DAY FIVE REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey

During the penultimate day of the week-long Women Mobilizing Memory workshop, a number of new research questions and concerns emerged, including the following: As women (and sometimes men) mobilizing memory, how do we deploy feminist scholarship, and what does feminism mean to each of us across our diverse cultural, linguistic, and educational contexts?

The working group panels for the day explored this question from a number of different angles. In a talk titled, “Coups d’État: Dialogues at the Intersection of Memory and Life Story in Chile and Turkey,” Marcial Godoy and Zeynep Gambetti staged their feminist methodology in the form of a collaborative dialogue. Their conversation reflected on the ways in which their separate trajectories as activist-scholars growing up in eras of gross political oppression have converged in a transnational, professional friendship built on solidarity.

The need for concrete collaboration between scholars as an explicitly feminist methodology has come up in discussions time and again. Andrea Crow and Alyssa Greene took a different approach to contending with the issue of collaboration in their own conversation on “Working Definitions: Activist Scholarship in a Transnational University.” Their dialogue asked us not only to strive to define our critical terms in order to improve our communication as feminist colleagues, but also to remain aware of our role in the university system at large, especially as university structures become more global and corporatized.

In many ways, the following panel on “Reversing Silences/Telling Forgotten Stories” made manifest many concrete, feminist issues in Turkey that had been in the background of many of the group's explorations of Turkish politics earlier in the conference. Bürge Abiral gave a talk about sexual violence in women’s narratives of incarceration during Turkey’s military junta from 1980-1983. She provided important context for the difference regarding the "speakability" of sexual violence in Turkey, where rape was, until recently, defined as a crime against public morality and order, not against women’s bodily autonomy and human rights.

Dilara Çalışkan continued thinking about sexual violence specifically in transwomen’s communities and queer kinship structures in Istanbul, asking a provocative question based on Professor Hirsch’s scholarship: “Can we speak of queer postmemory?” She analyzed the ways in which trans mothers and daughters not only queer intergenerational transmission in their families of choice, but also hand down unfathomable memories of torture and forced displacement.

In the final talk of the day, Soledad Falabella shared her activist work on archiving and making accessible poetry from Mapuche women, an indigenous group that faces tremendous hostility on a daily basis in Chile. Falabella described the positionality of Mapuche women as “unbearable beings” for the state, always in conflict with the extent to which “the whole societal imaginary is trying to erase you,” and yet, in simply surviving, you become a concrete “standard of testimony” for the political problem more broadly.

Before separating into smaller breakout groups for the last time, the group participated in an impromptu discussion about positionalities as feminist scholars pursuing questions of social difference. Diana Taylor started the discussion by asking, “If we’re talking about gender, does our work automatically focus on women? Or are we using a feminist analysis to look at whatever we’re looking at?” A number of cross-cultural insights on feminism rose to the surface, including recognition of the potential that feminism has to provide an ethical lens for thinking about oppression, vulnerability, and a critique of power that does not lose sight of local contexts.

The final event of the day returned to the Black Box Theatre, where Maria Jose Contreras put on a one-woman piece of experimental performance art titled Prosthesis. Contreras' performance embodied a tension that had been remarked upon throughout the day: the ethical imperative that the personal remain political in our work as feminists. Her performance juxtaposed televised images of incendiary political moments from her childhood in Chile with x-rays of her debilitated father’s internal organs and a working breast-pump, making a visually stunning commentary on the ways in which her milk as a new mother also carries with it residues of Chile’s past.

Day five report contributed by: Nicole Gervasio

Nicole Gervasio is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

DAY FOUR REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey

The fourth day of Women Mobilizing Memory featured a roundtable discussion moderated by Ayşe Gül Altınay on documentary films about state violence and Kurdish memory. The directors of the films Bûka Baranê (2013, dir Dilek Gökçin) and Dersim’s Lost Girls (2010, dir. Nezahat Gündoğan) also joined the discussion. Bûka Baranê focuses on the experiences of people who were students at an elementary school in Hakkari to explore the different forms of state violence and the Kurdish guerilla movement in the 1990s. In light of their memories of violence during the period of emergency rule, the film reflects on how children longed for peace.

Based on interviews with elderly women who experienced the Dersim genocide, Dersim’s Lost Girls explores how children and women have been affected by ethnic violence and assimilationist policies that targeted the Kurdish population in Dersim in the late 1930s. The discussion was followed by the roundtable Gendered Memories of War and Genocide in Turkey, moderated by Meltem Ahıska. Zeynep Türkyılmaz presented her research on the genocide in Dersim, its gendered aspects, and the tensions between memory and the archive as they relate to people's memories of the genocide. Ayşe Gül Altınay explored Nebahat Akkoç's organization KAMER to discuss post-nationalist feminist memory work within the broader context of Turkish politics. Hülya Adak’s presentation explored a variety of examples in late Ottoman and Turkish history to discuss how the position of “the mourning mother” has been utilized by authors and activists for different and at times conflicting political projects, especially with regard to the Armenian-Turkish relations and the memory of the genocide. Pınar Ensari discussed her research on young Kurdish women, their memories of state violence in the Southeast of Turkey in the 1990s, and their engagement with activism and politics in Turkey, with a specific focus on the Gezi Resistance and its aftermath.

After the roundtable, we joined the Gender-Memory Walking Tour co-organized by the Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Forum and the Karakutu/Black Box group. That evening, we attended Disco Number 5, a solo performance by Mirza Metin in Kurdish and directed by Berfin Zenderlioğlu. The performance focused on torture at the Diyarbakır prison during the military regime in the aftermath of the coup d’état of 1980. Reflecting the transdisciplinary nature of the program, the events throughout the day demonstrated the different forms of memory work.

Day four report contributed by: Rustem Ertug Altinay

Rustem Ertug Altinay is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and a Turkish Cultural Foundation fellow.

DAY THREE REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey

The third day of Women Mobilizing Memory was dedicated to three public roundtables with simultaneous translations at Depo: "Creating Alternative Archives," "Art, Performance and Memory." and "Gender, Memory, Activism."

In the first roundtable on “Creating Alternative Archives,” Leyla Neyzi introduced her recent project on Kurdish and Turkish youth living in Turkey and Germany with visual examples from the project's website. Neyzi especially focused on intergenerational memory, post-memory, and Kurdish and Turkish youth's different conceptions of time and history. Özlem Kaya began her talk by introducing the Truth Justice Memory Center, which is an independent human rights organization that is based in İstanbul. Kaya explained how the Center contributes to uncovering grave human rights violations at times of conflict and in strengthening the collective memory about those violations. Currently, the Center is trying to create an alternative archive through video testimonies about enforced disappearances in Turkey. Susan Meiselas discussed her web-based project akaKurdistan, which she founded in 1998. She explored the possibilities of creating visual histories and building memories with people who have no national archive. She focused on how multiple perspectives and hidden archives came together in the production of this collective archive of Kurdish memory. Silvina der Meguerditchian noted how her artistic works deal with issues related to the burden of national identity, memory, the role of minorities in the society and the potential of a space “in between.”  The roundtable was followed by a screening of Silvina’s new film “Nereye/Where to,” which follows the traces of İstanbul’s lost minority communities in Fener and Balat, revealing the complexities of recovering memory.

In the second roundtable, titled “Art, Performance and Memory,” Andreas Huyssen discussed the recent changes in museum culture, pointing to a "metamorphosis of the museum." Huyssen explored how the museum has been transformed from a site of memory as an “exhibitionary complex” to a mass medium as an “experiential complex.” Alissa Solomon drew attention to the current wave of museum building across the world as one of the emerging global tropes of memorialization. She asked various challenging questions and explored the answers through one type of global trope: the shoe. By looking at piles of shoes, seen in memorials and protests among other places, Solomon asked whether we can represent the scale of mass atrocities without blurring over individual differences. Carol Becker talked about Kara Walker’s new site-specific sculptural installation at the now defunct Domino Sugar Factory. Becker argued that the sculpture echoes the memory of slavery by focusing on how Black women were exploited in the history of the sugar industry that dominated the Caribbean and the American South for a century. Becker explored how reactions to this sculpture are indicative of the growing insensitivity of the United States to the subject of race and racism. Diana Taylor noted Regina Galindo’s piece Earth, which depicts the trial of ex-dictator Rios Montt. Taylor discussed the political efficacy of testimony in Galindo’s performance art on genocide. In her talk, Maria José Contreras focused on forgetfulness and its relation to memory in the performative dimension. Contreras asked whether we can think of forgetfulness for embodied memories. Furthermore, she traced the capacity of prosthesis in performance art to recuperate memories and evade forgetfulness.

The third and the final roundtable, “Gender, Memory, Activism” started with Marita Sturken who explored how architectures of memory, architectures of torture and architectures of conflict are shadowed by a culture of comfort and sentiment. Sturken asked whether we can think of modern architecture as an infrastructure for framing space and memory. In her talk, Marianne Hirsch discussed the works of several artists who activate small, fragmentary archives and allow them to travel and migrate, creating networks of connectivity that challenge the monumentalization of memory and resist national paradigms that erase difference. Nükhet Sirman noted the Women's Initiative for Peace, which is a group of approximately 500 women, all dedicated to forging a peace between the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and the Turkish State. Sirman explained how they, as a group, appointed themselves to bear witness to the atrocities that were committed against Kurds in the 1990s, especially the gendered crimes. Meltem Ahıska drew attention to how Saturday Mothers of Turkey made the enforced disappearances visible by a counter-movement. Ahiska argued that this counter-movement has played a significant role not only in creating a new space for politics, but also by enacting political memory. Saturday Mothers has infused spaces with memory since 1995 through their silent sit-ins. Nancy Kricorian concluded the panel by remembering Armenian history on a pilgrimage through her grandfather’s hometown in Turkey.

Day three report contributed by: Pinar Ensari

Pinar Ensari is an alumna of Sabanci University's Department of Cultural Studies.

DAY TWO REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey

Media, Memory, Political Efficacy

On Day Two of theWomen Mobilizing Memory workshop, Jean Howard introduced the following keywords for discussion: gender; embodiment; accompaniment (or “walking with”); politics; repair; mobilizing; hope; optimism; and play, or the recovery of joy. Ayşe Gül Altınay added feminism as a keyword and Milena Grass also expanded on Jean’s notion of accompaniment by stressing the idea of connection rather than comparison. Andrea Crow focused on the concept of connection as an important component of our work, pointing to our collective presence as evidence of the value of direct encounter.

Twin panels were also convened on Media, Memory, and Political Efficacy.  The panels explored a variety of themes, including: the personal archive; trauma and scholarship; the performative; and expanding notions of absence and representation. Taking as his point of departure photographs of his family and community, Leo Spitzer raised the possibility of a critical nostalgia among refugees. Milena Grass’ paper on Macarena Aguiló’s documentary work analyzed the legacy of Chilean leftist exiles and their descendants. Sibel Irzık’s paper picked up on the difficulties of sharing in trauma in the Turkish context of post-coup coup d’état novels, and the metafictional strategies that writers use to show language as a site of struggle against authority. In her work on the emergent aesthetics of disappearance, Nicole Gervasio proposed an expanded use of the term “forced disappearance” to include experiences such as political detention.

The second panel’s papers included a wider range of texts and explored a variety of affective possibilities. Embodiment as a critical term ran through the work all three panelists. Jean Howard discussed temporality and "slow violence" in the context of Carol Churchill’s theater, bringing together themes about the personal and the environmental as well as labor and bodily vulnerability. Henry Castillo’s work on the lumbalú, a customary dance of death in Colombia, was also discussed in the context of the gendered performance of lamentation, mourning, and sexuality. Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay added to the discussion by theorizing the intersections of the nationalist/political with the sexual.

Day 2 Report contributed by: Alyssa Greene

Alyssa Greene is a graduate student in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University.

DAY ONE REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey

Jean Howard, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Milena Grass, and Andrea Crow participated in the opening panel of Women Mobilizing Memory, a working group that explores women's acts of witness and the gendered forms and consequences of political repression and persecution.

Women Mobilizing Memory is one of four working groups that, together, make up the "Women Creating Change" initiative of CSSD. The first-day conversation of the working group revolved around a range of themes, including: the academic/practitioner divide; the political efficacy of academic, artistic, and activist productions; the relationship between memory, history, and archives; the ethical repercussions of witnessing; as well as the intricate link between the personal and the political.

The working group visited the Depo Gallery to attend Ayşe Gül Altınay's and Işın Önol's “Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing” exhibit. After the curators were introduced, Banu Karaca discussed the politics of memory as reflected in Turkey's contemporary art and Işın Önol related the exhibit to the country's recent history. Artists who took part in the exhibit included: Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Susan Meiselas, Nar Photos (Serra Akcan, Fatma Çelik, Gülşin Ketenci, Aylin Kızıl, Serpil Polat), Truth Justice Memory Center (represented by Özlem Kaya), Aylin Tekiner, Emine Gözde Sevim, Lorie Novak, and Gülçin Aksoy.

Day 1 Report contributed by: Bürge Abiral and Dilara Çalışkan

Bürge Abiral is a Masters student in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University. Dilara Çalışkan received her M.A. in Cultural Studies at Sabanci University in 2014.

"Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing" EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Opening Reception: September 5, Friday, 18:30
Venue: DEPO Istanbul (Lüleci Hendek Cad. 12, Tophane - Istanbul)

Artists: Gülçin Aksoy, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi (Truth Justice Memory Center), Gülsün Karamustafa, Susan Meiselas, Nar Photos (Serra Akcan, Fatma Çelik, Gülşin Ketenci, Aylin Kızıl, Serpil Polat), Lorie Novak, Emine Gözde Sevim, Aylin Tekiner

View exhibit catalog here (PDF)

Curated by: Ayşe Gül Altınay, Işın Önol

What is the role of witnessing in practices of resistance: resistance to enforced silence and forgetting, to state power, and to inaction?  What role do the arts play in combatting the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions and new histories for future generations?  In particular, what unique strategies have women devised to reveal and redress the violence directed at woman and at other disempowered social groups?

The feminist art work displayed in this exhibit imagines memory as part of a larger  politics of resistance.  It mobilizes memories of past and present violence precisely to create the conditions and the motivations for social change. Bringing together women artists many of whom are themselves direct witnesses to oppression and terror, the exhibit also reveals moments of resilience, resistance, and creative survival. The artists gathered here use memory in innovative ways.  They foreground unofficial acts of witness and forms of commemoration--embodied practices, performances, photography, testimony, street actions—that provide alternative histories and different political imaginaries than do official archives, memorials, museums, and state commemorations.  They make visible not only violent crimes and their gendered dimensions, but also the intimate texture of lives and communities that have survived or are fighting to survive immense destruction.  In honoring those lives and bringing them out of oblivion, the artists also reclaim women’s practices—dance, song, embroidery, for example—and show their political resonances.  As a group, these artists resist monumentality in favor of intimacy, featuring individual stories of the quotidian.  They use official archives to document and contextualize those lives, but they also create new archives and alternative interpretations, reframing how we understand the past and pointing to what has been excluded from authoritative histories. They thus imagine alternative social and political trajectories and more open and progressive futures.

This exhibit occurs in the context of a five-day workshop on “Mobilizing Memory for Action” that brings together an international group of scholars, artists, and activists to analyze the activist work memory practices can enable. The art works comprising this exhibit and the broadly comparative panels and roundtables on September 17 invite us to ask how our acts of witness can motivate social change. What do images and accounts of past and present violence demand of spectators, listeners, and readers? How can we modulate proximity with distance, empathy with solidarity? Indeed feminist practices of witness have fostered solidarity that demands not only collaboration and commitment, but also a respect for what is historically specific to particular acts of violence and oppression. In bringing diverse events of state violence—the Holocaust, the dictatorships in Latin American, American slavery—to the Armenian genocide, the persecution of Kurdish and Palestinian communities, and the oppressive acts of authoritarian power featured in this exhibit, the “Women Mobilizing Memory” workshop invites participants both to see where connections lie and also to recognize what cannot be generalized or translated across linguistic, national, or religious borders.  In resisting silence, forgetting and erasure, progressive acts of memory also resist easy understanding, appropriation and straightforward comparison.

The collaborations among the participants in the working group, and between the artists and their subjects, aim to create a space of solidarity and connection.  We invite you to enter into this larger collaborative project of responding to the memories recorded here, and to join us in the work of shaping memories for more hopeful futures.

Co-hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, DEPO Istanbul and Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Forum, the exhibition and parallel activities have been supported by the the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Blinken European Institute, Sabancı University, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Truth Justice Memory Center and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey Office.

For more information about the project please visit: http://socialdifference.columbia.edu/projects/women-mobilizing-memory

PUBLIC ROUNDTABLES: “Coming to Terms” with Gendered Memories of Genocide, War, and Political Repression," Istanbul, Turkey

Public Roundtables with Turkish simultaneous translations
September 17, 2014, 1:00-7:00pm
DEPO Gallery, ISTANBUL, TURKEY

Roundtable topics and speakers:

Creating Alternative Archives, with Leyla Neyzi, Özlem Kaya, Susan Meiselas, Silvina der Meguerditchian, and Şemsa Özar

Art, Performance and Memory, with Andreas Huyssen, Alisa Solomon, Carol Becker, Diana Taylor, Maria José Contreras, and Ayşe Öncü

Gender, Memory, Activism, with Marita Sturken, Marianne Hirsch, Nükhet Sirman, Meltem Ahıska, Nancy Kricorian, and Yeşim Arat

Schedule

1:00pm-2:30pm - Creating Alternative Archives
Moderator: Şemsa Özar (Boğaziçi University and Diyarbakır Institute for Social and Political Research)
Leyla Neyzi (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University) - “Young people Speak Out: The Contribution of Oral History to Facing the Past, Reconciliation and Democratization in Turkey” Project www.gencleranlatiyor.org
Özlem Kaya (Truth Justice Memory Center, Turkey) Creating an Alternative Archive through Video Testimonies
Susan Meiselas (Photographer, Magnum Photos, USA ) – Kurdistan
Silvina Der Meguerditchian (Artist, Argentina/Germany) – Nereye? / Where to?

3:00pm-4:30pm - Art, Performance and Memory
Moderator: Ayşe Öncü (Sociology, Sabancı University, Turkey)
Andreas Huyssen (German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA) - The Metamorphosis of the Museum: From Exhibitionary to Experiential Complex
Alisa Solomon (School of Journalism, Columbia University, USA) - Shoe Fetish
Carol Becker (School of the Arts, Columbia University, USA) - The Memory of Sugar
Diana Taylor (Performance Studies, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU, USA) - Is Performing Testimony, Testimony?
Maria José Contreras (School of Theatre, Catholic University, Chile) – The (Im)possible Performance of Forgetfulness

5:00pm-6:30pm - Gender, Memory, Activism
Moderator: Yeşim Arat (Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, Turkey)
Marita Sturken (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU, USA) - Architectures of Memory, Architectures of Torture, Architectures of Conflict
Marianne Hirsch (Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA) – Mobile Memories
Nükhet Sirman (Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Turkey) – How to Gender Memories of Violence?
Meltem Ahıska (Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Turkey) - Counter-movement, space, and politics:  How the Saturday Mothers of Turkey make the enforced disappearances visible
Nancy Kricorian (Author and Activist USA) - Place Names and Objects: Pilgrimage as/or Resistance

About

This series of roundtables occurs in the context of a five-day workshop on “Mobilizing Memory for Action” that brings together an international group of scholars, artists, and activists to analyze the activist work memory practices can enable. The workshop is part of Columbia University’s “Women Creating Change” initiative led by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and organized in collaboration with the Columbia Global Centers. “Mobilizing Memory for Action” began in December 2013 with a workshop at the Columbia Global Centers in Chile and continues in September 2014 with activities in Istanbul hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Forum and DEPO Istanbul. Support has also been provided by the Blinken European Institute, Sabancı University, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Truth Justice Memory Center and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey Office. The Istanbul program consists of a workshop with 35 leading scholars, artists and activists from Turkey, the United States, Chile and other contexts; an art exhibition and catalogue; documentary screenings; theater performances and post-performance discussions; and a series of public roundtables.

For more information about the exhibit, please click here.

Lila Abu-Lughod & Susanna Ferguson: On "Debating the 'Woman Question' in the New Middle East | Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice"

May 3-4 2014
Columbia Global Center | Middle East (Amman)

On May 3 and 4, 2014, the Columbia Global Center | Middle East in Amman hosted a workshop entitled “Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East: Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice.” The workshop was part of a larger project on “Gender, Religion, and Law in Muslim Societies” of Women Creating Change, an initiative at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University), director of the WCC project, co-organized it with Safwan Masri (Director of Columbia Global Centers), Amal Ghandour (Special Advisor to the Global Center in Amman), and Hoda El Sadda (Cairo University) with funding from Women Creating Change, the Blinken European Institute, and the Columbia Global Center | Middle East in Amman.

The aim of the two-day workshop was to bring together scholars and practitioners with expertise in the field of women’s rights and development to assess the impact of the Arab uprisings and their aftermaths and to take stock of emerging debates in the Arab world about women’s rights, citizenship, and prospects for justice. The international group of 20 participants came from five countries in the region as well as the US and UK. All had ongoing research and practical experience in the Arab world. It was particularly exciting to hold the discussions in Amman, Jordan, as we could draw in a strong contingent of Jordan-based participants with insights into the dynamics of local feminist debates

The intent of bringing together these interdisciplinary experts from the region was to move beyond superficial culturalist explanations that are popular in the West—attributing women’s status and prospects, for example, to the constraints of Arab culture or Islam—while also critically examining a tendency in the Arab world either to view women’s rights as mere tools of cultural imperialism or to imagine a simple opposition between women’s rights and Islam. These scholars and practitioners were knowledgeable about the many ways in which Arab women have been engaged in political activity, whether through street protests, human rights groups, feminist projects of legal reform and empowerment, or in the everyday contexts in which political contests have been occurring and Islamic parties and discourses have gained strength and legitimacy.

Three themes organized the discussions: the role of political economy and colonial processes in shaping gendered lives, bodies, and politics; the effectiveness of legal strategies for citizenship and justice, particularly for women; and the impact of Islamist governance and the rise of Islamic feminisms on women’s lives and rights.

Political Economy and Embodied Lives

Nicola Pratt argued for the importance of political economy in structuring gender relations in Egypt both prior to and after 2011, showing how the withdrawal of the state from key social services has put more pressure on the family as an economic unit. Consequently, women bear the heavy “double burden” of wage work and household labor while young people have been trapped in long periods of “waithood,” unable to marry and start families of their own. In turn, these dynamics have created a disjuncture between the roles that both men and women are expected to play (breadwinner, home-maker) and what they can actually accomplish, whether in the workplace, the family, or the home. This disjuncture, Pratt argues, is critical to understanding the 2011 uprising in Egypt and its gendered aftermath as different strategies for stabilizing gender relations have emerged: one, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, has responded to economic hardship with promises to restore the “ideal family” by promoting conservative gender norms, while the other, represented by young activists (many of whom are women), has insisted on the continued presence of women in the public sphere.

Sara Ababneh joined Pratt in arguing that questions about political economy should be central not only to our analyses of world-historical events like the Arab uprisings, but also to our political interventions. By highlighting a lack of overlap and solidarity between Jordan’s feminist movement and the women and men of the day-waged labor movement, the hirak sha’bi, Ababneh asked us to consider how an exclusive focus on “women’s issues” has prevented middle-class Jordanian feminists from hearing or supporting the demands expressed by both men and women in the hirak sha’bi for a minimum wage, paid holidays, and job security. Her observations about the disjuncture between mainstream Jordanian women’s NGOs and the day-waged laborers raised the crucial question that would run throughout the discussions at the workshop: feminism’s potential exclusions. How might a politics structured around “women’s rights” exclude or render unintelligible concerns about livelihoods and economic wellbeing shared by both women and men? How could feminists in Arab countries, as elsewhere, not be blinded by their class origins and easy turn to the political rather than the economic? Jordanian feminist Hala Ghosheh built on these concerns and on Ababneh’s reflections to pose another difficult question: had some feminist organizations in Arab countries been made complacent and ineffective not only by deep investments in the economic status quo, but also by their close relationships with ruling regimes? Might traditional feminist projects rooted in the middle class and sanctioned by ruling elites be usefully complemented, or replaced, by a more grassroots approach?

If Pratt and Ababneh argued that political-economic concerns should be central to our modes of analysis and political interventions, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian showed how sedimented histories of legal and political as well as economic oppression continue to structure the intimate lives of Palestinian men and women. Her focus was the gendered yet deeply politicized processes of pregnancy and giving birth in occupied East Jerusalem. Her paper showed the importance of looking “across historical tenses,” as she linked the legal categorization of Palestinian women who returned home after 1948 as “infiltrators” to the current challenges faced by pregnant Palestinian women who must navigate contested political spaces and borders to ensure legal that their children receive legal recognition from a hostile Israeli state. More importantly, Shalhoub-Kevorkian reminded us that it is in the most intimate spaces of (gendered) life and mobility that we can see how histories of injustice and oppression shape women’s embodied lives.

In their papers, Frances Hasso and Zakia Salime reinforced the value of this other dimension of the material: “the gendered body” as an analytic for understanding contemporary dynamics and transformations in the Middle East. For Hasso, gendered and sexualized bodies and the spaces through which they move (or are prevented from moving) offer a productive lens for thinking through the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. These uprisings featured diverse and mutable actors and constituencies (for example, “the people,” or al-sha’b) rather than the unified entities that have been central to traditional historical and sociological analysis (for example, “the working class”, “the army” or “the state”). Building on Jacques Ranciere’s concepts of “politics” and “police,” Hasso argued that only by thinking about specific gendered bodies and the particular contours of revolutionary spaces (think, for example, of Tahrir square) can we begin to understand Egypt’s 2011 uprising and its aftermath. In particular, it is critical to think about gendered bodies and their specific positioning vis à vis shifting relations of power to see how even “revolutionary” or emancipatory forms of politics may continue to enact hierarchies and exclusions, with detrimental implications for women and others who inhabit bodies that get marked as “other.”

For Zakia Salime, as for Hasso, attention to the gendered bodies of ordinary women enables us to think about how women have influenced, participated in, and lived through this particular moment in the Arab world. Salime focused on two provocative examples from Morocco--the self-immolation of Fadwa Laroui in 2011 and the suicide of Amina Filali in 2012-- to argue that ordinary women who are not always represented by mainstream feminist groups are turning to embodied acts like self-immolation and suicide to “express a sense of self-worth and rights,” and to intervene politically in contexts which sometimes take women’s political representation seriously but fail to meet the demands and desires of ordinary women. For Salime, Laroui’s videotaping and first-person narration of her own self-immolation suggested a desire to produce her death as spectacle, to use her body to draw attention to the impossible circumstances of single mothers in Morocco and inspire others to “take a stand against injustice, corruption, and tyranny.” Laroui’s act, however, did not spark the same controversy as the death of Amina Filali, who committed suicide after being forced to marry her rapist in March of 2012. This proves that positionality still matters even as “ordinary women” take matters into their own hands: the death of Laroui, a working-class single mother whose concerns were about livelihood and social welfare, received much less attention than Filali’s, which fit into dominant international narratives about female “victims” of male aggression and of patriarchal “Islamic law.” Salime also countered this narrative about Filali as a “victim” of patriarchy and Islam, suggesting instead that her death might have been made possible in part by the erosion, under neoliberalism, of traditional “patriarchial” structures that served to protect women in the past.

A key debate that emerged from these analyses of history, the body, and political economy was about the significance and meanings of gender as a category of analysis and a focus of activism. While Pratt and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work, for example, suggested the inextricability of gender from historical and contemporary structures of political-economic oppression, Ababneh’s reflections on the gap between middle-class Jordanian feminists and the women and men working on questions of livelihood in the hirak sha’bi reminded us that using gender as the primary scholarly analytic or political focus might preclude broader solidarities and also render invisible or unintelligible important struggles that do not articulate themselves in gendered terms. Leila Hilal’s suggestion that women in particular have great potential as peacemakers in contemporary Syria compelled participants to ask how and under what circumstances gender should serve as a dominant lens for conceptualizing political possibilities and action.

Hasso suggested that an analytic focused on gendered and sexualized bodies and spaces might offer us a way of thinking not only about women but also about men, while Salime argued that larger social problems and dynamics are mediated through women’s bodies in particular ways. The conclusion was that lived material conditions and the histories and structures of oppression impact intimate lives and embodied realities, which are indeed gendered. How to conceptualize political transformations and dynamics, including those of class and ethnicity, by thinking through intimate, everyday life and the gendered body emerged as crucial arenas for future scholarly and political work on women in the Middle East.

The Effectiveness of Legal Strategies

The second of the workshop’s organizing themes centered on how effective for women were legal strategies for citizenship and justice. While all agreed that the law has been a central arena for feminist intervention in the Arab world, as elsewhere, tough questions arose about the roles law does and should play in future feminist politics and practice. In the case of Palestine, Reem al-Botmeh noted the depoliticization and NGO-ization of the Palestinian civil sphere that has accompanied the rise of legal reform as central to Palestinian governance and gender advocacy. In her view, this focus on the law has obscured the difficult political work which remains to be done both for women in Palestine and for Palestine in general. She also reminded us that the law does not always do the work it claims to do, particularly for women. Her research showed that while the shift from shari’a (personal status) courts to civil courts in Palestine was presented as a triumph for women’s rights, in practice it has made it more difficult for women to access justice in the courts; the civil legal apparatus has proven both more rigid than that of the shari’a courts and more dependent on expensive legal expertise that poor women cannot afford.

Likewise, Susanna Ferguson argued that the invocation of human rights and international law as a primary language of justice by feminists in Syria had both emancipatory and disciplinary effects. While articulating feminist claims and political desires in the legalistic language of rights promises to give citizens a framework within which to demand new freedoms from the state, these invocations of rights also structure the subjectivities of those who speak in their name, creating new silences and exclusions. In pre-uprising Syria, making claims in the language of rights produced subjects who had a faith in modernity and progress and an aversion to tradition. Confident in the promises of the nation and the universals represented by international conventions, they distanced themselves from what was deemed “religious” in favor of what was considered “secular.” These convictions may have prevented advocates of “women’s rights” from engaging with women across the country who did not share these certainties.

At the same time, many contributors re-affirmed the power of the law to serve as a vehicle for women’s empowerment. Marwa Sharafeldin argued that in the case of the 2006-2010 campaign to reform Egypt’s Personal Status Law, both human rights law and Islamic law served as important resources for women’s NGOs. The way in which these NGOs appropriated concepts from both legal discourses to support their reform agenda revealed the potential for creative and syncretic political platforms that draw strength from multiple legal traditions. Activists were able to turn to the law (in various forms) to respond to the challenges they observed Egyptian women facing in their daily lives.

Nabila Hamza and Hoda El Sadda followed Sharafeldin in arguing even more firmly that law is key resource for women. Hamza argued that in the case of post-revolution Tunisia, international human rights law served as a crucial resource for feminist activists as they helped to draft a new constitution. In particular, it enabled them to remove any references to shari’a law from the 2014 Tunisian constitution and to push for an article that pledges that the state will seek to guarantee parity among men and women in elected councils, protect women’s rights, and take measures to eliminate violence against women. Likewise, El Sadda, a feminist scholar and activist who was on the 50-person committee tasked with writing a new constitution for Egypt in 2014, described how she was able to form coalitions with other power brokers during the drafting of the new constitution by appealing to the law and to a language of rights. Acutely aware of the compromises and shortcomings of the process, she nevertheless was convinced that the law in this instance was both an important tool and a critical arena in which feminists were able to engage with existing structures of power to further a feminist political agenda.

A wide variety of perspectives emerged about the role the law and the framework of women’s rights should play in future scholarship and political work.

Islamic Governance and Islamic Feminisms

A third theme of the workshop was the impact of Islamist governance and the rise of Islamic feminisms on women’s lives and rights in the region. Yara Sallam from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) argued that because they had decided not to engage with legal or political questions emanating from interpretations of Islam, secular women’s NGOs in Egypt after the 2011 uprisings were unprepared to contest the agenda put forward by ex-President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. She suggested that women’s NGOs needed to be able to engage more effectively with political Islam on a policy level, rather than leaving the field of interpreting Islam to Islamist parties and the women and men who belong to them. Marwa Sharefeldin, speaking as a scholar and a member of Musawah, pointed out that there is a stronger alliance now than there was in 2012 between feminists making arguments in Islamic terms and women’s NGOs.

Merieme Yafout, however, reminded us not to lump together the women who belong to “Islamist parties” either across the region or within individual countries. Opinions about correct interpretations of Islam and the shari’a, as well as the best forms of political engagement, vary widely among women who belong to the region’s many Islamist parties. Serious contestations are taking place among men and women within the sphere of political Islam about correct interpretations and ways to proceed. Yet, Yafout’s research in Morocco and Tunisia showed that the 2011 uprisings have ushered in a new phase in which women are taking on more public roles in Islamist political parties.

Like Yafout, Asef Bayat argued that the 2011 uprisings and women’s very public participation in them have released new energies and opened up new possibilities and challenges in the Middle East. While, in his view, the presence of women in the public sphere was central to de-exceptionalizing and broadening the uprisings, many women have also faced new kinds of violent backlash against their presence in the public sphere. Nevertheless, this revolutionary moment in which so many conflicting tendencies have found free expression may have opened up further possibilities for the emergence of what Bayat termed a “post-Islamist” polity, which favors a non-religious secular state, a neoliberal economy, but a religious society. The impact of this kind of conjuncture has yet to be parsed for women and for advocates of liberal democracy in the region. One political possibility is that both men and women will continue to participate in what Bayat terms “non-movements,” in which non-collective actors engage in ordinary actions that shift conservative norms and enhance citizenship in practice, destabilizing or challenging structures of power.

Conclusions

These questions about the focus, strategy, and language of women’s political participation framed a larger conversation that took place among many of the workshop’s particpants regarding what can or should constitute feminist political intervention. Both Zakia Salime and Lila Abu Lughod raised this question explicitly, wondering, who intervenes on whose behalf under the aegis of feminism and women’s rights, and on what grounds? Samar Dudin described her “6 Minutes Joy of Reading” campaign, which gives Jordanian women from the Jabal al Natheef neighborhood in East Amman an opportunity to read short stories, novels, and poetry in addition to the religious texts to which they normally have access. She argued that this project constituted a model of local and accountable feminist intervention in women’s lives through literature, as women, teachers, librarians, and youth in the community worked together to address a problem that they observed in their neighborhood and meanwhile to build community leadership. Abu Lughod asked, however, if even this grassroots project might still be claiming to intervene, on behalf of a secular women’s rights vision, among women who may not desire or require such an intervention.

A set of serious and respectful debates like this one animated the workshop. There was total agreement about the value of comparative study to illuminate differences among the situations in different countries--Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Palestine, for example. The importance of transnational flows and conversation in having advanced the “Arab spring” and feminist projects also became clear. The deep regional knowledge of the “lived realities” that participants brought to the discussions confirmed the value of thinking historically about gender and its transformations rather than reverting to timeless cultural patterns for explanations. Participants like Amal Ghandour remarked on the rich political landscape and extraordinary differences among countries. Hoda El Sadda also pointed to the challenges that the fast pace of change and the constant shifts in policy and politics in the region had presented to old paradigms and strategies. Ahdaf Soueif noted that even some of the most negative developments—like the deliberate sexual assaults targeting in Egypt—had led to breaking taboos about speaking up, which then paved the way for an article in the new Egyptian constitution explicitly condemning violence against women for the first time. Both scholars and practitioners benefitted from the opportunity to engage one another in a substantive way and to talk about translating, as Hala Ghosheh put it, “across domains.” From this group of committed scholars, it was clear how problematic it was to distinguish among scholars, practitioners, activists, and “ordinary” people.

Although they spoke from different geographical, political, and methodological locations, the workshop participants shared a commitment to justice and fuller citizenship. The question was how best to achieve this ideal. Questions about gender were raised alongside questions about material realities and intimate, everyday lives; possible ways of confronting the power of states, police forces, armies, neoliberal regimes and geopolitical interests; the role and work of the law and other languages of justice; and the impacts of Islamic feminisms and politics.

The fissures emerged in debates about the power, exclusions, and politics of the different languages of justice operating in the region; about who is able to access what kind of law and how law and legal reform work in practice; about how to understand and whether to deploy Islamic language and practice in political work; and about the significance and meanings of gender as a category of analysis and focus of activism. Disagreements emerged about the value and dangers of various forms of intervention meant to enhance women’s rights and livelihoods, forcing us to consider which women and which social groups they might exclude, either deliberately or inadvertently, whose interests they serve, and which arenas and domains--the economic, the political, the intimate--should be the focus of our analysis and our short- and long-term efforts, given the geopolitical forces with which people in the region must contend.

Lila Abu-Lughod and Susanna Ferguson

WORKSHOP: Shifting Notions of Social Citizenship: The “Two Wests”

What is the welfare state?  What happens when it disintegrates? What is the future of the family in light of its historical transformation? 

Scholars and graduate students from research universities in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway convened to answer these questions during the Shifting Notions of Social Citizenship: The “Two Wests” workshop, held June 11-13, 2014 at the Columbia Global Center | Paris.

What constitutes a welfare state? 

Maurizio Vaudagna chaired the opening session with welcoming addresses delivered by Brunhilde Biebuyck (Columbia Global Centers|Paris), Marc Lazar (Institut d’Études Politiques), and Raffaella Baritono (University of Bologna-CISPEA).  Alice Kessler-Harris presented introductory remarks that asked participants to answer the elementary question, “What constitutes a welfare state?”  Kessler-Harris showed how setting conceptual limits around the welfare state are made difficult by the variety of its present-day obligations.

Papers in the first session took up the definitional challenge by thinking about the concepts that undergird the intellectual production of the welfare state in the European Union and in comparative context between the United States and Sweden. Vincent Michelot (SciencesPo Lyon) chaired presentations by Maurizio Ferrera (University of Milan), Ann Shola Orloff (Northwestern University), and a research group that conducted a longue durée analysis of the welfare state in France and the United Kingdom, rooting the welfare state’s earliest beginnings in the 17th century and well before industrial capitalism supplanted mercantilism.  Ferrera outlined the intellectual and political roots of the European Union idea, suggesting that a “neo-Weberian” typology offered solutions to the intractable differences between ideas about national sovereignty and the EU’s political and economic superstructure.  Orloff examined “gendered policy formation” and rebutted arguments that the state simply reinforced paternalism as too simplistic.  Orloff’s analysis challenged participants to think about how historically changing definitions of gender changed social policy and vice-versa.

What happens when safety nets go?

Day two opened with the question, “What happens when safety nets go?”  Donna Kesselman (University Paris Est Créteil) chaired presentations by Christian Lammert (Free University of Berlin), Beatrix Hoffman (Northern Illinois University), and Sébastien Chauvin (University of Amsterdam).  Lammert argued that in the process of re-commodification, the visibility of the welfare state’s provision in people’s lives diminishes, which undermines public support for these programs. The results are pernicious for democracy because as people are forced back into the labor market and forced to accept a shrinking safety net, their level of political participation also declines.  Hoffman dug into the problem of healthcare in the welfare state by comparing citizen participation for health reform in Spain and the United States.  Hoffman showed how Spain’s generous healthcare provision has failed to embrace the healthcare needs of a growing number of immigrations and how the United States has become increasingly less responsive to the demands of civil rights organizations, especially after hospital closures zipped through urban neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980s.  Chauvin answered the question from the perspective of precarious labor and the growing exploitation of contingent—not temporary—workers.  Through participant-observation in two contingent work dispatch centers in Chicago, Chauvin asserted that the idea of “temp work” is a fiction because precarious workers often develop long-term relationships with a small number of employers.

The Future of the Family

The next session envisioned the future of the family.  Mario Del Pero (Institut d’Études Politiques) chaired presentations by Chiara Saraceno (University of Turin), Robert O. Self (Brown University), and Laura Lee Downs (European University Institute, Florence).  Saraceno argued that the EU forces a plural acknowledgement of different family forms and that family and family policy are not one and the same.  Civil regulation regarding the family contains variety, but remain attuned to traditional conceptions of the family.  Self argued that the push for the reconstruction of the welfare state after the 1960s came mostly from the center left, rather than reactionary forces.  The extent of social solidarity from the New Deal had been exaggerated, while the myth of the breadwinner was a social idea before it ever became an economic reality.  Downs pondered the future of social protection in France by looking at the history of its colonies de vacances, holiday camps that were established for working-class children throughout the country.  The extent of centralization in France meant that the diversity of political and ideological groups that participated in the state was far-reaching.  At the same time, Downs shows how fiscal pressures during the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating just how reliant all groups were on a state committed to financing social activities and opportunities to build national solidarity and to develop equality among young adults.

Possibilities of Resistance and Solutions

The last session, held on the last day of the workshop, thought about possibilities of resistance and solutions to the present-day impasses and challenges to the welfare state.  Olivier Giraud (CNAM) chaired presentations by Gro Hagerman (University of Oslo), Birte Siim (Aarlborg University), Marissa Chappell (Oregon State University), and Neil Gilbert (University of California-Berkeley).  Hagerman questioned whether the Norwegian and Swedish welfare states could “have it all,” arguing that the fiscal basis of both welfare states is premised on their status as resource-rich states. Siim asserted that democracy and citizenship needed articulation outside of the nation-state framework and that the rise of right-wing populism was more than just racism and constituted a serious critique about the distributional objectives of the state.  Chappell’s archival research found that the Civil Rights Movement galvanized movements for greater economic citizenship among poor people; however, gender bias and racism prevented the formation of alliances.  Gilbert traced how the U.S. welfare state transformed from a system of entitlement to one increasingly checked by means testing and conditionality.

The workshop concluded with Vaudagna and Kessler-Harris synthesizing the wide-ranging contributions of the speakers and the dialogic exchange that occurred between sessions.  All participants left with a greater sense of the enormity of the welfare state as an object of study and the importance of comparative analysis between countries and even supranational structures of governance.  The work of thinking about the welfare state in historical, social and political perspective continues.

The Columbia University Blinken European Institute and the Interuniversity Center for European-American History and Politics convened the international workshop with the support of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University’s Department of History, and the University of Eastern Piedmont’s Department of Human Studies.

George Aumoithe
PhD student in History at Columbia University | Graduate Fellow, Social Justice After the Welfare State Project at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference

Women Mobilizing Memory Workshop II

Working group:

Women Mobilizing Memory
Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics Encuentro

Montreal, June 2014

Conveners: Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Diana Taylor

Description:

Bringing together artists, writers, theater practitioners, museologists, social activists, and scholars of memory and memorialization, “Women Mobilizing Memory” focuses on the political stakes and consequences of witnessing and testimony as responses to socially imposed vulnerabilities and historical trauma. The working group will probe how individual and collective testimony and performance can establish new forms of cultural memory and facilitate social repair. Using gender as an analytic lens, this project explicitly explores women's acts of witness and the gendered forms and consequences of political repression and persecution. It asks what strategies of memorialization and re-imagining are most effective in calling attention to past and present wrongs and in creating possibilities of redress through protest and other forms of action and resistance.

Participants:

Pilar Riano, ‘Afro-Colombian Singing as Testimonial Practice.’
Giselle Ruiz, ‘A Poetic Corporeality’
Victoria Fortuna, ‘Dance Based Memory Practice’
Ausonia Bernardes, Memory in Contemporary Dance Practice.
Monika Gagnon, "What is Posthumous Cinema?"
Barbara Sutton, "Women Mobilizing Body Narratives of State Terrorism in Argentina (1976-1983)"
Julie Okotbitek
Milena Grass, “Women who collaborated with the dictatorship”
Raúl Diego Rivera Hernandez, “Performative strategies of Central American Caravan of women searching their missing relatives in Mexico”
Nuria Carton de Grammont —narco trafico
Leticia Robles, “Antigonas”
Carolyn Vera, Guatemalan performance artists
Leyneuf Tines Villarraga, TBA
activistas / desafíos políticos.
Shahrzad Arshadi
Lorie Novak, “Photographic Interference”
Jenny James, "Bricolage Memories: Gender, Refugee Life and Narrative Repair in the fiction of Dionne Brand and Kim Thuy"
Magdalena Olszanowski, ‘Between Mother and Daughter: The belly button as scar of separation’
María José Contreras, ‘Teatro testimonial de mujeres ancianas mapuches’

Methodology:

We spent each of the sessions on a particular topic arising from the participants’ interests. Beforehand we circulated by internet brief background readings for each session and for the group. Each session we had a warm up exercise in order to create a collectivity that could think and be in presence together Then, each participant presented a 6 minute presentation that ended with questions for a 3 minute discussion. Each session concluded with an extended 45 minute discussion.

Some notes about our discussions:

As said in the call, the group discussed about the role women in the circulation, recovery, reshaping and mobilization of memory.

Some of the most important issues that emerged during our work was COLLABORATION. Collaboration was seen in different levels: between women that had suffered violence, but also between women artists and/or activists and/or researchers with women that had survived to violent pasts. Women’s memory practices may enable transnational memory networks, both at a local and global dimension.

We also considered posthumous collaboration, as a way to connect the living and the death. Some of the case studies discussed evidenced how the dead spoke to us through their traces. In a sense, when studying memory of violent pasts, all collaborations are somehow posthumous, they are about what remains and what may survive.

MEMORY was defined as a practice that sometimes allowed the cultural renewal of traditions and sometimes functioned as resistance to narratives of disposability or vulnerability. Memory practices appeared as crucial strategy of resistance for women who have endured continued forms of physical erasure (from genocides to current femicides),

Art and cultural performances recuperate and reshape memories. Memory is not just about bringing stories, is about creating a collective history. In that sense, memory is always intervening in the present creating new forms of identity and collaboration. The mobilization of memory allow different possibilities for an engagement that triggers multiple plural ways of seeing the past, challenging dominant or status quo versions of the past. The artistic work with memory activate and animate archives and by allowing them to travel and migrate, they create networks of connectivity that challenge the monumentalization of memory.

One of the crucial concepts raised was that of POSITIONALITY: were are we respect to past violence or slow ongoing violence of neoliberalism? What kind of memory work advances political engagement and responsibility?

When coping with trauma and horror embedded pasts, memory practices become critical to render visible the violence. Memory practices as studied by the group articulate different forms of visibility and invisibility. Art and cultural memory practices enable/encourage/make possible different forms of efficacy, mobilizing action for the future in different levels.

Efficacy may be considered from different perspectives, as a political efficacy that mobilizes social change, but also as a communicative efficacy that by contagion, empathetic connection and affect circulation create collective identities and networks and may subtly transform materials and perceptions. The group discussed to what extent the circulation of affect alone may cause social change.

Another issue discussed in the group was the distinction between empathy, identification and solidarity (between people and networks). We could realize how in acts of scholarship and artistic creation there are various uses of empathy, distance, identification, alienation, solidarity and witnessing. Each of them portrait different sorts of efficacy

When discussing about efficacy we questioned ethical issues regarding for instance the risk of appropriation of artists of painful memories and again the question of positionality: were are we, what is our political and ethical engagement regarding past or present violence?

The different case studies displayed a range of memory practices in different SCALES. From micropractices and intimate memory actions to larger actions, sometimes even monumental actions. All of these cases advanced different sorts of efficacy.

The type of efficacy of these practices relate to the media considered as different ways to address memory: the human body, images, sounds, voices, writing. Analyzing these various media we could better understand how memory is transmitted across bodies and generations.

The body appeared in several presentations as a living dynamic archive, both in the generation that suffered violence and in the later generations. Bodies serve to mobilize the horror that cannot be said and also allows us to learn about other’s experiences when we were not there. The body always transmit, so the relation between memory and body is complex and dynamic: memory of the body / memory in the body / the body as memory. One of the critical aspects specially when working with testimonies was the continuity of presence that prefigured the importance of being there, present and presenciando collaboratively.

We also discussed the potentiality of images as mobilizing devices. Images are powerful transmitters/creators of memory and this is something that mass media seem to understand well since they banalize images as a political strategies. Other than the images the sound and voice are also power media to mobilize memories. The voice for instance immediately mark the presence of who’s speaking. Literature, theatre, photography, internet all portray different ways to approach to memories.

By the end of the work group we highlighted the importance of hope. The mobilization of memory always seem to have a hope component, the desire to share, to render visible and to share experiences to enable us to respond to past and present slow violence.

Photos from the Women Mobilizing Memory Workshop II at the 2014 Hemispheric Institute Encuentro held in Montreal, June 21–28.

Rachel Adams, Director of the Future of Disability Studies Working Group, Won the 2014 Educators Award

The 2014 Educators Award committee from Delta Gamma Kappa, the society of women educators, selected Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability & Discovery by Rachel Adams, director of the Future of Disability Studies working group. Dr. Adams attended the international convention on Wednesday, July 30 and participated in a workshop with the committee.

CSSD Announces Two New Working Groups

CSSD has inaugurated two new working groups for fall 2013. 

Social Justice After the Welfare State will be directed by Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History. The group will explore the implications of the declining welfare state for American politics, gender and race relations, and the future of American democracy.

The Digital Black Atlantic Project (DBAP) will also launch in fall 2013. Co-directed by Kaiama Glover, Associate Professor of French at Barnard College, and David Scott, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, DBAP is a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary working group that has come together to invent a scholarly resource and digital platform for multimedia explorations and documentations of literary texts, visual documents, sites, moments, rituals and ceremonies, monuments and memorials, performances, and material objects emerging out of and concerning the Black Atlantic World.

PUBLIC LECTURE: Beyond Masculinity: Testosterone, Sexual Desire, and Gender/Sex

Everyone knows that sexual desire and testosterone are linked because men have higher testosterone, and testosterone is tightly linked to masculinity and sexual desire - right? But what do empirical data actually say? Professor van Anders discussed findings that support decoupling testosterone from masculinity and provide insights into the nuanced ways testosterone and sexual desire are - and are not - linked in humans.

From her multi-method research program that includes experiments, correlational studies, and qualitative focus groups, she argues that social neuroendocrinology, rooted in feminist science, provides a way to ask hormonal questions that have evolution and social construction in their answers, sidesteps nature-culture debates, and separates biology from biological determinism.

This event was presented by The Science and Social Difference Working group of the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference and co-sponsored by the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Psychology at Barnard College and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

KEYWORDS: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations

Colleagues from the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Socio-medical Sciences discuss “Vulnerability” as a keyword in the study of social difference.

Featured participants were:

Walter Bockting
Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry and Nursing) and Co-Director, LGBT Health Initiative, Division of Gender, Sexuality, and Health, Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University

Katherine Ewing
Professor of Religion and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Sexuality
Columbia University

Marianne Hirsch
William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Social Difference
Columbia University

Richard Parker
Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Anthropology, and Director, Center for the Study of Culture, Politics, and Health
Columbia University

Moderator:
Alondra Nelson
Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies, Director, Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Co-Chair, Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies Council
Columbia University

Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations is a series inspired by theinnovative interdisciplinary scholarship promoted by the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The series draws participants together from a wide range of disciplinary homes in order to explore the various ways we think about fundamental critical/theoretical ideas and to generate new vocabularies and new methodologies.  The WGSS Council is a network of leaders from centers, institutes, and initiatives at Columbia University dedicated to women's, gender, and sexuality studies.

REFLECTIONS: Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East: Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice

At first glance, 2014 does not seem like a banner year for women in the Middle East. We heard that ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, was requiring female circumcision around Mosul in Northern Iraq (a claim the group denied). A new law regarding domestic violence in Lebanon failed to criminalize marital rape, apparently thanks to conservative religious opposition.

The prevalence and persuasive power of these headlines about women in the Middle East was part of the reason I was so excited to attend a conference last May entitled, “Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East: Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice,” sponsored by the Women Creating Change Initiative at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and held at the Columbia Global Center in Amman, Jordan.

The conference brought together scholars and practitioners from five Arab countries in addition to the US and UK. Given that my own doctoral work in Middle Eastern history has been inspired by time I spent working with a women’s rights organization in Syria, I was particularly eager to see what this combination of practical expertise and scholarly attention might produce. Coming from the US, where much of what I see and hear about “women in the Middle East” revolves around stereotypes, it was a privilege to join this group of experts as they reflected on some of the issues facing women and the study of women and gender in the Middle East in the complicated aftermath of the Arab uprisings.

Over the course of an intense weekend in Amman, these scholars and practitioners listened carefully to one another across political, strategic, and theoretical divides. They discussed, on the basis of their close knowledge of the histories and present circumstances of gender politics in particular countries, a set of big questions: How best can women fight for better lives and livelihoods under dire conditions, faced with the intransigence of state power, neoliberal restructuring, and colonial violence in both its historical and contemporary forms? How do discursive traditions or resources, like the languages of human rights, Islam, and shari’a law, enable and constrain women and those who advocate on their behalf?

One striking development is that a debate over the “woman question” itself emerged. How, many asked, does it serve us to pose questions and build alliances in terms of “women” and “men,” rather than in terms of class, race, sexuality, or one of the many other kinds of difference that divide human experience? For example, if thinking only in terms of “women” prevents middle-class feminists in Jordan from supporting the demands for a living wage articulated by working-class women as well as men, might it serve us to think more broadly in our scholarship as well as in our political work?

Focusing on women’s experiences, however, did open up an important conversation around the role of law in securing better lives for women. While many had successfully deployed legal strategies and means to further their political and feminist agendas (for example, taking on torture in Egyptian prisons or advocating for women’s concerns to be reflected in the text of the Egyptian Constitution), others were more critical of the law as a panacea. For example, a legal scholar from Palestine argued that, surprisingly, the transition from shari’a courts to civil courts, while presented as a victory for “women’s rights,” may have actually made it more difficult for women to access justice in the courts.

The conversation about the advantages and unexpected consequences of relying on legal strategies and the language of  “women’s rights” started out as a conversation about feminist strategy—when and under what circumstances to deploy the language and practice of the law. It became, however, a much larger conversation about the nature of political intervention. Who intervenes, on behalf of whom, and on what grounds? This question elicited a range of responses, but each was grounded in a particular set of political struggles and ethical commitments--making clear that while it is possible and indeed productive to talk about regional transformations, specific knowledges of embodied realities, political dynamics, and historical contexts are key to the questions which motivate and emerge from feminist scholarship and practice.

The workshop convinced me that it these specific knowledges and the conversations they enable that will allow us to move past the stereotypes which so often characterize—and hamper—our approach to the “woman question” in the Middle East.

--Susanna Ferguson

For more information about the workshop and working group, please visit: http://socialdifference.columbia.edu/projects/gender-religion-and-law-muslim-societies

NY TIMES OP-ED: "The Trouble with Too Much T"

In 2009, the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya was barred from competition and obliged to undergo intrusive and humiliating “sex testing” after fellow athletes at the Berlin World Championships questioned her sex. Ms. Semenya was eventually allowed to compete again, but the incident opened the world’s eyes to the process of sex testing and the distress it could bring to an athlete who had lived her whole life as a girl. When an endocrinologist, a gynecologist and a psychologist were brought in to determine whether the teenager was really a woman, she simply asserted, “I know who I am.”

From 2011, major sports governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the International Association of Athletics Federations, instituted new eligibility rules that were intended to quell the outrage over the handling of the Semenya case. Instead, as recent cases attest, they may have made things worse.

Rather than trying to decide whether an athlete is “really” female, as decades of mandatory sex tests did, the current policy targets women whose bodies produce more testosterone than is typical. If a female athlete’s T level is deemed too high, a medical team selected by the sport’s governing bodies develops a “therapeutic proposal.” This involves either surgery or drugs to lower the hormone level. If doctors can lower the athlete’s testosterone to what the governing bodies consider an appropriate level, she may return to competition. If she refuses to cooperate with the investigation or the medical procedures, she is placed under a permanent ban from elite women’s sports.

The first evidence of this new policy in action was published last year in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Four female athletes, ages 18 to 21, all from developing countries, were investigated for high testosterone. Three were identified as having atypically high testosterone after undergoing universal doping tests. (They were not suspected of doping: Tests clearly distinguish between doping and naturally occurring testosterone.)

Sports officials (the report does not identify their governing-body affiliation) sent the young women to a medical center in France, where they were put through examinations that included blood tests, genital inspections, magnetic resonance imaging, X-rays and psychosexual history — many of the same invasive procedures Ms. Semenya endured. Since the athletes were all born as girls but also had internal testes that produce unusually high levels of testosterone for a woman, doctors proposed removing the women’s gonads and partially removing their clitorises. All four agreed to undergo both procedures; a year later, they were allowed to return to competition.

The doctors who performed the surgeries and wrote the report acknowledged that there was no medical reason for the procedures. Quite simply, these young female athletes were required to have drastic, unnecessary and irreversible medical interventions if they wished to continue in their sports.

Many conditions can lead to naturally high testosterone, including polycystic ovarian syndrome or an ovarian tumor during pregnancy, but women with intersex traits tend to have the highest T levels. And it is these intersex traits that sports authorities want “corrected.”

Sports authorities argue that screening for high T levels is needed to keep women’s athletics fair, reasoning that testosterone improves performance. Elite male athletes generally outperform women, and this difference has been attributed to men’s higher testosterone levels. Ergo, women with naturally high testosterone are thought to have an unfair advantage over other women.

But these assumptions do not match the science. A new study in Clinical Endocrinology fits with other emerging research on the relationship between natural testosterone and performance, especially in elite athletes, which shows that T levels can’t predict who will run faster, lift more weight or fight harder to win. The study, of a sample of 693 elite athletes, revealed a significant overlap in testosterone levels among men and women: 16.5 percent of the elite male athletes had testosterone in the so-called female range; nearly 14 percent of the women were above the “female” range.

This finding undermines the idea that sex-linked performance differences are mainly because of testosterone. The authors suggest that lean body mass, rather than hormone levels, may better explain the performance gap. They also conclude that their research makes the I.O.C.’s testosterone-guided eligibility policy for women “untenable.”

Some might argue that the procedures used to lower T levels are simply part of the price athletes must pay to compete at the elite level. But these choices aren’t temporary hardships like training far from home or following a rigorous diet. The required drug and surgical treatments are irreversible and medically unjustifiable. Clitoral surgery impairs sexual function and sensation; gonadectomy causes sterility; and hormone-suppressive drugs have side effects with potentially lifelong health risks.

Moreover, the policy places a disproportionate burden on poor women who may have limited career opportunities and are likely to face enormous pressure to submit to these interventions in order to continue their athletic careers. Under the current policies, more and more female athletes with naturally high T levels will be confronted with these harsh choices — and not just at the elite level. The I.O.C. requires that each country’s Olympic committee investigate cases of female athletes with high T levels before naming them to national teams. Some countries, like India, now apply such policies to all female athletes, not just those competing internationally.

Barring female athletes with high testosterone levels from competition is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Worse, it is pushing young women into a choice they shouldn’t have to make: either to accept medically unnecessary interventions with harmful side effects or to give up their future in sports.

--Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis

Katrina Karkazis is a senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University.  Rebecca Jordan-Young is project director of the Science and Social Difference working group and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.  This op-ed first appeared in the NY Times on April 10, 2014.

Memory for the Future: Collaborative Witnessing in Post- Dictatorship Chile

In December 2013, a transnational group of scholars, artists, and activists came together at Columbia’s Global Center in Santiago de Chile to reflect on the manifold ways in which cultural memory of the Pinochet dictatorship has been and can be mobilized in the service of different visions for Chile’s social and political future.

This “workshop,” sponsored by Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference’s “Women Creating Change: Mobilizing Memory” project, incited all members of the group to think not only about the politics and performances of memory in Chile and beyond, but also about their own scholarly practices and methods for engaging with sites of memory and the complex connective histories of which such spaces are a part.

This roundtable discussion brought together five graduate student members of the Women Creating Change group to discuss the impact of site-based, collaborative, feminist, and transnational engagements with the past on their own critical and personal understanding of the social and political work memory enables, as well as their own role as producers of “memory work” within the field of memory studies.

Graduate student roundtable discussion with:

Henry Castillo (NYU)
Andrea Crow (Columbia)
Nicole Gervasio (Columbia)
Leticia Robles-Moreno (NYU)

and moderated by Kate Trebuss (Columbia)

Parenting, Narrative, and our Genetic Futures

Part of the Heyman Center’s Disciplines Series: Evaluation, Value, and Evidence, authors Alison Piepmeier, George Estreich, and Rachel Adams took up many of the questions raised in their November 2013 event on "Genes, Children, and Ethics" (featuring Michael Berube, Faye Ginsberg, and Rayna Rapp) in their discussion of "Parenting, Narrative, and Our Genetic Futures." Elizabeth Emens chaired.

Participants

Alison Piepmeier
Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies Program, College of Charleston; author of "Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism" and other works.

George Estreich
Author of "Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body" and "The Shape of the Eye"

Rachel Adams
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University

Elizabeth Emens
Professor of Law
Columbia University

- Rachel Adams