The broader emergence of the Muslim voice on gender and sexuality has been a powerful and necessary outcome of Orientalist and post-colonialist criticism. Coupled with the rise of standpoint theory and transnational feminist discourses that rightly privilege non-Western voices and scholarship, these intertwined movements in the scholarship on gender and sexuality in Islam have challenged the Western, non-Muslim scholar. Though criticisms of Western, non-Muslim scholarship on Islam as Orientalist “other” are fair and to be expected given the long history of speaking for and about Muslims, these movements have also contributed to the privileging of self-identity research, particularly within Gender Studies, limiting who is considered able to conduct authentic, authoritative research. As scholars within the field of Gender Studies, such as Clare Hemmings and Robyn Wiegman, engage in greater reflexivity on the kinds of scholarship we are able to produce, the task remains to apply these considerations to the study of Islam and Muslims from within the fields of Gender Studies, Middle East and North Africa Studies, and Islamic Studies. This presentation considers how the essentialism of post-Orientalist privileging of standpoint and self-identity work affects the study of Islam, gender, and sexuality. It will also consider how the privileging of Muslim voices and experiences in scholarship may help to address concerns about the essentialism of analysis on Islam, gender, and sexuality, and will further explore how an emphasis on storytelling and narrative in the study of gender, sexuality, and Islam may shift the discourse further from it Orientalist roots. I ask: how can the de-essentialism of standpoint and of post-colonial criticism of Western scholarship contribute to a next wave of research on Islam, gender and sexuality? In this presentation, I will explore a role for the Western, non-Muslim researcher that is responsive to the challenges of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and reflexive feminist scholars and is conscious of positionality, but is also able to meaningfully, authentically consider Muslim experiences of gender and sexuality.

North American feminist theorizing of essentialism is most often refracted through Gayatri Spivak’s work, considered a post-colonial correction to a ‘progressive narrative’ that did not account for legacies of colonialism and political agency (Hemmings 2011). The work of authors like Clare Hemmings and Robyn Wiegman have asked North American feminists how their accounts of feminist theorizing of difference have evolved into narratives that have become so deeply entrenched in the field that other intellectual genealogies become secondary, or altogether forgotten. The central question of this presentation is this – what difference does difference make, as it is articulated across two fields? In Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality she deconstructs the concept “stranger fetishism,” locating the stranger as someone we actually can, and have, envisioned, so much that we have universalized this figure as one to be feared (2000). I will trace the divergence between theorizing the figure of ‘terrorist’, no longer a stranger but an intimate figure that is affectively conjures up feelings of animosity and fear, within the bodies of feminist post-colonial theorizing, critical race theorizing, and Middle East Studies. Some feminists theorists might ask, how has the figure of ‘terrorist’ been gendered and sexualized? Critical ethnic studies theorists might ask, how has ‘terrorist’ been racialized and classed? In an effort to bring North American feminist theorizing of essentialization into conversation with how the figure of ‘terrorist’ has been theorized within post-colonial, critical race theory and Middle East Studies I will focus my analysis through the event of the so-called ‘Boston Bombing’. By tracing the evolving articulation of embodied ‘suspects’ I will unpack the affective allegiances to progressive (North American) stories, stories that quell fears that we have ‘correctly’ theorized how race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality and nation have been essentialized in mainstream western media.

In responding to the existing theories of Muslim women’s agency and its relation to the adoption of a visual identity marker, the veil, this paper introduces the main parameters of a theoretically and socio-historically nuanced account on Muslim women’s agency. This paper begins by a brief examination of four dominant approaches in the scholarship on Islam, women’s agency and the veil, namely the enlightenment-virtuoso accounts; liberal empowerment perspectives; illiberal models; postmodern approaches in order to emphasize the necessity for re-conceptualizing Muslim women’s agency from within the existing postmodern approaches. Then, drawing on several ethnographic cases from my Ph.D. fieldwork, conducted on two most prevalent and conflicting modes of action performed by middle-class Muslim women in the public sphere of Istanbul, namely Muslim women’s justice-driven political activism and Muslim women’s fashion-related endeavours, this paper investigates the diverse ways in which visible identities, in particular, the veil, as a bodily-marked difference, carry epistemic and political significance in the formation of Muslim women’s subjectivities and their exercise of agency. The approach, I develop, here, does not exclude the notion of an open-ended subject formation process as postmodern approaches embrace. Instead, by insisting on the dynamic unity of change in one’s subject formation process, it aims to shake the definitions of subjectivity that problematise or completely disregard an agent who privileges a particular identity category, mostly visible identity, as her main constitutive identification over her other alignments. Hence, it claims that the way the subject interprets or attributes meanings to those foremost formative dimensions of her identity differs over the course of her lifetime, but her search for unity so as to feel at home remains. It is in this process, visible identities are cardinal in permeating one’s subjectivity. To facilitate this approach, this paper offers a theoretical framework from the works of Alcoff and Weir, which argue for the epistemic and political importance of identities (Alcoff 2006, Weir 2013). Therefore, my central claim is that identities are not necessarily essential and the politics of identity is not intrinsically good or bad. Building through this argument, the paper acknowledges identities, specifically visible identities, as practices of freedom -opening up to otherness and the creation of new connections (Weir 2013). In other words, it develops an approach that transcends the defense of identity that is always reactionary and has only strategic use so as to achieve certain political goals in post-colonial contexts (Spivak 1987, 2005).

Drawing on two new resources for Middle Eastern women’s history—the archives of the Women’s Secretariat of the Third International (Communist Women's International) and the Communist University for the Toilers of the East (KUTV)—this talk will focus on a group of women from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria who traveled to study and work in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s. Facilitated by the Comintern and the proliferating communist parties in the Middle East during the 1920s, these migrations occurred immediately after the period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that one scholar has recently described as the “moment of genesis” of Mediterranean radicalism. The talk will thus consider how the establishment of organized communist movements affected communities of Mediterranean radicals, but also consider important continuities. How and why did these women come to study in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s to the mid 1930s? What kinds of expectations did the Comintern have of them as “women” and as “Easterners” both in Moscow and in their home countries? How did these women use such expectations to promote their individual and collective interests using the bureaucracies of this officially anti-imperialist party-state? In answering these questions, Comintern archives help to illuminate a long neglected non-European dimension of “the woman question” in Middle Eastern studies. The documents suggest a new point of comparison for scholars interested in how various nationalist and European colonial modernization projects used Middle Eastern women as an object. Particularly interesting are examples of women migrants from places like Syria and Egypt who were asked to participate in Soviet efforts to “liberate” women in domestic regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Such cases show unexpected connections between internal and external workings of the party-state in its efforts to “overcome backwardness” in domestic and foreign “Eastern” societies.