a revolutionary feminist twist, I had hoisted my expectations to the moon—I did not love the movie. I liked it! I just did not love it like I expected to. If you’re reading this and have not seen the movie, stop here! Because I am about to spoil the ending. In the book, Jo, the protagonist among the four March sisters, gets married and has children like all the other women she knows, after spending the entire novel claiming she will never get married. I was disappointed by this ending and eager to watch Jo escape marriage and live out her literary dreams in the movie. But she still gets married! The twist is that the movie’s ending is ambiguous—even as it shows her getting married, there seems to be an alternate storyline running alongside the marriage one where she sees her book published and opens a school. These two threads are interwoven, and the distinctions between them blurred, so it is not clear what really happens, allowing moviegoers to choose which ending they like best. But I did not fully understand this dynamic until reading articles about the ending afterwards. When I walked out of the theater, I felt let down, because the storyline most visible to me was the marriage one, and it seemed like Gerwig simply followed the original story after all. I bring up this anecdote to make a point about art making a point: Art, be it painting, literature, film, or something else, usually aims to present content that can be interpreted in multiple ways. But sometimes, in pursuing ambiguity, artists may send a message they do not want to send, or send too many messages that end up getting tangled and confusing the audience. I am not necessarily suggesting Little Women was confusing in exactly this way; but the movie serves as a good example of art that intended to present itself ambiguously but in reality ended up strongly conveying the very message (that women should stay at home) it hoped to subvert in using that ambiguity.

I found this phenomenon to some extent in Özge Samancı’s Dare to Disappoint: Growing up in Turkey, but not in Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. In some ways, movie adaptations of books are like graphic novels, because they put something originally meant to stay on the pages of a book into visual form. In the process of illustrating literature, which on surface level would seem to clarify the words rather than muddy them, sometimes the images and words can convey different stories or create separate threads that do not intertwine quite right (as in Little Women). (I also want to note that I have only ever read one or two graphic novels before I read these two, so I might be biased against them or ignorant of their form.)

First, I want to discuss how each of these authors uses art to make their words come alive. Satrapi draws simply, consistently, and in only black and white. Her style remains largely the same throughout the book. But I love the perspectives she takes in different scenes, zooming in close on someone’s face or out to show an entire street or building, and often relying on images rather than words to further the story. Samancı draws with a completely different style, incorporating mixed media and colors instead of sticking to black and white. Some of her designs are incredibly creative and beautiful, such as the representation of the TV show “Dallas” on page 63; or page 156, which reads “everything changed in a flash,” and depicts vibrant sunlight bursting forth from clouds on a watercolor blue background. Yet others seem a bit contrived, like they are trying too hard to send a message artfully when the same message could be sent more subtly using simpler images, or words alone. On page 92, for example, she writes that Pelin “left all the things we loved behind,” and then pastes cutouts of words from different magazines or books such as “kite,” “bicycle,” “par-ty,” onto the page. I feel like she could have activated those words more, perhaps by representing them as objects, or drawing little remembered scenes of Pelin flying a kite, riding a bicycle, or dancing at a party. On other pages, too, the artistry seems like overkill, but perhaps I get that impression because I am comparing them directly to Satrapi’s very neat, pared-down style.

Of course, these details of Dare to Disappoint are minor and do not significantly affect the overall message of the book; but some of Samancı’s artistic choices do affect the message, and somewhat like Little Women, the book sometimes tangles the threads of its own storyline. At different moments in the story, it is hard to tell which voice to pay attention to. Since the format is more freeform than Persepolis, onto which Satrapi imposes a fairly rigid grid like more traditional graphic novels, the order in which readers of Dare to Disappoint should proceed through speech bubbles and asides by other secondary characters is not always clear, and some of the meaning can get lost in the process of hunting for the “correct” next step. Characters like the bird narrator further confuse the story. I was not sure if the bird was its own character or supposed to represent the author’s voice in the present making judgements about her past life. The bird educates readers with facts like, “At the end of WWI, Greeks invaded Izmir, and Atatürk and his soldiers took it back” (32); but it also makes mean remarks such as “She dropped the ball. Again.” after Özge gets suspended (128). I also was not sure whether the square boxes that hold explanatory information and point at characters are the author’s voice in the present or the past, or some third party. One on page 96, pointing to a boy whose mother brags he scored very well on his secondary school exam, states apparently objectively that he “has no friends, no hobbies, no social skills.” Is this judgement passed by the teenage or the adult Özge? Since the distinction between these voices is unclear, this box simply comes off as a mean, petty dig at the boy’s success, as if the adult author is still bitter this unpopular boy scored well and she did not. She may not have intended to send this message, but it is sent anyway.

My observations sound like criticisms of Samancı as an artist, but I really enjoyed reading Dare to Disappoint and generally appreciated its unconventional format. I merely mean to point out that well-intentioned artists can skew their own message by making certain stylistic choices. Satrapi is much more successful in this regard, as she keeps the voices of her narrator and the characters all distinct.

Since I have spent most of this post talking only about the form of these books, and not their content, I want to highlight a few themes or moments in each that I appreciated. Aware of her own privilege as a member of what appears to be an upper middle class (if not upper class) family, Satrapi deals a lot with class hierarchy in the book. She notes that her father has the financial stability to bribe the police officer about to search their home (110), and that her aunt, “who [knows] some bureaucrats in the education system,” secures Özge a spot at a new school after she gets expelled from her old one (144). Some part of me wishes she had addressed her own high social status a little more explicitly (she claims “it was a real struggle to find another school that would accept me,” but a lower-income family with fewer connections would undoubtedly have struggled much more), but, unlike Samancı, being explicit is not her style (144). I give her credit for at least bringing up the topic of class often throughout the book. And she makes sure to introduce lower-ranking individuals, such as her maids, by their name, and to tell their story, so readers get a sense for experiences in this place and during this time period outside her own. Samancı more explicitly addresses themes such as gender, and I appreciate her educational project about women and Islam. Like the BBC video we watched last class, “Things Not to Say to Someone Who Wears a Burqa,” Samancı appears to dismantle myths about Muslim women, but I like her approach more. She demonstrates that some people within the Muslim faith call other Muslims “radical Islamists,” as the girls at Özge’s science high school label the boys there (113). Furthermore, Özge’s roommate Merve still wants to veil but cannot because the practice is forbidden at school, and Özge expresses her support, stating, “We should all be able to do what we want” (114). This scene sends the dual message that not all Muslim women want to be unveiled, and that Muslim women do not always impose their choices onto others (in fact, many do not!).

Told through the lens of girls who grow up Muslim, these two books explore many of the themes we have discussed in class: gender, Islam, bourgeois values, feminism, nationalism. I want to reiterate that although I have some reservations about Samancı’s artistic choices, my criticism does not prevent me from enjoying Dare to Disappoint. I recognize that books like these, addressing the subject of “Muslim women” (and revealing all the diversity that seemingly monolithic phrase actually entails) for a Western audience, often come under stricter scrutiny because there are fewer such books. Dare to Disappoint and Persepolis are thus held to higher standards than other graphic novels, simply because they deal with subject matter about which many members of their target audience are ignorant. Expectations were similarly high for Greta Gerwig, as she has directed several female-driven movies in the past two years and thus was expected to create a feminist retelling of a classic novel. Overall, both Samancı and Satrapi strike a good balance of storytelling, autobiography, and education, and I look forward to discussing them in class.

persepolis, dare to disappoint, and capernaum

This week we read Persepolis and Dare to Disappoint, two beautifully, cleverly narrated stories of growing up. I only formed this sentence to be able to compliment these works before I start.

I have many questions, and I want to explore them by introducing Capernaum (Capharnaüm) into the discussion. Capernaum is a 2018 movie by Nadine Labaki, telling the story of Zain, a Lebanese boy. The main event is Zain suing his parents for having him (“Why do you want to sue your parents?” “Because I was born”), while we see his life full of poverty, violence, and many other hardships. It won the jury prize at Cannes and was clapped on foot for a long time (15 minutes, I think it broke a record?). 

Here, check the trailer if you have time (the lead actor is so so good):

Now. This movie is said to “hit hard”, and it does. I can’t describe all the dense feelings I had the first time I saw it. Though I don’t want having feeling towards (or “liking”) something to stop me from questioning it. 

All of the three works have received immensely positive reactions from a Western audience.

Yet, there are differences (and similarities) as to how they do that.

Let’s start with the similarities.

-They all have (or at least start with) children as the protagonists. This is crucial, as children are often seen as relatable blank slates born into those oppressive environments by chance. They attract affection.

-They use “universal” languages. This is not only literally the language (French for Persepolis, English for Dare to Disappoint), but also the use of references, terms, and mediums that are familiar to the “universal” (Western, historically dominantly male) subject. 

What makes the two books different and better (terrible choice of word) in my opinion is that they allow nuances (by far one of the most important concepts that the scholars we read point out the lack and need of). 

Being autobiographies, they have ups and downs, just like...life.

The oppressive father of Özge is not necessarily evil, there is a context behind his behavior, and still, this does not mean he is completely right and must be obeyed to.

Not just for the father, there is a context for many of the social events and practices in both works. Context is not equal to acceptance, but it exists. It is inseparable. 

In Persepolis, there are people having fun in the midst of “all the tragedy”. There are actual PEOPLE living lives with actual feelings of joy, shame, excitement, regret, frustration and many more. 

Islam or nationalism is not simply accepted/rejected, but the narrators have complicated and evolving relationships with them.

Whereas in Capernaum, there is a stronger sense of some “evil” entity, bad people doing bad things (Zain’s 11-year-old sister being married off to the landlord’s son), apparently because they are bad. It is a bad world where the bad holds power. Zain, however, is a resisting hero. Empathy and pity arise towards the boy struggling in this alien world. 

With this approach, “the problem” becomes the parents having children into this cruel world, and you get comments like: “this is so real. some parents do not deserve to have children😢” (copy-pasted).

The audience understands, yes, things are bad, but does the solution really lie in preventing people from having children? Of judging the parents who if their stories were told, the audience would also feel bad for?

(Many woke modern people think so)

And oh, criticizing works of art, sorry, Art, with their possible political interpretations accepting that they inevitably serve as political tools? That is scary for an artist (wow I just called myself one) “just wanting to do art”.

Elle magazine spread of Halima Aden

"halima-aden-is-the-role-model-we-need"

Things Not To Say To Someone Who Wears A Burqa

The Portrayal of Muslim Love in HBO’s Ramy - Fatma Elsayed

In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Lila Abu Lughod’s piece on “The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt '' considerably explores the portrayal of women in Egyptian media. Abu Lughod uses examples like Usama Anwar ‘Ukasha’s Hilmiyya Nights, a television series that aired during the 1980s and early 1990s about struggles of looking for love and marriage, and She and the Impossible by Fathiyya al- ‘Assal about the value of education for women. It was interesting to find how, despite both creators sharing a similar strand of progressive and liberal views on feminism and women in the workplace, there were still differences in how that intersected with marriage and love.  For example in Hilmiyya Nights, Zohra marries her boss at work who seduces her as Ali frustrates her and in She and the Impossible, the female lead goes from illiterate to educated and raising a son alone after being rejected by her lover. In both pieces, there is a similar sense of autonomy but portrayed in different ways Zohra chooses to marry her boss and the female lead chooses to educate herself and raise her son alone.

Reading Abu-Lughod’s piece made me think about the HBO show Ramy which recently won an Oscar for Ramy Youssef as Best Actor in a TV Comedy. The show itself is a modern, comedic portrayal of a Muslim, Egyptian in America that follows their struggles and challenges with merging their Muslim faith and Egyptian culture with American life. The show deals with standard topics such as growing older and building a career, but also emotional ones like love, marriage, and sacrifice. 

I enjoyed the show, and I had previously watched clips by Ramy Youssef who’s comedy was an entertaining yet relatable expression of being Muslim in America. However, I know female Muslim friends who absolutely despised the show, criticizing it’s negative portrayal of Muslim women as objects and appealing to the western eye. Having a back-and-forth with these friends about the show was very conflicting because I usually agreed with these friends on many other things but this case seemed to be an exception. I was fully a fan of Ramy for how hilarious it was, but also for how I felt like it painted a relatable portrayal of the spectrum of Muslims and piety in western societies, and how challenging it can be to find an appropriate partner in the midst of this diversity. However, my friends mentioned plots such as the hijabi Muslim woman who sleeps with Ramy and cheats on her husband as an offensively sexualizing portrayal of Muslim women. 

Conversations and disagreements like these make me wonder if we can ever portray Muslim women in all their diverse lifestyles and piousness without degrading the Muslim woman herself? Additionally, what responsibility do Muslim creators have in upholding or molding the perception of Islam and Muslims? Do we hold them accountable if we do not like their vision?

Angela Davis, "I'm not a femenist... I'm a Black revolutionary"

A little over a month ago, on January 16th, 2020, Yale University invited famous activist and scholar Angela Davis to speak to commence Yale's week long celebration of Martin Luther King. I had been a fan of Angela Davis' academic work which always emphasized an intersectional approach to not only feminism, but all global struggles for equality, justice and rights. The phrase may be on its way to buzzword status, but intersectionalism is the heart of what Chandra Mohanty is discussing in her essay, "Under Western Eyes." Feminism is not a homogeneous category, and not is that of "The Woman." In particular, Mohanty critiques the existence of the Third World Woman as a ready made category that exists before an individual becomes any specific "type" of woman by entering a given relationship.

I am reminded of a commen Davis once made about her initial reaction when she was being referred to as a feminist for her scholarship on gender and race. She recounts in this speech here how her immediate reaction was "I'm not a Feminist... I'm a Black revolutionary!" Though she later admits that this was the result of her perhaps only narrowly understanding the meaning of Feminism, she made a very important point that underlies much of this course: there isn't any one kind of any one thing when we talk about isms or ideas. She clarifies in her speech that she didn't realize she was critiquing "Bourgeois Feminism". It is thanks to the academic labor performed by those like Davis herself that we can take intersectional feminism for granted, if even as a buzzword.

It's interesting how during last election cycle with Hillary's nomination to the democratic party and now again this cycle with a refreshing number of women vying for party nominations, the language of "glass-ceiling feminism" circulated as the reasons for supporting this or that candidate. I don't reject the legitimate symbolic meaning of a women president, and I in fact do value the emphasis placed on electing female leaders. However, particularly with Hillary's election, so many people specifically wanted to "break the glass ceiling." In this same video, Davis mentioned how this goal is not one she is interested in; anyone already close enough to break the glass ceiling is benefiting from privileges and hierarchies that come at the expense of poorer and working class women. The way each class navigates the world is radically different. They are not all a ready made category of "women" with equal needs and experiences.

Posting on behalf of Fatma

Loving without the “Liberation” - Fatma Elsayed

After reading Lila Abu-Lughod’s piece titled “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others”, I was left with a lot of feelings about being a Muslim woman in the west and how my Muslim-ness effects the way I think about love and dating. Alongside a detailed commentary on cultural relativism as it relates to post-Taliban Afghanistan, Abu-Lughod taps into a larger discussion of how Western audiences percieve both Muslim women’s feminism and sexuality as a deviation from their own feminist structures.

In her piece, Abu-Lughod poses the interesting question, “Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might we have to recognize that even after “liberation” from the Taliban, they might want different things than we would want for them?”(5) This question reminds of my own personal relationships with friends, who although care for me deeply, can also dip into this savior-istic tendencies to encourage me to explore dating and love in ways that aren’t always feasible. I was raised in a black, Sudanese, Muslim household where I was taught to always maintain a modest distance from men. This meant no going to guys houses, no boyfriends, no premarital relationships, etc - however, this does not mean that I was repressed. Although I do not explore love and dating the same way that my friends from Western and non-Muslim backgrounds do, I still love and want to be loved. 

Abu-Lughod’s piece resonates with the larger, complex experience of being a Muslim girl in Western spaces where your modesty and “veil”, whether it be literal with a hijab or abstract in the divisions between yourself and other men, is constantly examined by peers. Reconciling my desire to be in love and explore the dating scene with the need to also maintain a “veil” in college is challenging, but this “struggle” doesn’t necessarily mean that I am particularly repressed. I put these limits and expectations on myself from a source of love and dedication for my religion, Islam, and navigating dating is just a natural challenge that comes with that. 

However, when we, as women, talk about feminism being about sexual liberation for all and sex as a means to reclaiming our femininity, that is not inclusive of women like me. I believe in the right to a woman owning her body and her sexuality, but to universalize the way we explore our sexualities within a western contexts erases the sexual liberation Muslim women, specifically those who believe in modesty, express. 

This connects with an interesting point Abu-Lughod makes about this spectrum of feminisms by stating that “One of the things we have to be most careful about in thinking about Third World feminisms, and feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, is how not to fall into polarizations that place feminism on the side of the West.”(6)  Even though I may not own my body the same way other western feminists do, it does not make my feminism any less radical. It also does not make my exploration of love any less meaningful because no one entity or region has a monopoly over what feminism is and what love looks like.

after mahmood: empowerment and rkot

After two highly dense and thought-provoking chapters from Saba Mahmood, I found myself scrolling through the “Rich Kids of Tehran” Instagram page and the UN Women website. Let me start with the latter.

According to their own definition, “UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women”. They have regional chapters all around the world, including Cairo. I don’t feel qualified enough to comment on the specifics of the work they do, but I want to stop and think about “empowerment” for a while, a word that is all over UN’s website and frequently repeated in other Western feminist discourse.

Here is a definition (literally the first image when one searches for it):

(wow!)

I want to think about this seemingly universal goal of empowerment related to two of the women Mahmood writes about, Sana and Abir. Sana’s belief in self-esteem and how it can form through making decisions according to who you really are, what you really want fits well within what empowerment aims to do. When it comes to Abir’s case, things are not that simple (for the already “modernized” brain). From a Western perspective, by becoming pious, Abir gives up many choices and freedom. Yet as Mahmood points out, it is her commitment to Islamic norms (not a break from them) that makes her “empowered” towards her husband.

Furthermore, Mahmood explains how women in piety don’t necessarily take actions according to their natural feelings but an opposite relationship is present where feelings form according to actions. This way of thinking is very unfamiliar to Western feminist standards as it can easily be seen in such a definition of empowerment.

I am confused, angry, and a bit tired after realizing even a phrase like “promoting gender equality” has so many presumptions and history behind it. Ah.

Moving to the rich kids of Tehran, it is basically an Instagram page that has pictures of a lot of, well, “rich kids” (smiling attractive young people in luxury apparel), expensive cars, trips abroad—and there are also the occasional posts of people making art and a sign reading “give peace a chance” or “nice day for a revolution”.

You probably got the idea, still:

https://www.instagram.com/therichkidsoftehran/?hl=en

I think it is a really striking example of Mahmood’s analysis regarding how “resistance” can mean reinscribing to alternative forms of power. It is possible to view what this account is doing as “resisting” the norms of the Iranian society, mainly the Islamic principle of modesty that was thoroughly discussed in the reading. What they think they are doing is aligned with this, as it can be understood from their bio: “Stuff ‘They’ Don't Want You To See About Iran”. The “stuff” apparently is the Western neoliberal ideal of a desirable life that exists for an elite portion of Iranians. What seems to be romanticized and presented to be rebellious freedom is thus capitalist consumerism (mixed with bits of neoliberalism), which is arguably one of the largest forms of power today. Though this is a pretty obnoxious example, it is not the only place where “resistance” and the status of economic strength go hand in hand.

Week 5: Mohanty/Abu-Lughod/Williams -- The New York Time

This week we read three scholars who critique Western feminisms. Chandra Mohanty (1988) critiques the slippage of Western feminists between Woman as a homogenized, analytical category and women as diversely positioned people in the world. Mohanty is concerned with how Western feminists frame women as a primordial social category wherein all women experience a common, shared oppression (65). This universal “sexual difference” is observed by Western feminists in the “Third World” as especially pronounced because of the “third-world difference,” which reinforces Western cultural imperialism and allegations of Oriental backwardness (80). Mohanty concludes the essay by meditating that while Western feminists are not the only participants in the production of Western cultural hegemony, but their contribution of the “monolithic ‘third-world woman’” may be useful in ongoing projects of “latent economic and cultural colonization of the 'non-western' world” (82). 

Lila Abu-Lughod (2005), writing almost three decades later, takes Mohanty’s warnings of the political utility of the “third-world woman” as her launching point. Abu-Lughod shows how analytical strategy descibed by Mohanty of the homogenization of third-world women has enabled justifications for interventions in the Middle East on the grounds of Muslim women who are universally oppressed and all “need saving.” Abu-Lughod argues that to move past an agenda of “saving” women, academics must work towards “recognizing and respecting differences -- precisely as products of different histories, as expressions of different circumstances, and as manifestations of differently structured desires” (787).

Juliet A. Williams (2009) offers one way of doing this kind of thinking, which she calls “double critique.” Williams studies the Orientalist news coverage of temporary marriages to make “orientalist representations themselves the object of the inquiry rather than treating (mis)representation as a problem somehow to be gotten around” (617). This kind of “double critique” is powerful because “Instead of denying the inherent partiality of perspective, double critique mobilizes partiality as a fulcrum with which to bring into view that which is obscured when there is no critical outside” (629). Williams offers a way out of passive cultural relativism or ethnocentrism so as to recognize historically constituted differences. Ultimately, this mode of thinking might allow Western feminists to consider the conditions of third-world women without reinforcing Western hegemony, by always critiquing Western methodological limitations in studying the third-world in a way that can ever be omniscient. Acknowledging this limitation reduces the risk of producing Mohanty’s monolithic “third-world women.” 

***

I subscribe to a weekly email newsletter from the New York Times called In Her Words, which highlights a few important headlines relevant to gender politics from that week. A few weeks ago, on January 23rd, 2020, I received a story about a report on gendered wealth inequality that emerged from the Davos World Economic Forum. The report in some ways moves past the shortfalls of “saving women” from culture in that the report recognizes structural factors as the origin of gendered oppression. Women hold less wealth because, as the policy director at Oxfam says, “there’s something deeply sick about the economy.” 

Yet, even in a structural approach, the report relies on the existing notions of cultural others and homogenized womanhood. In one part of the NYT’s summary, they write that “nowhere in the world do men do as much unpaid work as women. In Norway, a country often hailed as a gender equal utopia, women spend about an hour more on unpaid work than men ...  But in India, women spend almost six hours on unpaid labor and men spend less than an hour.” NYT does not explain why they choose these two countries to compare. It does not indicate if India had the worst metrics of those measured. NYT draws upon the common-sense ideology of “third-world difference” described by Mohanty as “that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries” (63). Without explanation for invoking India, the NYT readers understand that India is not like Norway because of this third-world difference that manifestly makes women more oppressed in India.

NYT also homogenizes women as Mohanty warns. The NYT explains the mechanism of this wealth inequality as follows:

“Because women tend to earn less than men, they have more of an economic incentive to give up their job and focus on work at home while the higher earner goes to work. But because they have so much to look after at home, they often can’t take on a higher-paid job that might require more commitment, creating a vicious cycle that traps women at the bottom of the economic pyramid, perpetuating the gender pay gap.”

This hyper-generalization lumps together every household on the globe and elides the infinite differences that exist between households. It, among many other things, presumes a nuclear family, presumes maternal caretaking, presumes universal gender wage gaps, all of which are true in some contexts but false in many others. This flattening of the nature of oppression to one form forecloses opportunities to explore how gendered oppression operates in decentralized ways, and thus, forecloses the generation of successful anti-oppression efforts. 

The organizations involved in the report -- including Oxfam, IMF, and the Gates Foundation -- all hire alumni of institutions like Yale, many of whom likely studied Western feminism in some form during their education. In a world that is increasingly attentive to “global patriarchy,” the ways we as students and academics study women and feminism have serious consequences for reports like these.

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?uri=nyt://newsletter/49fdf877-946e-43ec-9ca3-d60a7eddc1f8&te=1&nl=in-her%20words&emc=edit_gn_20200123?campaign_id=10&instance_id=15395&segment_id=20585&user_id=fbaa2c635eb11cc27ff849e79fe6088b&regi_id=75294619_gn_20200123


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Questions I would like to discuss more:

1. Abu-Lughod articulates a need for something that is neither ethnocentric or culturally relativist, and argues that we need a politics that recognizes and respects difference precisely as a product of history. What does this mean in practice relative to interventionism? What types of material responses might this produce?

2. Is "double critique" a viable anti-imperialist mode of study? Does Williams essay still reinforce a belief that third world women need to be represented by people lodged in the West? Why or why not?