Feminist Geographies of the Middle East and North Africa
Panel VII-18, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, October 8 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Though feminist geographers have made critical contributions to the fields of economic, political, and human geography, their work remains at the margins of both Geography, and Women's and Gender Studies. The work of feminist geographers has similarly been underrepresented in the field of Middle East Women's and Gender Studies. While feminist scholars and activists continue to produce important work that attempts to make sense of the sociopolitical climate in the region - including issues like the popular uprisings in places such as Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan; stagnant economies and governments; the continued fighting for gender equality and women's rights; and the huge numbers of migrants and refugees – they continue to ignore the important theoretical and methodological considerations offered by feminist geographers, and the field of feminist geography more broadly. Feminist geography provides a critical lens that is, "simultaneously deconstructive - disassembling the totality to locate distinct moments of the whole - and dialectically reconstructive" (Bannerji in Vogel, 2013, xl). In other words, feminist geography positions regional and global processes in a direct relationship with the "situated knowledges" that are embedded within specific places, spaces, and times, acknowledging the ways that these processes can be, at times, complementary, contradictory, overlapping, and co-constitutive (Katz 2001, 1230). Such place-based knowledges, therefore, are critical to any study of feminist or queer social movements, women's rights, or social justice issues in the region: experiential, place-based knowledge has the power to disrupt hegemonic knowledge production that often flows from the global North to the global South, and can, consequently, push us towards a true feminist "politics that simultaneously retains the distinctness of the characteristics of a certain place and builds on its analytic connections to other places" (Katz 2001, 1231). Further, in its attention to process, feminist geography is better able to conceptualize social differences, and understands gender, race, and class, among others, as both constituted by, and constitutive of the very sociopolitical and economic processes that are the focus of academic work in, and on the region.
Foregrounding these methodological considerations, this panel will highlight the critical work being done at the nexus of Feminist Geography and Middle East Women’s and Gender Studies, and will ask how feminist geography can help to push Middle East Women’s and Gender Studies into promising new directions of academic inquiry.
Disciplines
Anthropology
Geography
History
Sociology
Participants
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Karen Culcasi
-- Presenter
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Dr. Yalda Hamidi
-- Presenter
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Gabriella Nassif
-- Organizer, Chair
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Brittany Cook
-- Presenter
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Caroline Nagel
-- Discussant
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Dr. A. Marie Ranjbar
-- Presenter
Presentations
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The 1953 Coup, engineered by the CIA to remove the first democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, is one of the most significant turning points of the contemporary history of Iran. Despite the impact of this political climax on Iranian women’s lives and activisms, the scope of the academic studies addressing the Coup still remains exclusive to men. However, this general masculine approach in academic research, Iranian women authors have written a female standpoint of national geography and history in the genre of fiction. In this paper, I re-read the novel Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran (2012) by Shahrnush Parsipur, one the of most famous novelists of the Iranian diaspora, to argue how the author attempts to fill the blanks in narratives of the 1953 Coup in her novel.
Literary scholars read the novel as an unmarked and white-washed feminist piece that advocates for Iranian women leaving their male partners and family members behind. Nevertheless, in my reading through the lens of feminist geography, I argue that Parsipur writes Tehran and Karaj, the capital and its suburb at the time, as representatives of Iran after the Coup. As the novel opens with the Coup unfolding in the streets of Tehran, a group of women struggles with the different oppressions. As a result of the intersectionality of governmental violence of the Coup, combined with previous traditional patriarchy and misogyny, some of these women found their way into a female-exclusive space of an abandoned garden in Karaj. This transformation happens through the performativity of their genders in several unforeseen ways; from murdering an abusive husband to becoming victims of rape or family honor killings.
Their chosen performativities change the colonized space into a temporal safe-space. However, before these women have the needed time to own the space, they have to return from Karaj to Tehran. In Tehran, this time the scene of post-Coup upheavals, they found no option but to return to their old oppressors. This paper argues that Parsipur has written the spatiality of the Iranian female body under the governmental violence of colonization under Pahlavis and showed how the colonized space prohibits any possibility of the emergence of feminist consciousness.
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Karen Culcasi
War affects women from the bedroom to the battlefield, but for most women war
is experienced within intimate spaces. Intimate spaces are rarely the focus of
mainstream academic research or media reporting; thus women's experiences with
war and displacement are often concealed. Building from literature in feminist
geopolitics that helps focus our attention toward everyday and intimate geopolitics, I conducted in?depth interviews with Syrian women refugees in Jordan in order to examine how they are coping. Of the many ways that they've learned to
cope, these women asserted that earning an income and adjusting to altered gender performances and relations have been both dire and formative. Many Syrian women refugees have become income providers for the first time in their lives. Some women have become their families’ sole providers, and other women are now heads of households as well. Bringing literature from feminist geography,
transnational and migration studies, and critical home studies together with feminist geopolitics, I offer the ideas of coping and coping labour as a framework to examine the intimate spaces of displacement. I highlight that paid work is understudied within feminist geopolitics, but such a focus renders important insights into how gender shapes experiences of displacement and how displacement is reshaping gendered relations. In this paper, I show that in the intimate spaces of displacement women have taken on traditionally masculine practices, but while their gendered performances shift, they are simultaneously entrenched as the ideals of appropriate feminine and masculine performances are recreated. Though these multiple gendered performances are creating numerous demands and challenges for Syrian women refugees, these women are also experiencing an increased sense of strength, confidence and respect as a result of their shifting performances.
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Dr. A. Marie Ranjbar
In this paper, I question what Global North scholars recognize as feminist praxis in Iran. Drawing from feminist postcolonial insights, I examine how the concept of ‘freedom’ is articulated and deployed in narratives of anti-compulsory hijab protests in Iran. I posit that women’s rights movements in Iran only become legible (and thereby, visible) to US audiences when they conform to narrow frames of feminist activism and orientalist tropes. I begin this paper by analyzing the relationship between “My Stealthy Freedom” (MSF) and the “Girls of Revolution Street”(GRS) protests to elucidate a politics of recognition that I argue reinforces orientalist representations of women’s rights in Iran. Through its circulation of protest footage to its one million plus followers, MSF increased the visibility of the GRS protests. Yet, through MSF’s selection of which GRS protests to publicize and English-language commentary on why this movement is important, other critical aspects of the GRS protests were rendered invisible. I posit that the strategic framing of women’s rights through campaigns like MSF does more to attract international support than address the multi-faceted nature of gender injustice in Iran and, paradoxically, rests on Iranian women reproducing themselves as the vulnerable ‘unfree’ other.
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Brittany Cook
In the wider worlds of organizing, activism, and academia, ‘feminist’ has multiple modes and meanings. The word can be amorphous, taking on many, sometimes contradictory meanings, and it can elicit a strong affinity or strong opposition. In this paper, I ask what it means to do feminist work as a geographer who works in rural spaces in Jordan? What methodologies have been successful and what have been some challenges and contradictions? How do different conceptualizations of feminism overlap and differ? I argue that, like in the case of gender and sexuality studies and global LGBTQIA+ movements, we should be careful and honest about the lines (and sometimes lack thereof) between our research and the categories of our personal particular feminisms as we work across different spaces and cultures. This paper reflects on the ways in which I implemented feminist methodologies in order to examine issues of gender, development, and social reproduction. I reflect on how the structures of the academy shape the type of feminist methods that are possible for me. I reflect on the importance and trouble of taking the feminist killjoy—the one who, by necessity, calls attention to problems of sexism and racism—for a ride into different contexts. What does it look like to honestly hold my feminist killjoy in one hand and the feminist praxis of engaging deeply with communities on the other? These two are not by default contradictory, but can face some contention.
