Although "body" is receiving increasing attention as a fashionable topic for historical research in the recent years, it remains largely under-theorized and under-empiricized in the historical studies. It is most of the time used in exchange for sexuality, reproduction, or merely the female, and hence not as a stable or specified concept of historical analysis. The problem is partly raised by the limitations of the concept of the body and the methodological difficulties of placing it at the center of historical research. Moreover, sources also play a role since bodies mostly appear in indirect and mediated ways as historical artifacts in which the researcher could hardly touch upon the real bodies of his/her subjects. Furthermore, applying Western-oriented conceptual models to the non-Western contexts adds to the complications of theorizing “body” through distinct historical bodies of different spaces and times.
Addressing these conceptual and methodological problems, we will discuss the history of “bodies” in the Middle-Eastern context through specific cases. The first paper will explore the phenomenon of women refusing to “surrender themselves” to their husbands in the legal records of mid-eighteenth-century Anatolia. It will discuss how the early-modern Ottoman-muslim woman acquired a legal subjectivity within “wife” through which she had a voice over her body and sexuality while being subjectified to a gendered matrimonial order. The second paper will focus on advice books for pregnant women published in the late nineteenth century and it will elaborate the medical investment on female bodies in the context of pronatalist policies arguing that reproduction was not a natural but a political subject in the late Ottoman history. The third paper will also approach gendered bodies through medicine. It will analyze the medical discourses emerged in turn-of-the-century Egypt which medicalized moral and social concerns in the name of rationality and science. With a special emphasis on the “other”s of these discourses—hashish smoking, male masturbation and spirit-possession cults—this paper will examine the interplay between gender, nationalism, and body. The final paper will examine the American missionary activities on the specific issue of education of boys and girls on cleanliness, order, nutrition, and hygiene. It will demonstrate how bodily and physical conditions of the children were utilized by the missionaries in their general aspirations of civilizing and proselyting. By introducing some under-utilized sources of “body”, this panel aims to explore the possibilities of using “body” as a site for analyzing gender and subjectivity.
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Ms. Basak Tug
Women’s legal subjectivity was constructed more on the category of “wife” than that of “woman” in the early-modern Ottoman legal practice. Despite the fact that the Islamic jurisprudence gave in theory the adult “woman” full legal capacity in certain fields such as property and inheritance, “wife” had a more privileged position even in these fields. Legal subjectivity which women acquired through “wife” in the Ottoman context was also very effective in the field of woman-initiated divorce. Yet, more important than these, women often appeared as legal subjects through the status of “wife” in the early-modern Ottoman legal practice.
In this paper, I propose to analyze another possibility of the legal subjectivity that marriage provided for the early-modern Ottoman muslim woman: the transitional moment in which the adult female was supposed to become her husband’s wife through the consummation of marriage. This instance in which the Ottoman muslim woman appeared in the court as a “virgin wife” was an instance in which she stood between the licit and illicit, and thus became a threat to the gender order in the society. Thus, in this paper I will argue that it was not a coincidence that the Ottoman woman acquired a prominent legal subject-position at this very moment in the early-modern legal practice.
This paper will therefore explore the phenomenon of women refusing to “surrender themselves” to their husbands in the court records of mid-eighteenth-century Anatolia. It will discuss how the early-modern Ottoman-muslim woman acquired a legal subjectivity within “wife” through which she had a voice over her body and sexuality while being subjectified to a gendered matrimonial order. It will argue that the “virgin wife”’s body, which was positioned on the border between the licit and illicit, became a sign of her sexual and marital rights.
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Gulhan Balsoy
From the mid-to-late nineteenth century, populationist discourses associating demographic strength with economic and international power were prominent in the Ottoman Empire similar to other contemporary European societies. To amass a large and healthy population, the Ottoman government officials and medical men believed, promoting birth rates and improving health standards both during and after parturition were of utmost importance. In order to do that, various measures such as educating, licensing and regulating the midwives, and opening maternity hospitals were initiated. Moreover, male physicians entered into obstetrics. Although the appearance of male obstetricians did not mean the displacement of midwives as it was the case in some other geographies, they increasingly set the norms about healthy pregnancy and delivery. According to them, pregnancy and parturition was a medical condition rather than a natural event, and hence the pregnant woman should receive the right care during this period for a future recovery. New nutrition regimes and the proper manners of a pregnant woman were also debated as elements of this new conception of pregnancy. Promise of safer and less painful birth through the use of drugs and other medical innovations, such as forceps or anesthesia were important topics of controversy among male practitioners. Besides professional journals, the male physicians expressed their ideas through advice books targeting pregnant, a genre that shortly became very popular among educated upper class urban women, who were also more open to try the new developments in obstetrics. In my paper, I will focus on these advice books and discuss the linkages between the appearance of male practitioners in obstetrics, and the new approaches toward pregnancy and birth, which in the end changed the conceptions of female body.
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Dr. Liat Kozma
Historians of Egyptian nationalism have demonstrated how, in turn-of-the-century-Egypt, household management and the composition of the family became target of criticism. The poor state of Egyptian homes and families and the ignorance of Egyptian women were seen as detrimental to the nation's future and its ability to liberate itself from the yoke of British occupation. Similarly, as early as the 1880s, the human body became an object of reform. Physical exercise and modern medicine were deemed significant in fostering a national future.
In turn-of-the-century Egypt, new medical discourses emerged, which medicalized moral and social concerns in the name of rationality and science. Scientific and medical journals, many of them founded and edited by Syrian émigrés, provided a lively platform for intellectual debates. Physicians, medical students and laypersons transmitted and produced medical knowledge and presented questions to the editors. To many of them, medical principles for managing one's body, household, kitchen, childbirth and childrearing, were the hallmark of national modernity.
My lecture will use these debates as a background for discussing three of the "others" of this national modernity: hashish smoking, male masturbation and spirit-possession cults. The first two were associated with idleness and subsequent insanity, and both were gendered male. The third was associated with African women, and with spirit-possession practices that also entered elite harems in the second half of the nineteenth century. All three symbolized Egypt's backwardness; overcoming them was therefore not merely a personal but also a national endeavor. Focusing on medical articles, official reports and medical literature, I trace new ways of addressing these three practices, which turns from a moral to a medical concern. The hashish smoker, the masturbator and the possessed defied the rationalization of the male and female bodies.
The discussion offered here situates medical discourse in the context of a tripartite colonial encounter, between Sudanese, Egyptians and British. In this encounter, Egyptians partially adopted colonial understandings of Egyptian and Sudanese practices – they saw spirit possession cults as corrupting both individual and national bodies, and saw the adoption of European medicine, and even leisure practices, as potentially strengthening and improving society. Egyptian intellectuals, moreover, did not merely adopt colonial discourses, but rather adapted them to create their own particular understanding of medicine and the body.
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Prof. Nazan Maksudyan
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was founded in 1810 and the first missions for the Ottoman Empire were established in 1819. Continuously growing and expanding its field of activities, the ABCFM quickly become influential in most of the provinces of the Empire, especially in areas of orphan relief, education and health.
Apart from the general aim of conversion, the American missionaries wanted to inculcate certain values of 'civilization' to the people of the East especially in the areas of family life, cleanliness, order, child-rearing, nutrition, and hygiene. For them, “ the social life of Orientals was one of great degradation” and the Ottomans were “living and eating and sleeping like domesticated animals”. Criticizing many aspects of life at home, missionaries tried to enforce standards of sanitation, hygiene and appearances in their educational programs.
Physical hygiene was especially underlined in missionary writings on orphans. Long descriptions of their bodily features were provided, telling to how they were received in a miserable condition with dirt, sores, and vermin and how they were tamed in the hands of the missionaries into clean, good-looking, and well-behaved children. Orphan girls, coming “literally in rags” were furnished with “plain but neat cotton or woolen dresses”. Those “wretched little creatures” were turned into neat, clean, obedient, and rapidly learning students. As dirty, half-starved, and neglected orphans, they were “other children”, based on otherness of need, poverty, and undesirability. The missionary relief, thus, made them both “children” and believers. As a useful tool to convince the world of believers and benevolent contributors that these orphans were civilized into good Christians, before-and-after photographs were utilized to exhibit the progress realized with these “other children”. Thus, they were not only physically cleaned and cared for, but they were transformed into “sleek, bright and interesting” children and true members of the Protestant community.
This paper will explore how bodily and physical conditions were utilized by the American missionaries as material representations and mirrors of religious and moral state of children in the late Ottoman Empire. Based on both written and visual material in official missionary journals, memoirs of missionarie, and the ABCFM archive of internal correspondence, this research intends to show that, as tangible proofs and easily malleable targets, children's bodies were part of the missionary agenda in their general aspirations of civilizing and proselyting.
