Reflections on the Study of Gender at CCAS

Reflections on the Study

of Gender at CCAS New research CCAS faculty, students, and alums reflect on how the study of gender has impacted جديدة their learning, research, teaching, and field work. ابحاث

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. And a number of MAAS students from the the study of a wide array of subjects—disabillate 1980s and 1990s embraced the study of ity, literacy, war, law, development, and miwomen and gender and went on to earn PhDs gration to mention a few. A number of these at Georgetown and elsewhere, and then played graduates are represented in the pages of this a central role in developing the field. I have newsletter, and it is a source of great satisroom to mention only a few of the pioneers: faction to note that many more might have Faculty spotlight Mary Ann Fay who changed our views of the harem and seclusion (page 17), Ellen Fleiscontributed if space allowed.

Over the course of the following two dedid scholarly work to assign, much of it written by colleagues who once studied in the MAAS program. cades, the addition of Professor Fida Adely (page 14) to the faculty strengthened our teaching on gender issues immeasurably, and Dr. Judith Tucker is Professor of History at we were able to develop a women and gender CCAS, former Director of the Master of Arts concentration. MAAS students continued to in Arab Studies Program, former Editor of the engage with the field and bring the gender International Journal of Middle East Studies, lens to bear on a variety of subjects. As the and President-elect of the Middle East Studies field of women’s and gender studies in the Association. She is the author of multiple books Arab World has matured, MAAS graduates on the history of women and gender in the Arab have led the way in integrating gender into world. (See box below.)

We have come such a long way. Now I chmann who wrote the first English-language can teach a large undergraduate class on the history of the Palestinian women’s movement history of women and gender in the Middle (page 4), Wilson Jacob who set a new course East and face no difficulty in finding splenإضائةعلىالهيئةالتعليمية in the study of Egyptian nationalism with his book on masculinity (page 8).

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

Diogo Bercito

MAAS ‘20 During my graduate studies at MAAS, I have taken three courses on topics directly related to gender: “Gender and Empire in the Middle East,” “Women and Gender in the Arab World,” and “Arab Feminism Through Literature.” I learned through these courses, for example, about how empires regulated women’s bodies to exert power in colonized territories or how particular Arab writers raised awareness of gender inequality through their work. However, regardless of the specific content of these classes, the important academic leap for me happened more in terms of learning new questions to ask in my research. This is, I believe, the result of exposure to different theoretical frameworks, which has helped me learn to see the same research object from different perspectives. For example, in my writings about Arab migration to Brazil, these classes prompted me to dig into my sources to find the answers to questions like “How did gender influence the decision to migrate?” “How did it condition the experience?” or “How did the act of migrating impact gender norms?” In a particular paper I wrote for a class, I analyzed the case of an Arab migrant in São Paulo and her writings on the role of Arab women in the diaspora. Although I knew about her story and had access to her documents, I would not have known which questions to ask until I took these courses. Without them, I would be missing a valuable opportunity to pursue more intersectional approaches in my work, taking gender into consideration along with class and race.

Diogo Bercito is a Brazilian journalist specializing in the Middle East and has covered the 2013 Egyptian coup, the 2014 Gaza war, and the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. He graduated in May from the MAAS program, where he developed a research focus on Arab migration to Latin America.

Alexandra Murray

MAAS ‘20 When I applied to CCAS I knew I wanted to study women and gender. During my undergraduate program, where I studied international relations, the only exposure I had to these themes was through a class called “Gender and Terrorism.” Thankfully, it approached the topic from a critical feminist perspective, but learning about women in the MENA region only from the context of terrorism still didn’t sit well with me. I applied to the MAAS program because I wanted to learn about women and gender in the Middle East beyond the context of violence and politics. My time at CCAS has led me to a breadth of research I never would have discovered had I continued studying politics—from gender and sexuality to film and television studies. In this sense, the MAAS program has helped me winnow down my interests from the broader “women and gender” to find what I really love studying: cultural production and the various intersections of gender and orientalism within it. I am currently researching the emergence of gendered and orientalist tropes of Arabs in the early Hollywood era and the transnational flow of such tropes across different national film industries. As part of this project, I have been mapping the gendered and orientalist representations in the 1919 novel The Sheik, and its 1921 film adaptation, and how they fit in with Hollywood representations of Arabs at the time. MAAS has shaped my research in innumerable ways: introducing me to gender studies in anthropology and history, teaching me about gender from the lived experiences of men and women in different contexts within the Middle East, and paying strong attention to the theoretical background of these discussions. All of these factors have helped make me a stronger researcher in both Arab studies and media studies.

Alexandra Murray graduated in May from the MAAS program with a concentration in women and gender issues. She holds an M.A. in Arabic and International Relations from the University of St Andrews and is a recipient of the Jack G. Shaheen Exploratory Research Grant at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University for 2020.

Mahdi Zaidan

MAAS ‘18 Focusing on gender and sexuality at MAAS was a fascinating way to learn how to tie seemingly “cultural” issues to larger historical and economic narratives. Problems that are often attributed to vague concepts like patriarchal culture or masculinity were studied at MAAS with rigorous reference to the particularities of the economic policies and sociohistorical structures in the region.

One pertinent example of this was Dr. Fida Adely’s course on development. The course largely focused on training students to analyze development narratives and rhetoric written about the Arab world. Instead of applying simplistic explanations like the culture of masculinity or tradition to themes such as women’s economic inequality, the course showcased how employment is a complex issue that is contingent upon economic policies of austerity, expansion and decline of state sectors, as well as the peculiar nature of the oil economy in the Middle East. Explanations for social issues were thus always underpinned by a deep understanding of local context. The paper I wrote for this class was on sex work in Lebanon. In analyzing the labor market and the sociological reality of women’s employment opportunities rather than focusing on vague ideas of morality or culturalism, I was able to understand the link between larger socioeconomic issues and the seemingly micro problem of sex work.

For my thesis at MAAS— “We Live in the Shadows”—I explored the themes of identity formation, socioeconomic precarity, and activism among LGBT migrants in Lebanon and Athens. My approach, again inspired by what I learned in my courses, was to historicize and complicate shallow narratives of homophobia and cultural descriptions of the region. As a result, a thesis that was originally about LGBT activism and identity ended up also exploring the history of sectarianism in the Levant, its relationship to political econ

omy and the family, and how these phenomena could do more to explain homophobia in the region than a simple diagnosis on the premise of tradition or culture.

Mahdi Zaidan graduated from the MAAS program in 2018. He is currently pursuing a second masters in social anthropology at Cambridge University, where he is focusing on urban ecology and environmental activism. He hopes to begin a PhD program in London next year.

Wilson Chacko Jacob

MAAS ‘95 I was very pleased when I received an invitation to contribute a short reflection on the role gender plays in my work as a historian and scholar. As an alumnus of MAAS, a program that one can truly be proud of, I am honored to share a few thoughts. During my years at Georgetown, two brilliant scholars taught me to think about gender in relation to the Arab World, South Asia, and the postcolonial in general: Judith Tucker and Lalitha Gopalan. Through their historical and critical approaches to gender, I learned to think with and against a category that did not solely ensue from particular identities—yet could shape those identities.

The demonstration of this doubled role for gender—as an analytical concept and as an identity—became the object of my doctoral research and culminated in my first book, Working Out Egypt (see page 8). Gender conceived as irreducible to biologically given male or female bodies opens up the possibility of thinking, for example, about masculinity as a socially and historically constituted set of performances. Those entangled performances— of self-writing, dress, sports, association, embodied sovereignty—are what I pursued in my research in order to think more critically about the political and ethical limits of what I had seen as a globally unfolding colonial modernity (1870s-1930s) that compelled different groups to (re)organize themselves as self-determining national bodies. Regarding gender as performance opened up new vistas onto the formation and persistence of masculinist hierarchies of various scales: global, imperial, national, and so on. For example, I was able to trace starkly divergent views on the burgeonwhich a project has integrated principles of ing international Olympic movement—from gender equity into its activities. In an attempt colonial officials, royalists, nationalists, athto be inclusive of women, this particular projletes and fans. On the one hand, that global ect required that at least 3 of the 12 commustage of physical performance could be imagnity group leaders be women. “This [quota] ined as a symbolic site for the fulfilment of is not equality,” one woman in the group told national aspirations (self-determination in a me. She added angrily that had it not been cultural register, so to speak) and hence held for that quota, they would have achieved 50 obvious political implications that imperialists percent female representation on the board. and internationalists all felt needed to be reguAs I spoke with the other women, it became lated. On the other hand, individual athletes evident that they understood the quota to from Egypt did not simply imagine the stage indicate there should be a maximum, rather as symbolic or political; for them, the desire than a minimum, of three women. Clearly, to compete against the world’s top sportsmen the intended impact of the quota was lost promised personal bests and recognition as somewhere between the American practisuccessfully embodied masculinity. tioners who came up with it and the Iraqi

Georgetown, thus, started me on a path dewomen who were supposed to be benefiting voted to a life of the mind, a life that questions from it. This misunderstanding was a stark basic assumptions about things as natural and reminder of how a top-down, one-size-fitsself-evident as gender, race, and nation. all approach to gender equity and equality that is driven by outside actors doesn’t work. It often causes further harm. Wilson Chacko Jacob is Professor of History One of the most powerful things I learned at Concordia University. He graduated from during my time in MAAS is the importance Georgetown’s five-year BSFS/MAAS program of regularly reflecting on my own positionin 1995 and earned his PhD from New York ality and power as a white American studyUniversity. Dr. Jacob is author of Working ing—and later working in—the MENA and Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subother regions around the world that have ject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870- been directly impacted by my own country’s 1940 (Duke University Press, 2011) and For historical and present actions. I must continGod or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian ue to do that as a development practitioner Ocean World (Stanford University Press, 2019). focused on gender equality, a field in which most of the people deciding funding and proLindsey Jones-Renaud gram priorities are still, like me, largely from MAAS ‘06 or based in the United States, Europe, and It was 2012, and I Canada. In my work, I try to focus on pushwas in Bnaslawa, a ing for shifts in power and resources to the town outside of Erbil women and genderqueer-led movements and in the Kurdistan Reorganizations that are working for gender eqgion of Iraq. I was uity in their own communities so that women meeting with a group like the ones I met in Bnaslawa can deterof community leaders mine their own actions for advancing gender involved in a developequity instead of being forced to follow our ment project to identify and address priority misguided ones.  infrastructure goals, such as constructing new roads or equipping health centers with medical supplies. Although the community Lindsey Jones-Renaud has been working in groups were entirely Iraqi-led, they were mothe international development sector since she bilized by the project, which was designed graduated from the MAAS program in 2006. and managed by international and American She is the founder, owner, and principal consuldonors and development practitioners. tant for Cynara Development Services, which

The purpose of my meeting was to conprovides facilitation, training, social impact duct a “gender assessment”—a development analysis and strategic planning services for orindustry term for a type of participatory reganizations working to advance gender equalsearch designed to determine the extent to ity and social justice. جامعة جورجتاون–مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة 11