Stereotypes about gender and women in MENA have proliferated with the rise of Islamophobia. Women in MENA are imagined as victims of a fanatic patriarchy, prompting "white men [and women] to protect brown women from brown men," in Gayatri Spivak's words. Gender inequalities in Europe and the United States, described by Joan Scott, are ignored. Diversity in the region is not considered in this homogenizing discourse, nor is attention paid to the possibilities or opportunities for empowerment open to women in MENA. This panel, composed of papers from diverse disciplines, presents alternative images of agentive Middle Eastern women to promote discussion about diversity between and within patriarchal systems. Specifically, hegemonic and "modernist" stereotypes do not take into consideration regional differences in the valuation of public and private spheres, the important political roles of domestic spaces in MENA and norms that provide many women with leeway to negotiate professional choices. The first paper will present the career of Celile Berk Butka, an internationally successful Turkish architect who worked during a time in which architecture schools in Europe and the United States were largely closed to women. The second paper discusses Jordanian Samiha Khrais's novel, Al-Qurmiyya, that depicts powerful Bedouin women who were instrumental in the early Arab resistance to Turkish military demands. This novel challenges popular images of Bedouin and Arab women. The third paper offers an example from Iran in which rural women, often belonging to ethnic and religious minorities, were marginalized by the Pahlavi monarchy for their traditionalism. The paper discusses the active involvement of these women during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and how these activities challenged the ascribed roles of women within both Pahlavi and Islamist governments. The fourth paper is based on ethnographic research among Palestinian women embroiderers. Such home-based work is often not recognized as productive labor in studies of women's economic participation. Yet the author argues that embroidery provides women with financial self-sufficiency and important spaces for addressing controversial national political issues. The final paper, also based on ethnographic research, discusses Yemeni women's political and economic participation and, especially, rural women's mobility and agency. It argues that a history of women's leadership in South Arabia, combined with a norms binary that differs from hegemonic understandings of "public/private," provides women in Yemen with spaces to negotiate their activities within a system that formally cedes authority to men.
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Dr. Meral Ekincioglu
The international career of Celile Berk Butka (1915, Istanbul-1984, New York City), the first woman architect-engineer from Istanbul Technical University, her master’s thesis at MIT in 1946-1947, and her professional career in Detroit and New York City (1959-1972) fill a significant gap in the field, and offers the potential to stimulate new scholarly studies on women architects from Turkey, a modern, secular and Muslim-majority country in the Middle East; or other countries with the similar architectural and cultural characteristics and their alternative career paths. Although the postwar period witnessed a new and international self-image of Turkish women architects unlike the official ideology of the country in the making of modern woman as a nationally constructed icon in the 1930s, why are their inspiring career stories still invisible in the established history of architecture?
Turkish women architects of the postwar generation redefined not only stereotypes associated with Turkish women but also the stereotypes that women architects should specialize in “women’s fields” such as housing projects, domestic architecture and interior decoration. As the first woman architect-engineer graduate of the Istanbul Technical University (1942), one of the oldest and leading universities in the Republic of Turkey, Celile Berk Butka and her international scope challenge gender stereotypes in modern Turkish architecture merits scholarly attention.
This paper is based on archival research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the American Institute of Architects, the Women’s Museum Istanbul, and relevant personal archives, as well as semi-structured interviews and a close reading on relevant published architectural and scholarly essays, books on Turkish women architects of the postwar generation, and on women architects in the US in between the 1940s-the 1960s. Celile Berk Butka is not only the first woman engineer-architect graduated from Istanbul Technical University in 1942, but she also opened a new path for the next generation of women architects from postwar Turkey to the international world.
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Dr. Caroline Seymour-Jorn
This paper explores representations of women in Jordanian Samiha Khrais’s novel al-qurmiyya (English translation, The Tree Stump, 2019). The novel tells the story of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It has been recognized as offering a local, Arab perspective to the story of the Middle East in the WWI period, and particularly as offering an alternative to T.E. Lawrence’s account of Bedouin life, ethics and role in the conflict. While numerous chapters of the novel are dedicated to movements and conflicts of men, the novel begins with and follows the actions and consciousness of several Bedouin women, including women whom Khrais depicts as instrumental in early Arab resistance to Turkish military demands. I argue that in this ethnographically informed novel, Khrais makes strategic use of cultural, historical and linguistic elements and references to create representations of powerful women within the Bedouin communities. The novel explores women’s attitudes to and enjoyment of sexuality, their children and their relationships with husbands and other men. Through these carefully depicted female and male characters, Khrais generates a narrative that powerfully challenges stereotypes of Bedouin and Arab women more generally. Because the novel has recently been translated into English, it may be of interest to those teaching Arabic literature in translation, Arabic cultures or Arab history.
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Dr. Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh
ABSTRACT
The Other Women: Iran’s Mighty and Marginalized
Secular state reforms during the rule of the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79) in Iran aimed to modernize the country, liberate women, and make them more equal to men. Theoretically, the state’s feminist policy was all-encompassing but in practice it marginalized a large majority of women as the state forcefully removed their hijab and allowed those who accepted such changes to progress, which left millions of females behind.
This large group of females, which I refer to as the “other women,” were marginalized because of the secular nature of the reforms that disregarded their cultural sensitivities as they did not appreciate the Western model of change that the state practiced. The “other women” came either from poor, highly religious (Twelver Shiites), small town and rural areas, and in many cases they were non-Persian (e. g. Arabs, Azeris, Kurds).
In this paper, I discuss how these “other women” took an active role in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), and consequently changed its outcome. Additionally, I will explain how this group of women simultaneously challenged their ascribed gender roles and expectations. This is significant because their participation in the war took place while the theocratic regime demonstrated its highly repressive stance toward women through judicial and social policies while promoting its “Islamic” agenda limiting women’s social engagement only to the interior of their homes. Sources used in this study are women war participants’ memoirs, interviews, and unpublished accounts of their involvement in the war. The continuing women’s struggle against the Iranian government’s repressive treatment of women despite their important role in the war makes this a relevant subject.
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Ms. Rasmieyh Abdelnabi
Sanaa learned to embroider from her mother and aunts. Embroidering was part of their way of life and Sanaa’s mother did it to help with the family finances. Sanaa used the money she earned to pay for school because the fees were too high for her family. Through embroidery she achieved some independence and agency. Embroidery serves as material expression of the Palestinian experience, history, and identity. Palestinians use embroidery to generate income, discuss Palestine, and build new social networks. Using Palestinian embroidery as a space, this paper discusses the informal politics taking shape in women-only spaces.
This paper will utilize ethnographic research of Palestinian women who embroider and sell their products to understand the formation of an informal and soft politics by a population living under an entrenched system of oppression. The aim of this paper is to understand how one’s political subjectivity is shaped by one’s existence in such a system. What kind of politics takes form in everyday spaces? In particular, women-only spaces, criticized for being gender-normative, but are actually spaces where women become self-sufficient and develop new support systems?
Embroidery as a space is not without its challenges. It has been criticized for upholding gender-normative traditions because women generally embroider in their homes and are viewed as embracing gender segregation. But in this case, upholding such traditions benefits women and Palestinians as a collective both politically and financially. Embroidery as a space serves as a meeting place for the different Palestinian actors across various social, political, economic, and religious spaces, who are exhausted by conflict and seek to change the Palestinian narrative globally and maintain their existence as Palestinians – a political endeavor. This space is rooted in women’s work but utilized by the Palestinian collective. In particular this space allows us to understand how individuals and collectives maneuver through an entrenched system of oppression politically when direct confrontational acts, such as protesting or speaking publicly can bring forth severe punishment or death and formal politics has failed them as a people.
This paper seeks to understand a form of politics exercised by women globally, which takes form as a combination of quiet resistance and economic self-sufficiency. A politics that seeks not only that a people survive, but also thrive by making erasure of the native near impossible.
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Dr. Najwa Adra
Urban and rural Yemeni women often complain about gender inequality and the injustices they face in a male-dominated society. All legal systems in Yemen – State, Islamic and Tribal Customary Law – assume women’s dependence on their male kin. Women’s mobility and public voice have been increasingly restricted by imported conservative ideologies that have spread though the media and school curricula. The current conflict further limits women’s security. Yet, Yemeni women’s assertiveness and active political and economic participation have captured the attention of international observers because these contradict assumptions of Arab and Muslim women’s “victimization.”
This paper, based on long-term field research and consulting experience in Yemen, suggests that a variety of cultural and economic factors empower Yemeni women despite formal gender inequality. These include a high local valuation of children and motherhood, women’s control over their property, and strong sanctions against physical assault on women (until the current conflict, “honor killing” was virtually unknown, and domestic violence was very rare.) Gender roles for men and women differ from the dominant ones in the West and in some ways favor women’s empowerment. Men in Yemen and much of the Arab Region are culturally responsible for maintaining community cohesion. Thus, mediation and modesty in male leaders is valued over the Western ideal of a confrontational “abstract individual” (described by Joan Scott) who dominates the “public sphere.” Much political discourse and policy is formulated within the home, as Lisa Wedeen has shown, arguably in domestic spaces controlled by women. Women in Yemen routinely participate in all levels of dispute mediation. Rural villages, in which the majority of the population resides, are not gender-segregated and, until the early years of this century, rural men and women danced together at weddings and other celebrations. This paper does not argue that gender equality exists in Yemen, but that local norms open up important spaces that promote women’s agency as they contradict stereotypical assumptions.
