In the flesh: Middle Eastern Bodies and the Construction of Power Relations
Panel 247, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 20 at 10:00 am
Panel Description
In recent years the body has become the focus of scholarly attention and the object of historical inquiries. Bodies of men and women began to fill a key role in the process of understanding the political, religious, social, and cultural spheres of Middle Eastern societies. This was, inter alia, a product of the growing attention of historians to the works of Michel Foucault and to feminism and queer theory, seeing the body as a site for research of power relations. Historians interpreted the relations between private and public as embodied through the research of the Body, asking how bodies became the objects of discipline, interrogation, torture, design, medical enquiry and more by states, governments, scientific institutions etc. The body as a reflection of power relations between state and subjects, locals and foreigners, elite and non-elite groups, constitutes the main theme of this panel.
In recent years the body has become the focus of scholarly attention and the object of historical inquiries. Bodies began to fill a key role in understanding Middle Eastern societies. This was, inter alia, a product of the growing attention of historians to the works of Michel Foucault and feminist and queer theory, which examined the body as a site of power relations. Scholars have begun asking how studying bodies as objects of gendering, culture, discipline, interrogation, torture, design, medical enquiry and more, allow us to better understand the ways in which states, governments, scientific institutions, and societies interact and function. The body as a site in which power relations are both made and reflected - between state and subjects, locals and foreigners, elite and non-elite groups, constitutes the main theme of this panel.
We address the body as an integral part of nationalist projects, sentiments, and struggles led by governments, terror organizations, medical expert and nationalists. The first paper presents how the dissemination of a new male body-image in 1930s Iran was imbued with political meanings. While this body-image buttressed the hegemonic status of an Iranian westernized elite, it ensured the loyalty and obedience of wider segments of society to the monarch, perceived as the embodiment of the nation. Another paper shows how power groups harnessed the female body and its presentation in the media to gain political ground. In the background of the ongoing civil war erupted in Syria, nationalist and oppositionist groups alike used gendered discourses of the Muslim female body to impose a religious discourse of fear and Anti-secularism. The two remaining papers will discuss different aspects of the history of the body in early 20th century Palestine. The first will present the political economies of bodily risk, harm, and skill among Palestinian Arab and Jewish workers engaged in manual labor. Focusing on the construction and citriculture industries, the paper will highlight how attention to bodies-at-work allows us to develop new understandings of the relationship between race, inter-communal relations, labor politics, and nationalist projects. The final paper will discuss the body as an object of scientific examination that told the story of a crime and enabled the British Mandate government to impose relations of power through the use of law. The latter will focus on the rising status of the medical expert as expert-witness, tracing criminal intent through a forensic examination of the victimized body.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Wilson Chacko Jacob
-- Discussant
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Prof. Avner Wishnitzer
-- Chair
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Dr. Sivan Balslev
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Nimrod Ben Zeev
-- Presenter
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Ran Levy
-- Presenter
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Leila Asadi
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Sivan Balslev
During the 1920s and 1930s, a new male body image was presented and promoted in the Iranian media. Iranian men had to become broad of shoulder and chest, ruddy of face, with an erect posture and bulging arm and leg muscles. This new preoccupation with the beautiful male body was part of a new discourse on physical culture and education and their benefits. My paper examines how the new male body image was used to advocate sport, scouting and soldiering during Reza Shah's reign, and how these activities aimed to preserve the power of the Shah and the ruling elite. It uses articles from the semi-official daily Ettela’at as its main source, since this was one of the main sites in which discussions of the new male body took place.
The promotion of modern sports, including mandatory physical education in schools and the establishment of the Iranian Boy Scout Movement, as well as the introduction of compulsory military service in Iran were meant to create young men with certain physical traits, but no less important – with certain character traits. Sport, scouting and soldiering were believed to be cultivating loyalty and obedience, character traits highly valued by Reza Shah and his government.
The gradual opening of institutes of modern education to somewhat wider segments of Iranian society made the cultivation of loyalty and obedience critical for the regime. Whereas mass education was one of the government's main goals, a large body of well-educated - and possibly politically aware and militarily trained - young men might have posed a challenge to the regime and the ruling elite. Using sport, scouting and military service to create new male citizens who were not only strong but also loyal aimed to avert this threat.
Whereas sport and scouting benefitted mostly boys and young men of wealthy families, military service was supposed to benefit men of all echelons of society. However, it mostly remained the lot of the poor. Evading service was relatively easy for the wealthy, and the maltreatment of rank-and-file soldiers as well as the army's reputation for corruption further contributed to educated Iranians' aversion to join its ranks. Thus, despite state propaganda, conscription, and the militarism of Reza Shah’s regime, military service did not become a requirement of Iranian hegemonic masculinity. Put differently, one did not have to become a soldier in order to become a proper Iranian citizen.
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Ran Levy
The legal sphere in Palestine saw many changes with the inauguration of the British Mandate, opening a legal infrastructure of British courts trying civil and penal cases. Under these courts, intent filled-in a central theme in criminal deliberations. This, in turn, encouraged a growing emphasis on forensic medicine of bodies, and the testimonies of medical expert witnesses who examined them, as the most crucial means through which the court could trace intent. In other words, courts in Mandate Palestine started to perceive pathological examinations of the victimized body as a scientific way to extricate intent. The Mandate years saw the growing use of the courts in testimonies of medical experts well-versed in the interpretation of forensic examinations of injured bodies. These were mostly Arab Christians employed in state hospitals, working under the supervision of the Palestinian Coroner’s Office.
I ask what role the body and its forensic examination played in criminal adjudications and how this new legal emphasis affected the role of the medical expert as an expert witness in the Palestinian legal discourse. I show that the ability to analyze the body in a scientific way elevated the role medical experts played in court, while their testimonies tremendously influenced the decisions in penal cases. This was imbued with colonial meanings of surveillance and control; the new place the body occupied in penal law reveals how the Mandatory government sought to harness the legal sphere to enforce a new colonial order. While the scientific evaluation of the body was perceived as a neutral process stripped of colonial intention, it actually promoted the penetration of the British to the most private realm of the colonial "self", changing the very core of local legal values and virtues such as the categorization of an act of crime.
I focus on the court records of the murder of Jamil al-Bahri (1930) as a case study. Analysis of court deliberations will provide a unique perspective into the important role Dr. Zāhen Ḥadad played as expert witness, “speaking” with the body of the victim through a forensic examination and extricating the intent of those who stood behind the murder. This scientific ability to “speak” with dead bodies influenced the criminal discourse developed around the case, and his testimony was most important in the decision of the court to incriminate the accused.
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Nimrod Ben Zeev
Two national myths central to early 20th century Zionist thought and politics stand at the center of this paper - “Hebrew labor” (‘avoda ‘ivrit) and “building the land” (binyan ha-aretz). The first was considered a crucial component in the creation of a “new Jew” – able-bodied, masculine and wholly antithetical to the frail “diaspora Jew”. The second was just as important: If an allegedly barren Palestine, often itself gendered female, was to be transformed into a Jewish homeland, it would have to be built anew. These myths and their material and ideational manifestations were understood to be co-constitutive, embodied in the notion of “to build and to be built” (livnot u-lehibanot). In this paper I will demonstrate how attention to the body, in this case mostly male Jewish and Palestinian Arab bodies-at-work, reveals both myths to have been fraught with contradictions and overlooked consequences.
The paper focuses on manual labor in two of early 20th century Palestine’s most significant industries, construction and citriculture. I show how in these industries Zionist thought constructed the ideal laboring body in opposition to the bodies and comportment of Palestinian Arabs and Middle Eastern (mizrahi) Jews, at the same time as physical laboring bodies were often required to emulate and copy them. Additionally, I demonstrate how the bodies of male construction workers in particular, despite the immense symbolic and economic values attached to their work, were constantly placed in harm’s way. In response, an emerging body of “work safety” literature sought to ameliorate this contradiction by racializing risk. While there is no indication that accidents were more common among Arab or Mizrahi workers, such texts often placed the blame for bodily harm on their “improper” labor practices. This, I argue, was compounded by the labor politics of “Hebrew labor” and the urgency of “building the land”, leading to a perpetuation of the problem – copious work accidents in the construction industry due to lax safety regulations, virtually non-existent enforcement and the negligence of employers.
The paper is based upon archival research, combining Hebrew and Arabic newspapers, workers’ testimonies, and literature and leaflets published by labor unions, hygiene and safety committees, health organizations, and the Mandate government. It shows that the linked processes of building a new Hebrew body and landscape were constantly haunted by its material Arab and Middle Eastern foundations and that the ways in which these were dealt with often had dire results.
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Leila Asadi
Necropolitics and Muslim Female Bodies in Online War on Terror
Since 2013 the war on the ground in Syria expanded to the online sphere where ISIS used social media with very advanced and sophisticated strategies to create a climate of fear, recruit people from across the world and advocate its propaganda. On the other side, groups opposing ISIS have also deployed the social media platforms to raise awareness about the threat of ISIS for freedom, human rights, and democracy in the world. In this online encounter both groups have used female bodies, as gendered power relations to accelerate their propaganda machine’s speed and in result have provoked a hyper-masculine nationalist and anti-terror sensations.
Although scholars and researchers investigated the impacts of “a gendered rhetoric” of post 9/11 war on terror, nonetheless since Islamic States of Iraq and Syria officially emerged, these narratives reinforced by western and Muslim nations confronting ISIS, still remain understudied. Acknowledging the brutality of ISIS, this paper will examine the ways in which both ISIS and its opponents portray female subjects in their online confrontation. Using discourse analysis, I attempt to review intertextual animated and contested narratives in Fox News, Iraqi government, and ISIS affiliated online materials to unfold the portrayals of Muslim female bodies on both sides. I argue that ISIS and the anti-ISIS rhetoric have leveraged a very gendered imagery and language in online social media through which they subordinate Muslim females and center their bodies at the heart of radicalization, human security, and militarization of Iraq and Syria. Reflecting on the post colonial scholar Achille Mbembe’s idea about necropolitics or politics of death, which is a corrective complement to Michel Foucault’s idea of bio-politics, I argue that the current online discourse of ISIS and anti-ISIS groups highly consists of subjugations or representation of subjugated Muslim female bodies that intertwines violence and terrorism with gender to reconstruct the narratives on war on Islamic radicalism and create a climate of fear for western societies.
