One of Lubna’s presentation slides: Saudi Women and Social Change
Thank you to all of you who attended Lubna Bahamman’s talk today – it was great to see so many of you! Lubna’s paper was a wonderful insight into how Saudi women are represented on Twitter either by themselves or by men. She highlighted the popularity of Twitter in Saudi Arabia and revealed that the majority of users were in their twenties. She also set the tone of her paper by emphasising the misconceptions of Saudi women’s freedoms and lives that are often all too evident in the Western Press.
After providing some context about Saudi Arabia and its laws, in particular those that came into force post 2001, Lubna gave two particular hashtags as an example of the linguistic research she is undertaking. These were: (in translation from Arabic) #newtravelcontrolsforSaudiwomen and #onethirdofSaudiwomenarespinsters. She focused on the first hash tag and explained how a piece of news about women needing the permission of their guardians to renew their passports was misappropriated into an argument about women being allowed to travel on their own. She explained that 63.8% of tweets using the hashtag were by profiles claiming to be women. She also outlined that women were most likely to use laughter and emoticons in the tweets and men were more likely to quote from religious texts. One tweet Lubna showed us was written by a 50 year old woman who was protesting the fact that she is not allowed to travel abroad to medical conferences without her young son’s permission (as her guardian).
Our Q and A included a discussion about women’s opportunities in Saudi Arabia and where such debates about women’s rights took place before Twitter. Lubna highlighted the revolutionary nature of the space Twitter has provided for Saudi men and women because it is it is accessible to them both. Before Twitter, the only place where women could debate such issues with men was within their families.
Thanks again to all who attended and especially to Lubna!
See you next week for a talk on ‘Syrian Men and the Humanitarian Response to the Refugee Crisis in Jordan’ by Lewis Turner from the Politics department at SOAS.
Thanks to everyone who attended Carl Gibson’s talk on his fieldwork in Palestine. It was fascinating to hear about his varied experiences with interviewing local people and the information he has gathered from doing so. Carl discussed the difficulty in defining the word ‘terrorism’ and the varying use of the word in the Western and Arab media. He has discovered that media and internet discourse on terrorism is highly gendered. He noted that there is much more written about the lives of female terrorists and their motivations than on male terrorists. The sources mentioned often linked the women’s involvement with terrorism to a trauma in their past, such as the death of a child, rather than to political motivations. Yet, Carl suggested there was more of a taboo around these female terrorists as almost all of the posters he has spotted in Palestine were of male martyrs (شهيد / shahid) rather that female ones (شَهِيدَة/ shahida).One woman in particular, named Hadeel al-Haslamun has featured on the occasional poster, despite it being unclear whether her refusal to remove her niqab at the Palestine Israeli border was for political reasons.
The discussion after Carl’s paper revolved around the escalation of violence in Palestine and women’s involvement in such violence. We also debated why in war women and children are treated as victims and men often are not and why how this linked to a lack of biographical information on the internet about male terrorists. As well as discussing the lives of the shahida in more depth, we also discussed the practicalities of Carl’s research in such a dangerous part of the world. It was clear that his many years of living in Palestine were vital to his success in finding interviewees and conducting his research successfully. We wish him all the best for his return to Palestine at the end of the week!
Monica Palmero Fernandez’s insightful paper introduced us to the ancient land of Mesopotamia (Iraq and Syria in the modern day) and the significance of goddesses in the cultural context of this society. She provided us with various visual representations of the goddesses which included drawings of these figures in human, symbolic, and animal form. Monica explained the complex gender identity of the gods and goddesses, stating that the same gods/goddesses were sometimes represented as male in one depiction and female in another. Their sexualities were also complex and did not reflect sexual norms in Ancient Mesopotamia. Monica connected the powers attributed to the goddesses by the ruling elite to the power structures this elite wished to enforce in the society they governed. For example, kings would write poems declaring their relationships to various deities throughout their lives in order to legitimate their royal status. She ended her paper by discussing the complexities of grappling with her methodological approach to written and visual depictions of the goddesses, which included looking at intersectionality and queer theory.
After her paper, the discussion centered around the role of elite women in male dominated Mesopotamian society, the link between the goddesses and nature, as well as the lack of sources describing the lives of members of society at the lower end of the hierarchy. Furthermore, Monica explained the difficulty in determining the gender of these goddesses from the Sumerian language because it does not have masculine and feminine pronouns or articles.
Maria and Sophie would like to thank Monica for her delightful paper and everyone else who attended our final seminar of 2015. We hope to see you next year for our very first paper which will take place on Thursday 14th January. It will be presented by Carl Gibson from the Politics and International Relations department. He will be providing us an insight into his fieldwork in Palestine.
Our next meeting will take place on November 26th at 1pm in G09 at the Graduate School. The paper on the interaction between Marxism and Feminism will be presented by Yanos Soubieski from the department of Politics and International Relations.
Here is his abstract:
Marxist Feminism as it stands strictly perceives patriarchy, a society characterised by male domination over women, in terms of capitalism. Marxist Feminism focuses specifically on the roles that capitalism designates to women in the production process and the harmful implications this has. Marx’s own analysis of capitalism was not as economically rigid as this would have us believe, with terms like alienation, exploitation and ideology all owing their theoretical rigour to Marx. My research is predicated on taking the economics out of Marxian analysis in the context of patriarchy. I shall do this by applying the Althusserian theory of ideology to understand the reproduction of patriarchy. I thus aim to provide a new form of Marxist Feminism contrary to the economistic variant which has survived for so long.
We look forward to seeing you there! We are hoping to see many of you from the politics department but also from other disciplines too.
Thanks to everyone who attended October’s Gender and Sexuality Network meeting!
And… to Chris Foye, of course, for his fascinating paper!
For the first time we were treated to a paper by a PhD student from a non Humanities background. Chris Foyes’ paper examined a data set from Germany and drew conclusions on the relationship between gender and the importance of housing. For example, he drew parallels between the importance of housing for men with or without children, stating that the former considered housing to be far more important than the latter. For women, however, there was no change in their attitudes to their home when they became mothers. His paper lead to a series of questions about the role of a woman’s age in her satisfaction towards her house and also whether marital status was an important factor. The organisers of this group, Maria and Sophie, also questioned whether sexuality played any role in the importance people assign to their housing. We were unsurprised that data from the 90s did not include any statistics on this. Yanos Soubieski, who will be presenting at our next meeting on the 26th November, asked whether attitudes towards housing in the former East and West Germany had reflected the historical changes in the two regions. Chris responded that this was a very interesting question and that he would bear this in mind in the chapter upon which his thesis is based. Cultural comparisons were also made between German, English, Greek, French, and Arabic speaking nations. The audience offered their personal experiences of the ways in which male family members’ attitudes towards their home environment differed from female family members’ attitudes. According to the attendees’ experiences, it often seemed to be the case that the men viewed their houses more in terms of an investment than did the women, putting less emphasis on the appearance of the inside of the house than the women.
We are now looking forward to Yanos’ paper “What’s wrong with Marxist Feminism? Taking the economics out of Marx” on the 26th November 1-2pm in the Graduate School. Look out for the abstract!
We hope you all had a wonderful summer and feel rested for the new term.
We have now finalised our speakers for the first term of this year. We look forward to seeing you at our three talks from PhD students from three different departments! We are indeed very pleased with our multi-disciplinary programme and we hope to have attendees from a variety of academic disciplines.
And now to our first event… It will take place on October 22nd from 1-2pm in G09 at the Graduate School. We hope to see you all there!
The paper will be presented by Chris Foye from the School of Real Estate and Planning.
Title: “Why is housing more important to female satisfaction than male satisfaction?”
Abstract:This paper is concerned with how the relationship between housing and well-being varies according to gender. By examining the German Socio-Economic Panel study (GSOEP), it demonstrates that women attach greater importance to housing as a life domain than men. Hypotheses are advanced that attribute this gender gap to gender differences in i) personality and ii) values. First, personality. By referring to a wide range of literatures including affordances, social role theory and gendered meanings of home- the paper proposes that women rely more on housing as a source of identity and social status, whilst men rely on housing as a source of economic status. Second, values. It is demonstrated that there is strong relationship between the women and the home in societal discourse leading women to assume the aesthetics and atmosphere of the home as their responsibility. Further examination of the GSOEP suggests gender differences in both personality and values may mediate gender differences in the subjective importance of housing.
We have been informed of an event taking place at the Henley business school that may be of interest to some of our members. Here are the details of the symposium and who to contact to register your interest:
Symposium on Family Troubles: Care and Change in Diverse Contexts, Henley Business School, University of Reading, 16 September 2015
This inter-disciplinary symposium aims to explore family relations, care and ‘troubles’ in diverse contexts. The symposium will reflect on the powerful, often emotive discourses associated with ‘family’ in different cultural and policy settings and explore the (potentially troubling or troubled) changes, caring practices, and intergenerational relations that shape family lives over time and space in both the global North and South.
Parallel paper sessions will address the following themes:
* Meanings of ‘family’ and (troubling) changes in family lives
* Care and interdependencies in diverse household forms
* Support for ‘troubled’ families
* Responses to death and ‘bereavement’
* Life-limiting illness, dying bodies and family caring practices
* Policy framings of ‘troubling’ families
These contentious, emotive and sensitive issues pose questions and dilemmas for policy makers, practitioners and service users, as well as researchers and academics interested in issues of family change, care and support.
Registration fee (includes lunch and refreshments): £30
Thank you to everyone who attended the gender and sexuality research network meeting yesterday. It was a very inter-disciplinary group who came along to see Lucy’s paper on the mosaics in Roman Spain. We had attendees from archeology, politics, philosophy, modern languages and even business studies! Everyone engaged with Lucy’s fascinating presentation on the representation of masculinity in the beautiful mosaics on which she is basing her research. I (Maria) particularly liked the anthropological angle Lucy is taking on these mosaics by questioning for whom these mosaics were commissioned and what message the owners were trying to portray to those who saw them. We had a lively discussion after Lucy’s paper about the mosaics which included suggestions from those present who study politics for Lucy to consider some discourse theory as a way of interpreting the mosaics. We considered the significance of where these mosaics were placed in the Spanish villas and who witnessed them; whether it be the esteemed guests of the owners or their servants who washed the floors.
Drinks after the meeting
The discussion continued in the pub on campus afterwards. We discussed Lucy’s paper and some ideas about how to build on the success of the Gender and Sexuality Research Network during the next academic year. Watch this space!
Thanks again to everyone who attended and in particular Lucy for coming all the way from Bristol to give her insightful paper. Yesterday’s meeting was the last of this academic year. We look forward to seeing you all again in the Autumn Term. If you would like to present a paper next year please contact us and we will book you in. Keep your eyes on the blog as we may be posting articles from time to time on gender and sexuality. If you would like to contribute a piece, please contact us.
One of the reasons for creating this blog was for us to discuss issues relating to gender and sexuality. As well as reporting on our meetings, we would like for this blog to be a platform on which we and you can write on the subject of gender and sexuality. If you would like to write for us, please let us know.
Below is the first in what we hope is a number of articles that will be posted on this site on gender and sexuality related topics. The author of this article is our co-organiser Maria Tomlinson who asks… ‘Why are periods such a taboo?’ The opinions held in the article below and completely hers (bar the theorists etc. to whom she refers) and she hopes you find it insightful yet entertaining.
You may remember in March the controversy over a certain photo on Instagram. Photographer Rupi Kaur posted a photo of a girl lying in bed wearing pyjamas with a menstrual bloodstain on both her tracksuit bottoms and on the sheets. Instagram removed this photo twice as the powers that be deemed it to be offensive and too graphic. When one in two of us in the world have to live with periods every month, and it is a completely natural biological process, why did Istagram try to forbid the user from displaying this photo? More importantly, why did many of the people who viewed this photo react to it with disgust? (Even I myself felt a slight repulsion towards it).
Well, in Western society the idea that periods are polluting, contagious, and should be kept out of sight goes all the way back to biblical times. In the Bible the menstrual taboo manifests itself in Leviticus. In this book, it is suggested that women be ‘put apart for seven days’ (Leviticus 15:1) when they are menstruating and that their husbands must not approach them for sexual activity during this time. It even states in Leviticus that if a man ‘lies with a woman’ on her period they should both ‘be put apart among their people.’ (Leviticus 20:18) Therefore, according to the Bible, a menstruating woman is taboo to her husband especially because going near her may lead to both of them being banished from the community – a pretty serious punishment! This menstrual taboo also exists in other religious texts such as the Qur’an, which forbids a menstruating woman from praying, fasting, and entering a mosque, and also in various Hindu scriptures, which insist that a menstruating woman must not handle food that others will be eating or even do housework (this may be a nice break perhaps). All of these restrictions reinforce sexual difference and women’s subordinate position in society.
Translation “I am Menstruating” “Graffiti Ljubljana 82” by MZaplotnik
Some feminists think that the idea of PMS is a patriarchal construct devised by medics in order to keep women in their places by painting the female body as deviant. The thinking behind this line of argument is that men feel threated by women (why wouldn’t they, we are pretty awe-inspiring) and want the inconvenience of menstruation to stop them from advancing in their work place. I don’t agree completely with this view point, but I am sympathetic to Dale Spender’s declaration that menstruation ‘would have been the locus for glorification had it been the experience of men.’ (See ‘Defining reality: a powerful tool’ in Language and Power, eds. Mureil Schulz et al) The Bible states that semen is only polluting for one day, yet menstrual blood is polluting for seven days. Of course, there is no explanation as to why. Perhaps if women had written the Bible, it would have been the other way round. It is unsurprising, then, if we bear in mind the religious traditions upon which our societies are built, that we treat periods and their representation with such aversion and despondency. We fear contamination and pollution, and therefore images such as that which appeared on Istagram provoke in us a sense of horror as if our mere gazing upon the menstrual blood of another may infect us.
In fact, our reaction to this blood is what feminist and post-structuralist theorist Kristeva would call ‘abject’. Kristeva mentions periods as one of the many bodily discharges, such as excrement or pus, which incites an abject reaction in those who witness it. According to Kristeva, the reason why menstrual blood revolts us is that it reminds us of the fleshy boundaries of our bodies and by association our mortality. Because of our disgust for anything that reminds us of our animalistic nature, we try hard to not think about the materiality of blood and try extremely hard to hide the fact that we are bleeding. This is evident when we contemplate that girls are taught about menstruation at school in terms of hygiene and how to conceal their menstrual flow from others. Menstruation is rarely described in a positive light (e.g. “It means you are fertile – hurray!”). Often a mothers only gives her daughter information after the onset of her first period, but again this is usually only about how to remain clean and how to disguise the fact that she is menstruating (“Don’t let any boys see you with sanitary equipment”). Adverts are also a testament to the fact that we view periods as abject because adverts also emphasise concealment. Furthermore, when commercials show you how absorbent their tampons or sanitary towels are (you are probably slightly perturbed when reading me clearly mention such things – oh the horror) they use a blue rather than a more representative red liquid. Perhaps this is more to do with society’s fear of blood or its association with death, but it also represents our discomfort when thinking about the reality of our bleeding. Another evidence of our refusal to think about the reality of monthly bleeds is our reluctance to speaking directly about menstruation, we feel the need to refer to it euphemistically as our ‘time of the month’, ‘having the painters in’ or ‘the communists are coming’ (perhaps some wish they were after the Conservatives were re-elected) etc.
So that is a brief look at why in this day and age when we are becoming more and more open about sex (less so if you are British maybe), yet we still feel ashamed to talk about such a natural and not at all scandalous biological process that many of us experience. So women, stop beating about the bush when you need a feminine hygiene product because aunt Rose is visiting. Let’s stop feeling ashamed about the fact that we menstruate, use the word ‘period’ in front of other females and males (they’ll get used to it eventually too), and educate our children about the wonders of being a woman (bleeding and all). Then maybe just maybe one day the taboo will finally be completely broken. Happy Menstruating!
We are very much looking forward to our next meeting which will take place on 28th May G09 1-2pm. We are pleased to announce that our next talk will be given by Lucy Elkerton from the Universities of Bristol and Southampton.
Here is the abstract for Lucy’s paper:
Rape of Europa Mosaic, Merida
The mosaics of Roman Iberia have been comparatively neglected as an important body of evidence for the society that created them. They contain a range of vivid images including mythological and allegorical scenes, and scenes of “everyday” life. This research aims to demonstrate the potential of this material in understanding the social structures of the communities of the provincial inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, in particular in questions of gender identity. How do the images on these mosaics impact on the way that people within this particular community had a sense of their gender? I will argue that by studying the mosaics of the Iberian Peninsula we can discern a discourse of gender: that the images contribute to, and form part of, ideas about what is appropriate behaviour within these communities, and the construction of both masculinities and femininities. This study will specifically look at these questions and this evidence in its local context. In particular, this talk will focus on my initial research so far, which has examined particular mosaics which contribute to an idea of masculinity. For example, a number of hunting mosaics are considered, alongside images of violence against women, which both seem to reinforce a particular set of behaviours for ideal manhood within this provincial community. I aim to examine these mosaics both as images of art and as physical artefacts that exist in an archaeological context. By doing so, I believe I can contribute significantly to our knowledge of constructions of gender in Roman Iberia.
And a bit more about Lucy….
Lucy is in her first year of a PhD at the University of Bristol and the University of Southampton. Her thesis is on the mosaics of Roman Spain, in particular looking at how gender is represented and communicated through these images. She’s interested in how this provincial society constructs and performs gendered behaviour, and how these images contribute to these conceptions of gender. She is based in the Classics department at Bristol, and the Archaeology department at Southampton. Her undergraduate and masters degrees are both in Roman Archaeology at Southampton.
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We look forward to seeing you at the Graduate School!
Gender and Sexuality Research Network 