Dartmouth Summer Institute on Gender in Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies
Brand new, hot off the presses.
I can’t even say how excited I am that it’s actually happening. I’ve had the great honor of being part of some of the early conversations, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be quite amazing and wonderful. If you’re an academic type, do consider applying.
Thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation, a Summer Institute on Gender Studies in Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies will take place August 7-10, 2005, Sunday afternoon to Wednesday noon, at Dartmouth College. No formal papers will be delivered; rather, several brief, informal presentations will be made to encourage group discussion. Space is limited and the Institute is open by application to faculty and graduate students who work in fields related to Jewish Studies and/or Islamic Studies and who have background in gender studies.
The Institute will focus on issues of gender as they inform and enhance a range of disciplines and topics in the study of Judaism and Jewish history, Islam and Islamicate culture and history. The goal will be to considers ways that scholars in Jewish Studies who work on issues related to gender might develop both scholarly and collegial interactions with feminist scholars of Islam. It is hoped that participants will include historians, anthropologists, political theorists, scholars of religion, literature, and culture, among other disciplines, and that their interests will include a range of time periods and geographic locations. Graduate students and junior faculty are particularly encouraged to participate.Â
For more info, and application instructions, check out the website here.
is the reactionary Muslim Student Association part of the progressive student alliance at Dartmouth like they are at Berkeley? What a wacky twist on feminist/gender studies! The burka as a symbol of liberation….
Sausage, you should read Leila Ahmed’s “Women and Gender in Islam.” Ahmed doesn’t veil herself, but she has a crucial discussion of how the veil came to be a symbol for many things besides simple religiosity, such as resistance to European colonialism, national patriotism, etc. It was greatly in response to European discourses of Islam’s oppression of women (ironic since during the British occupation of Egypt Lord Cromer, the viceroy, was also head of the London anti-suffragist league) that some Muslims developed a counter-discourse of the veil as resistance. Those feminists who had been making headway in the area of convincing people not to veil came to be seen as making concessions to the West; this dynamic still operates in many ways today.
The burka as a symbol of liberation….
The Snood as a symbol of …..
hmm, i think my post was misuderstood a bit. I’m not anti-veil at all. I’m generally pretty libertarian and if one wants to wrap themselves head to toe in pursuit of spirituality I say you go girl! It’s just not my thang.
I do find the “counter-discourse” (i like that phrase) fascinating. But a symbol of resistance within a reactionary ideology does not make the ideology itself progressive. For those progressives who are embracing radical Islam right now because elements of islamist thought are fighting the west, I see that as hypocritical and dangerously naive. The willful ignorance is similar in my mind to friends of Israel who refuse to acknowledge that maybe what’s going on in the Territories is not all kosher. And like we’re seeing in Israel now, there’s a hefty price to pay for that.
As far as the snood, like I said, I got no problem with how others worship. But I can’t recall Chabad getting an invite to a Progressive Student Alliance on any college campus I know of….
Yeah, I agree that the fact of the discourse of the veil as resistance being within a wider reactionary ideology makes it very problematic. And it’s simplistic and foolish for anyone to smooth that over. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been at Berkeley, though, but I haven’t seen anyone on the left embracing radical Islam. I mean, it seems sort of clear to me that if you’re for secularism, free love, gender equality, etc. etc. that Wahhabism, vilayet-i-faqih, and Sayyid Qutb are not for you.
If you ask me the best way to show your still keepin it real, and not conforming to western standards is the clitendectomy, or however else you spell it
I wonder if it is less an embracement of radical islam and more a romanticization of it.
A quick google search sees Progressive Student Alliance type groups working in conjunction with Muslim Student Alliance chapters at Cal Poly SLO, University of Tennessee, as well as Berkeley among others. The East Tennessee Progressive Alliance, a non-campus group, also lists the MSA as a progressive group.
There is so much ironic orientalism at play it is delicious to say the least.