Revisited: Muslim Women’s Agency and Feminist Anthropology of the Middle East

January 21, 2018

Revisited: Muslim Women’s Agency and Feminist Anthropology of the Middle East

Citation

Sehlikoglu, S. Revisited: Muslim Women’s agency and feminist anthropology of the Middle East. Contemporary Islam, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0404-8

Abstract

This article locates imaginative aspects of human subjectivity as a feminist issue by reviewing the concept of agency in the genealogy of Muslim and Middle Eastern women in anthropological and ethnographic literature. It suggests that, if feminist scholarship of the Middle East would continue approaching to Muslim women’s agency -as it has been doing for decades-, it should do so as an epistemological question and thus expand the limits of ethnographic and analytical focus beyond the broader systems, such as family, nation, religion, and state. As an example to this proposition, the article then discusses the recent work on aspects of selfhood that escape from the structures, rules, systems, and discursive limits of life but captures imaginations, aspirations, desires, yearnings, and longings.

Keywords

agency, Muslim women, anthropology of the Middle East, desire, feminist theory

Sponsorship

This paper was completed during a visiting research fellowship in Contemporary Turkish Studies of the European Institute at London School of Economics.

Identifiers

External DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0404-8

This record's URL:https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/267846

Comments

Narrative Bio

I grew up in a fishing village called Büyükdere by the northern seacoast of Bosphorus, Istanbul. After my third childhood hiking journey to the hills of Büyükdere, my parents realized that I might fly off the nest once I grow up. Although they have always been positive of the idea of their first born child to become an explorer, supportive to my decisions to live away since age 12, take a path different from theirs, even study social sciences (and not engineering nor medicine like the children of all Turkish lower-middle class parents want for their kids), they have finally started complaining about my explorations after my third year in Montreal (2008), Canada, almost 8000 km away from the “nest”.

By the time my parents started complaining about my life in abroad, I was starting my MA in socio/cultural anthropology and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. That was my third institution after Boğaziçi University in Istanbul (for a sociology BA) and Concordia University in Montreal, Canada (for an anthropology BA).

Cambridge was somewhat a “medium” solution to my thirst for anthropology and my parents’ demands to have their daughter closer.

During my PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge (Newnham College), I was fortunate to have then William-Wyse Professor Henrietta L. Moore as my supervisor, who has proven to be one of the most exciting feminists to work with.

Between 2016 and 2020, I had been the Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah Research Fellow in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, an Affiliated Researcher and temporary Lecturer in Social Anthropology, and Teaching Associate in Centre for Gender Studies, all at the University of Cambridge. Being at Pembroke College was the best part of my last four years at Cambridge. Back then, Lord Chris Smith was the Master of the college (he still is), who has been working hard to make the college an inclusive space - a task that was especially challenging at an institution (Cambridge) that is built on (and the castle of) systematic exclusion.

Currently, I am the PI of a large project funded by the ERC and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Global Prosperity at the UCL - an institute established by a feminist anthropologist who believe that academia should be for greater good and prioritising the ivory tower will not bring any benefit to the world. She happened to be my former supervisor - so there's the nest I ended up going back to, that I chose for myself.