Gender, Sexuality, and Social Change in the Middle East

Catalog description

This first year seminar introduces basic concepts, debates, and narratives pertaining to the histories of gender and sexuality in the Middle East by covering the period from the late eighteenth century until the present day. In an engagement with global historical contexts, the course aims to engage students with the history of women, gender, and sexuality as they informed and shaped political and social change in the Middle East and vice versa. This course will concentrate on selected themes such as modernity, nationalism, and colonization to encourage students to challenge preconceived assumptions about Middle Eastern women, discuss some of the many roles they have played in social change, and think comparatively and transnationally about gender, history, and social life. In doing so, the class provides a historical context pertaining to the region’s history by presenting a chronologically and thematically organized analysis to scrutinize the decline of the Ottomans, the rise of nationalisms, the implications of Islamist reformism, colonial rules before and after World War I and their impact on shaping women’s lives, gender dynamics and sexual politics, the age of decolonization and rise of state feminisms under colonial and authoritarian regimes, an historical inquiry of same-sex desire and the political activism organized around LGBTQI+ movements, and finally contemporary political movements such as the Iranian Revolution and Arab Uprisings in shaping present discourses and practices informing individual and collective social and political status along with gendered and sexual politics in contemporary Middle Eastern societies.