Memory and Gender: Representations
Panel 013, 2012 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 17 at 5:30 pm
Panel Description
We commonly cherish our mediated memories as a formative part of our autobiographical and cultural identities; the accumulated items typically reflect the shaping of an individual in an historical time frame. Besides being of personal value, collections of mediated memories, however, are also interesting as objects of cultural analysis . . . In fact, both memory and media constitute intermediaries between individual and society, and between past and present. (van Dijck, p. 261)
Mediated memories come in various forms, from poetic online video memorializations in Turkey of deceased family members with emotional display rules evidenced and retransmitted through generations specific to gender, to historical and autobiographical Amazigh videos circulating through You-Tube and other online sites that support the Amazigh cultural identity movement via celebration of one representative female artist's history and artistry. Further, memoirs, letters, and autobiographical writings shed light on late 19th and early 20th century Ottoman women's identities, as well as post-memoirs (not autobiographical memoirs) illuminate the differing historical perspectives of Armenian men and women.
This panel seeks to interrogate questions of memory, identity, and gender from the late 19th century through the early 21st century, incorporating media from memoirs and letters to internet communications that in some sense capture the essence and function of memoirs and letters for current audiences/consumers. The panelists perform cultural analysis through the lens of memory inflected by gender particularly in environments wherein gender and/or culture constrain certain representations or their circulation. "As Hall (1998) eloquently noted: 'We are never outside memory, for we cannot experience the present except in light of the past . . . and remembering, in turn, is an action in the present' (p. 440)" (Hume, 184). Each panelist seeks to understand an aspect of the past, an aspect of remembering, an aspect of memory through not only the lens of gender but also the lens that particular media of representation afford.
Hall, J. D. (1998). ''You must remember this'': Autobiography as social critique. The Journal of American History, 85(2), 439 465.
Hume, J. (2010). Memory Matters: The Evolution of Scholarship in Collective Memory and Mass Communication. The Review of Communication, 10(3), 181-196.
van Dijck, J. (2004). Mediated memories: Personal cultural memory as object of cultural analysis. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 18(2), 261 277.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Roberta Micallef
-- Presenter
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Dr. Sandra G. Carter
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Mrs. Emine Hosoglu Dogan
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Sandra G. Carter
Mass Media, according to Kitch (2006) “have become the primary means by which most people understand the past” (p. 94). Media are thus also considered the pre-eminent method of recreating memories and thus the past, especially when new media technologies enable media to circulate to heretofor inaccessible audiences. A 1994 video of Raissa Fatima Tabaamrante’s autobiography, Tihya, presently has had 10,000 views in the past 10 months on YouTube, primarily by youth viewers and those who would not have had access to the vieo otherwise. Further, almost all biographical entries about Tabaamrante include mention of her 1994 autobiography video, though its content is primarily fictional enactment with only a brief appearance of the star herself at the end of the video telling her story.
Because the present is constituted by the past, the past’s retention as well as its reconstruction must be anchored in the present. As each generation modifies the beliefs presented by the previous generations, there remains an assemblage of old beliefs coexisting with the new, including old beliefs about the past itself…. (Glassberg, p. 234)
Perhaps the fictional recreation of one woman’s past, in this case, extends beyond a focus on an individual, and functions to recuperate Amazigh culture as part of the Amazigh cultural revival movement. And new media has an important role to play in this movement. This 18 year old video may be as old as some of the viewers who turn to it to gain a perspective on their culture and reclaim their past.
Amazigh identity and history, thus memory, is a source of political and ideological power, especially when an individual’s articulations mark them as representative of that identity. Amazigh cultural revivalists considered Tabaamrante’s musical and video representation of Berber cultural identity to comprise an important political statement.
Therefore, while on one hand the Amazigh cultural identity movement in the third world context of Morocco had tremendous political and ideological import, the videos and artists themselves had been affected by globally circulating mass media images and technologies and used those technologies to both further their career, or in the case of images circulating in new technologies 18 years later still, to further the cultural identity movement as well.
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Van Dijck posits that we cherish our mediated memories as a formative part of our autobiographical and cultural identities and that the accumulated items typically reflect the shaping of an individual in a historical time frame. I examine the relationship of the post-memoir, a memoir based mainly on the stories of older relatives, to that of other autobiographic genres through the examination of 20th and 21st century Armenian post-memoirs and life writings. I am concerned with the texts and their contexts. The post-memoirs that I examine reflect trauma upon the discovery of false or incomplete identities and a questioning of historical truth which is in conflict with personal narratives. Transmitted over three generations these texts also capture the process whereby a public secret is buried under layers of new information, misinformation and simply new social circumstances but still remains alive in the personal realm and reemerges to interrogate the official narrative. When why and how these texts were made public are central questions that I pose. My first question is who is narrating these texts. The vast majority that I have examined are narrated by granddaughters and were revealed by grandmothers which obliges me to ask why this is the case. Therefore I examine the texts from a gendered perspective to reveal any differences and similarities between the works of male and female narrators but also simply to see what roles men and women played in their communities and in the nation that allowed more women to narrate their stories. In both the production of the text, its dissemination and its contents I will argue gender plays a central role.
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Mrs. Emine Hosoglu Dogan
Late 19th and early 20th century in the history of Ottoman Empire is marked with efforts of westernization and reforms in various areas of social and political life including women’s status in family and society. The changes occurred in their lives gave way to a new breed of Ottoman intellectual women. This article is an attempt to take a close look at the Ottoman women of this period and shed light on the question of who they were by looking at their own memoirs, letters, literary and critical writings, the writings of female and male Occidental travelers and secondary sources. I seek answers to questions such as “What type of education did these women have, what did they read, how did they dress, what was their standard of life, which kind of families did they come from, how were they related and reacted to different political ideologies of the time, how did they regard westernization efforts in the Empire, did they have any shared concerns, how was their contact with each other and with Western men and women, and, do the Western writings of the period have anything common to say about Ottoman women?” Existing work on Ottoman women largely focuses on the issues of women’s rights and women’s movement, studies individuals or their publications or involves thematic explorations. Lack of insightful scholarship on the profiles of Ottoman women results in the recognition of some of the Orientalist presuppositions about them for practical purposes. This essay pursues a comprehensive and defining look on these women as to their identities, backgrounds, environments and aspirations through mainly first-hand accounts. While not dismissing a collective representation, this study, in general terms, aims at increasing familiarity with the late Ottoman women from high-class to middle-class, from the supporters of Abdulhamid II to the Turkists and from the graduates of colleges to those privately educated in harems.
