[Sci-tech-public] CANCELED March 17, 6PM - Minarets After Marx: Gender, Islam and the Headscarf Debate in Postsocialist Bulgaria

[Amberly Steward]

PLEASE NOTE THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELED

  _____  

From: Amberly Steward [mailto:asteward at mit.edu] 
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 10:17 AM
To: 'hasts-fac at mit.edu'
Subject: March 17, 6PM - Minarets After Marx: Gender, Islam and the
Headscarf Debate in Postsocialist Bulgaria

 

==============================================================

MIT Anthropology Presents:

 

Minarets After Marx:  Gender, Islam and the 

Headscarf Debate in Postsocialist Bulgaria

 

A presentation by

 

Kristen Ghodsee

Professor of Gender and Women's Studies - Bowdoin College

 

Thursday, March 17

6:00 PM

Rm. 16-220

 

==============================================================

 

Description


Gender equality was one of the core ideological tenets of 20th century
communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The hyper-modernist formula for a
functioning proletarian democracy included rapid industrialization, which
required the full integration of women into the formal labor force. In
Bulgaria, the so-called emancipation of Muslim women was a particularly
urgent goal and a litmus test for the triumph of scientific socialism over
what was considered the feudal backwardness of Islam. For over four decades,
all of the coercive powers of the centralized state were funneled into
suppressing local Islamic traditions and radically reimagining gender norms
among the country's Muslim minority. After the collapse of communism in
1989, Bulgaria's Muslims were free to embrace their religious and ethnic
identities, but found their communities bitterly divided with regard to any
potential Islamic revival. There were those who maintained allegiance to the
secular communist project, those who wished to revive local Muslim
traditions from before the communist era, and those who chose to embrace a
new form of universalist 'orthodox' Islam being imported into the Balkans
through the work of international Islamic charities. Many of these debates
revolve around the re-inscription of more conservative gender roles for
women, and an ongoing debate over the Islamic headscarf has become a potent
symbol of this conflict. This talk examines the local meanings of the
headscarf as a political and religious symbol and the complicated array of
factors informing the selective embrace of 'orthodox' Islam in Bulgaria
today.

Biography

 

Kristen Ghodsee is the John S. Osterweis Associate Professor in Gender and
Women's Studies at Bowdoin College.  She is the author of The Red Riviera:
Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Duke University Press,
2005), Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity and the
Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University
Press 2009), and numerous articles on gender, civil society, and Islam in
Eastern Europe.  She is the winner of national fellowships from NSF,
Fulbright, NCEEER, IREX and ACLS as well as the recipient of residential
research fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, the Max Planck Institute in Rostock, Germany, the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
at Harvard.  Her third book, Lost In Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday
Life After Socialism is forthcoming with Duke University Press in the fall
of 2011.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/sci-tech-public/attachments/20110315/349abccd/attachment.htm