[Sci-tech-public] TODAY 4pm Nadia Guessous talk

[Amberly Steward]

Please join us.

 

 

NADIA GUESSOUS

Monday, February 14

4pm

MIT, 16-220 

 

Tragic Moderns: The Problem of Tradition in 

Leftist Feminist Thought in Contemporary Morocco

 

When Moroccan leftist feminists narrate their life stories and talk about
formative influences in their lives, many recall the influence of a
"traditional" and pious father figure who was just and egalitarian, and who
inspired their commitment to and struggle for gender equality. If this
positive invocation of an enabling tradition is noteworthy for how
consistently it recurs in the life stories of a cross-section of Moroccan
leftist feminists, it is equally notable for how dramatically it disappears
and is displaced by a notion of tradition as obstacle to women's
emancipation and progress.  In this paper, I juxtapose invocations of the
"traditional, pious but egalitarian" father figure with that of "the failed
and disappointing leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact
traditional" in order to denaturalize the feminist repudiation of tradition
and think about the demands of modern, progressive subjectivity. I argue
that the tragedy of leftist feminist subjectivity lies in the fact that it
is predicated on locating the possibility of women's progress and feminist
politics in the repudiation of the very tradition that makes it possible in
the first place. This paper is based on two years of field research among
founding members of the feminist movement in Morocco whose activism emerged
out of their immersion in and subsequent disenchantment with the Moroccan
left in the 1980s.  By taking feminist constructions of tradition as an
object of inquiry, this paper seeks to contribute to a non-teleological
study of feminist thought and politics, and to the anthropological study of
secular and progressive subjectivity.  

 

 

 

Nadia Guessous is Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor, as well as
Director of Graduate Studies at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern
Studies at New York University.    She is currently finishing her PhD in
Anthropology at Columbia University under the direction of Lila Abu-Lughod.
In addition to working on her dissertation entitled "Genealogies of
Feminism: Leftist Feminist Subjectivity in the Wake of the Islamic Revival
in Contemporary Morocco," she has also published a short monograph entitled
"Women and Political Violence during the Years of Lead in Morocco" (2009,
the Moroccan Advisory Council on Human Rights). 

 

Amberly Steward
Senior Administrative Assistant
Anthropology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Bldg. 16-267
Cambridge, MA 02139
p) 617.253.3065
f) 617.253.5363 

 

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