2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Modern Middle Eastern history has often been narrated as a story of secularization, attended by the emergence of regional movements calling for women's rights in secular feminist terms. The heightened visibility of public piety and Islamist politics in the region since the 1970s has called the secularization narrative into question, but the association of women's empowerment with secular modernity has remained largely intact. Today, anxieties about Islamist politics are often articulated through concerns about the status of "women in Islam," as those advocating for a secular politics critique the Islamic tradition as oppressive and patriarchal and raise doubts on feminist grounds about whether Muslim piety and secular liberal governance can coexist.

This panel explores the conceptual contributions of women to Islamic thought in the twentieth century in order to rethink these anxieties. The papers investigate how women thinkers transformed central concepts and genres in the Islamic tradition: tarbiya (education and childrearing); sunna (path or way) and fard (religious obligation); tabaqat (biographical dictionary); tarajim (biographies); and tafsir (exegesis). How did women appropriate and rework classical Islamic concepts and genres for their own agendas? How did they engage Islamic intellectual pasts to intervene in debates about domesticity and family, gender and sexuality, and correct ethical, political, and literary practice? How did women challenge masculinist notions of religious and intellectual authority and authorship? Finally, how did the concepts women articulated serve to strengthen, reshape, or dismantle hierarchies structuring social life, for example between man and woman, public and private, and rich and poor?