ALUMNI FEATURE
Alumni Article
مقاالت الخريجين
Reflections on the Study of Gender at CCAS New research
CCAS faculty, students, and alums reflect on how the study of gender has impacted their learning, research, teaching, and field work. Judith Tucker
Professor of History and former CCAS Director When I first arrived at Georgetown over 35 years ago, I had little inkling that CCAS was about to carve out a special place for itself in women’s and gender studies. I was a women’s historian, eager to integrate women’s experiences into the history of the Middle East in my classroom, but there wasn’t much to work with. Women’s history was still in its infancy when it came to the region, and there was almost nothing to draw on in terms of scholarly sources based on solid research. I assigned a few articles I found here and there in order to eke out a “women’s week” each semester, but I couldn’t imagine how to mount an entire course on women’s and gender issues. Even early on, however, the idea that gender was important was wafting around CCAS. The Center’s annual symposium in 1986 focused on Arab women and brought together scholars from the U.S. and the Arab world—virtually all women as I recall—who worked in a variety of disciplines and presented cutting edge research. And our male colleagues also came onboard: Hisham Sharabi, one of the Center’s founders, published his Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society in 1988 in which he argued that patriarchal structures haunted the Arab world and blocked authentic change (see page 15 for book cover). And then, in the 1990s, CCAS began to really hit its stride. Professor Barbara Stowasser started to teach a course on women in the Qur’an, and published her pioneering book on the subject in 1994 (see page 14). I added courses on gender and empire in the Middle East, and Islamic law and gender.
ابحاث جديدة
And a number of MAAS students from the late 1980s and 1990s embraced the study of women and gender and went on to earn PhDs at Georgetown and elsewhere, and then played a central role in developing the field. I have room to mention only a few of the pioneers: Mary Ann Fay who changed our views of the harem and seclusion (page 17), Ellen Fleischmann who wrote the first English-language history of the Palestinian women’s movement (page 4), Wilson Jacob who set a new course in the study of Egyptian nationalism with his book on masculinity (page 8). Over the course of the following two decades, the addition of Professor Fida Adely (page 14) to the faculty strengthened our teaching on gender issues immeasurably, and we were able to develop a women and gender concentration. MAAS students continued to engage with the field and bring the gender lens to bear on a variety of subjects. As the field of women’s and gender studies in the Arab World has matured, MAAS graduates have led the way in integrating gender into
the study of a wide array of subjects—disability, literacy, war, law, development, and migration to mention a few. A number of these graduates are represented in the pages of this newsletter, and it is a source of great satisfaction to note that many more might have contributed if space allowed. We have come such a long way. Now I can teach a large undergraduate class on the history of women and gender in the Middle East and face no difficulty in finding splendid scholarly work to assign, much of it written by colleagues who once studied in the MAAS program.
Faculty spotlight
إضائة على الهيئة التعليمية Dr. Judith Tucker is Professor of History at CCAS, former Director of the Master of Arts in Arab Studies Program, former Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and President-elect of the Middle East Studies Association. She is the author of multiple books on the history of women and gender in the Arab world. (See box below.)
Judith Tucker Professor of History at CCAS and Former CCAS Director Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Restoring Women to History Indiana University Press, 1999 In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine California University Press, 1998 Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law Cambridge University Press, 2008 Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt Cambridge University Press, 1985
مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون
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