Critical Islamic Reflections Conference at Yale: The (Muslim) Woman Question

Critical Islamic Reflections Conference: The (Muslim) Woman Question
Date: Saturday, 10 April 2010
Time: 09:00 - 19:00
Location: William L. Harkness Hall, Room 119
Street: 100 Wall Street
Town/City: New Haven, CT

http://www.yale.edu/cir/

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, global media continue to traffic in representations of Muslim women, while representations produced by Muslim women are gaining international traction. Contemporary discussions around the role of Islam in foreign and domestic policy, civil society and democracy, war, globalization, human rights, and the private sphere increasingly hinge upon the semiotics of gender. However, despite the race to represent—and through representation to understand—the Muslim woman, prevailing debates on gender and Islam remain trapped in neo-Orientalist discourses and occluded by political ideologies worldwide.

As symbols of both oppression and liberation, Muslim women have historically been agents of political change and subjects of restrictive state policies in the West as well as in Muslim-majority societies. Lively religious debates on gender and the challenges of modernity prevail at the confessional level within Muslim communities. These debates are recast into objects of consumption by audiences unacquainted with the breadth and complexity of the Islamic scriptural tradition.

This conference explores how representations of Muslim women within visual and material cultures and in historical and contemporary literatures inform popular imagination and public policy on Islam even as they are influenced by them. Presentations will explore not only how Muslim women have been represented and have engaged in practices of representation, but will critically examine the structures of power such representations may serve, subvert, create, negotiate, or complicate.

To register, please visit http://www.yale.edu/cir/registration.html
Registration Fees: (There is no registration fee for Yale affiliates)
$7: pre-registration fee if you register online
$10: on-site fee if you register at the conference

For a detailed program, please visit http://www.yale.edu/cir/program.html

Thanks Omer!