Revisited: Muslim Women’s agency and feminist anthropology of the Middle East
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Authors
Journal Title
Contemporary Islam
ISSN
1872-0218
Publisher
Springer
Pages
1-20
Language
English
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Sehlikoglu, S. (2017). 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
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International, Attribution 4.0 International