[Bilimsel Haber] “Muslim women” in Europe

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

* “Muslim women” in Europe: Bodily performances, multiple belongings and
the public sphere. *

	

	

	

	

Ruba Salih (University of Bologna) and Annelies Moors, Isim
Chair/University of Amsterdam) would like to announce a call for papers
for a workshop that will be held at the next 8th Mediterranean Research
Meeting, Florence and Montecatini Terme, 21-25 March 2007.

The workshop title is “Muslim women” in Europe: Bodily performances,
multiple belongings and the public sphere"

This workshop focuses on the heightened tensions between legal
citizenship and cultural citizenship (national belonging) that Muslim
women in Europe are confronted with. In the course of the last decade
many European nation states have shifted their policies to a stronger
assimilationist stance, while the general public has increasingly come
to see Muslims as a threat to national security and Islam as
incompatible with European values. In this context everyday performances
of national belonging in several European countries have become ever
more demanding. Women are particularly implicated not only because they
are often seen as markers of communities but especially because their
gender submission - symbolized by the headscarf as immediately visible
sign - is taken as one of the hallmarks of this incompatibility. This
workshop investigates what discursive and/or performative strategies
Muslim women employ in the face of such shifts in state policy and
public opinion. The premise is that both in the everyday performance of
national belonging as well as in public debates the cultural politics of
bodily appearances and of aesthetics count. This workshop, therefore,
sets out to discuss the kinds of bodily performances Muslim women in
various European nation-states engage in and the sorts of belonging they
more or less consciously (want to) produce. The workshop invites papers
based on in-depth research that focus on the diversity of strategies
Muslims women have developed during the last decade with respect to
issues of cultural citizenship / practical national belonging.

This includes questions such as:

# What are the specific practices Muslim women have engaged, how are these
interpreted by various participants and publics concerned?
# How are particular forms and styles of presence in the public related to
ideological positions and forms of organization with respect to national
belonging, religion and gender (e.g. liberal-secularist, Islamic
feminist etc)
# Are "Muslim women” engaged in conflicting and clashing bodily
performances that bring to surface generational, ideological, class, and
political differences amongst them?
# What are the relations between discursive (e.g. public debate) and
performative (e.g. embodied appearances) forms of belonging?
# Are there other, alternative embodied practices (different from veiling)
that Muslim women engage with to get visibility in the public spheres?
(e.g. engagement in civil society organizations, marches,
demonstrations, boutiques, pictures, video- production)
# What aesthetics (such as in the case of Islamic fashion, anti-fashion,
or very revealing styles of dress) are employed to undergrid particular
(micro-)political positions?
# How are these practices positioned in fields of power? Which ones have
become authoritative and which ones have become devalued within various
settings?
# How have these strategies been influenced by the cultural politics of
various nation states (with respect to e.g. religion in the public,
ethnicity, gender and sexuality)?
# What has been the impact of the particularities of the Muslim presence
in specific national context (colonial, labour migration, conversion)
and concomitant transnational / subnational forms of belonging?

The workshop is jointly organised with the International Institute for
the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM, Leiden).

Information on how to apply ca be found at:
http://www.iue.it/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/mrm2007/pdf/CallPaperDoc_MRM2007.pdf 



or:

http://www.iue.it/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/mrm2007/Index.shtml#workshops 



*Deadline for application: 10 July 2006*

Contact info:

Ruba Salih
University of Bologna
e-mail: rsalih at spbo.unibo.it

or

Annelies Moors
e-mail: a.c.a.e.moors at uva.nl

	Ruba Salih
Strada Maggiore, 45
40125 Bologna
Italy

<mailto:rsalih at spbo.unibo.it>Visit the website at
http://www.iue.it/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/mrm2007/Index.shtml#workshops