Week 10: Afasaneh Najmabadi and Paul Amar

In Amar’s article, “Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?”, he addresses how Egyptian women were demoralized, sexually assaulted in public by police for protesting against the regime. The anger towards the women who protested against police brutality and the change of regime brought gender inferiority in Egyptian police since they were not seen as “rescuer for women” or “victim protector” instead a legitimate protestor. In the discourse of sexualized brutality, Amar discusses about the hyper visibility of Lara logon’s case. How Fox News described the entire Egypt for not being ready for modernity or democracy, and Egyptian men as a whole represented as predatory rather ignoring the fact that they were sub contracted thugs sent by the regime and Logon was rescued by Egyptian women and military. This challenges domestic versus international “logic of hyper visibility” focus on processes by racialized, sexualized subjects, or the marked bodies of subordinate classes, become intensely visible as objects of state, police and media gazes.

Nazmabadi, in her article, “Vatan, the Beloved; Vatan, the Mother” argues why “Vatan” has to be a gendered; why female beloved and why a mother? She also discusses how literature has probed the productive work of gender and sexuality in generating modern nationalism and patriotism however it has ignored how patriotism and nationalism create a binary of gender and hetero normalization of sexuality. Regardless of its geopolitical boundaries, “Vatan”, seen as a female body, to protect, to posses, to kill or to die. The meaning for Vatan has shifted from Mother earth to beloved territory, rejecting Sufi meaning of Vatan which had to do with the desire to belong to community of faith, or the passion for unity with the divine to modern day patriotism of passion for a national homeland. Also, this article reflects how literature has been successful to use metaphorical language and images to portray and contextualize Vatan with Iranian masculinity.

Week 10: Modernity, Nation-States and Sexuality

Paul Amar in their article, "Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?" addresses the context of Egyptian women activists who were victims of violence (sexually assaulted, charged with sexual harassment) by the state (police) who used their tactics in response to increased protests by civilians against the police throughout the revolution. Similar to Mahmood and Abu-Lughod's arguments in our past readings, Amar challenges the binaries of local vs international human rights (Western feminist agendas). For example, the attack of Lara Logon which created a hypervisibility of the Arab street or mob ("its uncontrollable sexuality returned with a vengeance") was displayed widely in Western media. However, there was no mention of the possibility that the attack against Logon was committed against "paramilitaries or subcontracted thugs by State Security" to attack foreigners as they had been for weeks against what they deemed imperialist agendas or no mentioning of the fact that Egyptian women and military officers rescued Logon. Additionally, Amar cites the organization El-Nadeem who resisted the pressure from external forces such as NGO's (who only endorce more police "protection" and state violence, according to Amar) and instead focused on helping civilians cope with the violence committed by officials. El-Nadeem also helped sex workers (despite how "respectable" they are labeled) and focused on challenging Egyptian state violence. Logon argues that organizations such as El-Nadeem and many others in Egypt actually are more productive in achieving feminist work since they learn from the ground up the conflicts with NGO's and international-human-rights frameworks. 

Afsaneh Najmabadi in their article, "Vatan, the Beloved; Vatan, the Mother," discusses the  connection between the romantic love for a female vatan, produced through patriotism and heterosexuality, and a femaleness "of the beloved." The author addresses how the vatan was considered both an imagined community and the actual land where you were born or homeland. The love for the vatan was so strong that it went above love for your wife and children because it was connected to the love for God. Thus, the lover is a patriotic son or male masculinity that through protecting his homeland is earning his honor. The beloved is produced through gendered notions of nation and modern citizenship that creates the land as an object of desire that needs male supervision, care and protection. Masculine protection produced a masculine brotherhood--a homoerotic space. Nadmabadi argues that this "Nationalist appropriation...produced a sense of persons belonging to a common land with a common history." Yet those who could claim the land often were only those born to the land and foreigners who claimed Iranian allegiance were eventually challenged. The author ends the article by showing visual representations that showed the masculinity of the state and the femininity of the vatan. 

Neoliberalism Videos

 

And here are links to all the videos from Barnard Center for Research on Women:
http://vimeo.com/user1739030 OR https://www.youtube.com/user/BCRWvideos

Both links have the same content; I personally find vimeo a bit better organized, but blogger lets me embed youtube videos only, so I thought it would be handy for you guys to have both.

Week 7: Femininity, Masculinity and Modernity

This week’s readings looked at assumed and practiced gender roles and how they affect one’s treatment in society. Certain roles are ascribed to Arab and Muslim men and women, which determine their treatment in society. The first article looked at how perceptions of Arab/Muslims affected their treatment in American society post-9/11, specifically in the South West suburbs of Chicago. Women were the primary victims of harassment and attacks, and reported experience hate encounters twice as much as men. Men were more likely to experience discrimination from government officials as they were seen as terrorists, though inconvenient, so long as they avoided these sites such as airports and border crossings they felt relatively safe in their day-to-day lives. While women were seen as violators of American values, it was in public, day-to-day encounters they felt most unsafe and threatened. Women who choose to wear the hijab or veil (as opposed to women who are “forced” by their husbands) were seen as more of a threat because they were willingly ascribing to values and norms that are un-American.  Regardless of whether these women were immigrants or American born, they were viewed as foreigners in their own neighbourhoods, producing the notion that one cannot be American and Arab or Muslim at the same time.

The second article challenged some of the common notions that the internet provides an outlet for the free, liberated individual. The writer looks at the phenomena of Weblogistan, which refers to the splurge of Persian-language blogs since September 2001. “The large number of Persian-language weblogs came to be known as Weblogistan, the Iranian blogosphere, which by now includes an estimated 700,000 Persian-language blogs” (p. 8). Weblogistan produces gendered subjects, where men are seen as violent and women sexually liberated. Whether it is mere coincidence that as a result of Weblogistan emerging around the same time the “war on terror” began, it has “subject[ed] Weblogistan to the historical and political civilizational discourses and practices that give it meaning in the context of the ‘global war on terror’” (p. 10). Discourses of militarism and neoliberalism are expressed, and the producers are represented as a gendered neoliberal subject. While presented by the West as a positive advancement as a result of the growth of technology “My caution in joining the cyber-enthusiastic accounts about Weblogistan is this medium’s implication in neoliberal, nationalist and militaristic discourses” (p. 21). Voices that are not heard are bloggers that don’t reflect these Americanized ideals, though they are out there, they’re blogs are unnoticed by Western, mainstream populations. Instead what is stressed is the fact that through blogging, repressed people are able to speak out and represent the American ideals we “all” wish to possess, militarism, freedom, and neoliberalism.

I hadn’t known just how much discrimination Muslim and Arab women faced post-9/11 in the United States. It seems like such a contradiction that women who choose to wear the veil freely are seen as ascribing to un-American values. If freedom is one of the tenets of what it means to live in America, shouldn’t freedom to dress however one chooses be included in this definition? Interestingly as shown in the second article, what is seen as a truly liberated woman through such terms is a sexually active one, suggesting that women define their freedom solely through their appearance and sexuality. This definition of female freedom is problematic, and yet women are more often than not defined through these terms alone and all other aspects of their identity are ignored.  

Shakhsari in her article discusses about how some Iranian diasporic bloggers use their weblogs as entrepreneurs during the ‘‘war of terror”. In further doing so, it creates a sharp distinction on repression on freedom (Iran) and ideals of freedom (West). Also, implies that the analysis of transnational politics of blogging and politics of representation during the “war of terror”. Persian language blogging is implicated in discourses of militarism, neoliberalism, She further argues that the neoliberal blogger acts as an enterprenuer, who is responsible for her/his own economic well-being and markers her/himself as the source of valuable information. She also shows that despite Iranian women’s active political participation before and after revolution, it is only through breaking sex taboo and blogging about “freedom” that women become representable subjects in mainstream narratives about weblogistan. If the masculine diasporic ‘soldier’ takes ‘freedom’ to Iran through his active participation in proper politics through web blogs, the woman blogger finds her ‘freedom’ of expression in writing about sex life and sexuality. “Agents of politics” is represented by diasporic men where as “sexual liberation” is subjected to disaporic women in these form of representation.

            Cyber space and internet technology gives a huge amount of freedom of expression and individuality. Not denying the fact that it also creates over representation of knowledge production during specific war time. 

Calla Gilligan's Week Seven Blog Post

In this weeks reading, Sima Shakhsari discusses in her article “Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora” how Iranian diasporic bloggers use their blogs as a free enterprise resource during the war on terror. Sima then describes Weblogistan, and its affect on cyberspace. Weblogistan is defined as being composed of a large number of Persian-language weblogs, the Iranian blogosphere, and a “cyber-territorial designation which has become the fastest growing cyber sphere in the Middle East” (Shakhsari, 8). Weblogistan provides a world of supposed freedom for Iranian bloggers, one where they can speak their mind on different issues without being punished. The lack of freedom of speech in print media in Iran has drawn the younger generations, especially women, to the so-called “democratic” world of blogging. Yet intriguingly, many Iranian bloggers live outside of Iran, where freedom of speech is a mostly guaranteed right to every citizen. Also, in Weblogistan, Persian-language blogging is very popular among well-educated Iranians but the most famous Persian blogs are not even written in Iran, but in North America and Europe.

Sima also argues throughout her article how Weblogistan produces different gendered subject positions for Iranian bloggers. For example, men seek freedom through blogging by participating in proper politics whereas the women blogger seeks freedom by writing about sex and telling the truth of her sex but only in a confessional mode. If a women’s subjectivity is discussed, it is with shock and awe, whereas the man’s subjectivity is discussed, it is with honor, because he is a warrior. The woman is just a rebel and her content, although real and accurate, is viewed as scandalous. “Not only does this form of representation produce and juxtapose the sexually liberated woman in the ‘west’ to a repressed and cloistered Iranian womanhood, it is also informed by the recent hype about a ‘sexual revolution’ in Iran” (Shakhsari, 14). This provides the mentality that Iranian women are unaware of their sexuality and therefore, are in need of sexual liberation.

While Weblogistan creates a world of supposed freedom for the many bloggers who use it so spread their political, sexual and emotional ideals, it also comes with a cost. The gendered binary roles created by society are still prevalent online to these bloggers, and are enforced daily by the things male and female bloggers write about. 

Week 7: Sima Shakhsari

This week, we read Sima Shakhsari’s piece “Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora”. Shakhsari begins the article by giving a brief explanation of the concept of a blogging movement. She troubles the idea of the internet as a “liberating force” that gives previously unheard subjects voices. A main problem with this narrative is that it presumes that before the internet, people (especially women) in Iran had no political voice. The proliferation of blogging as a way to establish freedom and liberation neglects the concept that women have been activists before the internet was a major force in the “war on terror”.

Most studies and accounts of the weblogistan movement focus on the state vs. civil binary. In other words, the concept that all of the bloggers that write about Iran, diasporic or otherwise, all share a larger goal of tackling the Iranian state. Both subjects are a unified force working in opposition to each other.

There is a sharp contrast in the portrayal of activist bloggers that is clearly gendered. Male bloggers are viewed as participants in the political process, who have insight into underground and powerful activism. Female bloggers are portrayed as notable or activists if she is “writing about sex and telling the truth of her sex”. The perceived liberation of the Iranian female is linked to sexual liberation, whereas with male bloggers, their sexuality is of no concern. By insisting on this focus on sex and taboos, the perception of female bloggers only becomes valid if she is declaring some sort of sexual subversion.

Shakhsari also points out that it is important not to neglect the economic entrepreneurship of the blogging. In the greater narrative of the “war on terror”, there is a need and demand for experts or testimonials to provide specific insight into the Iranian perspective. Shakhsari says, “some diasporic Iranians become entrepreneurs who participate in the production and marketing of a particular form of knowledge about Iran” (19). This entrepreneurship can lead to payments or job opportunities, but can also feed into the larger focus on blogging as a subversive political act against the Iranian regime.

Jacob

               This week's reading spoke of the Effendi and it's origins in Egypt. The author Jacob states that the term effendi was first used to distinguish the religious from the military. Later its meaning became more specific, it became a way to refer to "high level students and modern professionals," could be coined as the middle class.(46) The term was used in relation to a new modern Egypt, one where the men were fit and disciplined, able to do the jobs bestowed on them properly. (47) In order to bring about this change of modernity into Egypt they needed to make sure their government was sufficient and that they were making progress. (47) After the British invasion this brought about the need to bring in a class of men who were obedient, disciplined and in summary of what Jacob says servants with out the servitude. (48) They believed that this was the only type of man fit to hold responsibility. The term effendi's meaning was always changing to fit the needs of the ruling at the time.
               This article was an interesting one to read. In the past weeks we have read about how women where the ones under attention who either needed help or were helping other women. In this weeks reading we were given a glimpse into the the hierarchy of males in Egypt at that time and how they had to fit a certain caliber to be considered into this middle class type. Its interesting to see that they made these men seem as tho in order to be something they have to be what we expect of children, disciplined and obedient while having a servant mentality.

Speaking of sexuality and civilization...

Please hear/read Rush Limbaugh confound what he considers to be "deviant sexualities" with Islam. Both are attacking American culture, of course...

Lesbian Jihadists Attempt Takeover of Girl Scouts

Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity

Wilson Chacko Jacob in "Geneology" analyzes how effendi masculinity was formed as a subject of Egypt and how this thinking formed a "universal masculine subjectivity" that has contributed to the formation of a discourse on Egypt as a nation and Egyptian modernity (45). He examines how effendi masculinity was used in national representations.
The term "effendi" was first used in the precolonial period to distinguish the "religious-scribal class" (high status) from the military class. Jacob states that as the occupation of Britain in Egypt continued, there was a push to reform effendis with a different power relation that was obedient "but not servile" (47). Under the colonial gaze, effendi masculinity was supposed to represent a new Egypt but not a totally emancipated Egypt. This required a change of educational system to reflect a movement away from the "old effendi type" to a new "modern manly spirit" (48).
Jacob continues to analyze how the urban professional male (effendi) and the rural gentleman were set as binary opposites. The rural gentlemen was privileged because they represented a more passive, less engaged, cooperative stance with the state. Obviously, these colonial discourses that aim to "modernize" (such as some Western feminists, as another example) tend to erase indigenous resistance and seek to actually keep the oppressed powerless. Later in the article, Farid continues the narrative of passive yet intelligent masculinity when he states a great man was a nationalist who did not attempt to free or conquer his nation but wanted to "form a nation." Additionally a great man according to the ideal masculinity must have characteristics that make him powerful, self-reliant, honest, courageous, striving for the common good, have a quick judgement, intelligent, "a clear and effective use of language" among others (52). In order to make these criticisms, the British used family metaphors to make these ideas seem authentic and natural to the nation of Eygpt.
British occupation aimed to mesh Egypt into a bourgeois nationalist discourse by urging that it follow modernization and "Egyptianization" with a new masculinity. As Jacob states, "There was a very clear calculus behind this derivation of dominant masculinity, in which race and empire were fundamental factors, and all three were considered mutually constitutive" (58). The representations of race, empire and new masculinity is seen on the image on page 57. Additionally, nationalism and masculinity were constitutive of each other.
I must admit I re-read this text a couple of times and I still feel like I could read it more to fully understand it. The notes I wrote about are what I understood.

Masculinity and Modernity - A Look Into Colonial Egypt

This week, we dissected Wilson Chako Jacob’s chapter, “Genealogy” discussing Mustafa Kamil and Effendi Masculinity. First to understand the terminology, Effendi is a term to describe men of educated status, or high social standing. When looking into this discussion of Effendi masculinity and the creation of multivariable masculinity roles that have gone through changes in Egypt’s history, is deeply rooted in Europe’s imposition of how roles should be imposed, class, skin color, and a lot of similar colonial and imperial powers found present during Egypt’s occupation.

            The creation of distant dichotomies of modernity and primitivism in colonial Egypt is found in one of the first pages of this chapter, summed up by Ann Stoler, “If race already makes up a part of that ‘grid of intelligibility’ through which the bourgeoisie came to define themselves, then we need to locate its coordinates in a grid carved through the geographic distributions of ‘unfreedoms’ that imperial labor systems enforced. These were colonial regimes prior to and coterminous with Europe’s liberal bourgeois order… The colonies have provided the allegorical and practical terrain against which European notions of liberty and its conceits about equality were forged”” (Jacob 45). In order to foster the discussion of modernity, and how that also relates to gender and sexuality, it all very much starts with the colonial categorizations. As Stoler writes, the liberty and “practical order” that the Europeans had in their nation was enough to derank Egyptians from attaining modernity. Due to the lack of military education, as discussed more intensely on page 58, it was believed by settlers (colonizers) who were observing the men as having effeminacy, “The category of the effendi in the precolonial period designated a social rank within the Ottoman administration or, more generally, distinguished the religious-scribal class from military officialdom. In this system of lords, the effendi was at the bottom of the hierarchy that included the royals, the pashas, and the beys… the latter part of the nineteenth century, the term’s popular use expanded and overlapped with the English equivalent of gentlemen” (45). As time passed, “Effendiyya” (46) managed to change itself into something that meant the higher latter of Egyptian civilization.

            With creating such differences within Egyptian male civilization, it created strange power dynamics as highlighted in Jacob’s writing—creating the trope of the “obedient but not servile” effendi, bringing together the connection to femininity.  This connection to femininity was a cause of “colonial liberalism” throughout Egypts occupation, where conquest was also to make Egyptian men “properly disciplined and properly men” (47).

            Although this reading was very intriguing to me, I especially liked the quote “passivity born out of centuries to foreign conquerors” (59) because it shows the innate ignorance of colonizers when writing about the Orient, or the Other.