GRADUATE
GRADUATE COLLOQUIUM
The Graduate Student Colloquium is a series of presentations by graduate
students on topics related to the study of women and gender and is open
to all students, faculty and staff. It serves as one of the mail links
between the Program in the Study of Women and Gender and the university’s
graduate students. The colloquium provides a forum for new scholars from
a wide range of departments and backgrounds to discuss gender related
research. Graduate students have the opportunity to receive feedback
on their academic work as well as to practice presenting it in front
of a larger, sympathetic and, at the same time, critical audience, which
consists mainly of graduate students but may include dissertation advisors,
faculty members and, if the speaker wishes, members of the Princeton
Township community. This year’s colloquium organizers are Marcelline Block and Elena Peregrina.
Calendar of Events (Fall 2009)
The schedule of graduate student talks is listed below. All presentations take place from 12 pm-1:30 pm.
Lunch will be provided.
Riaz Tejani, Princeton University, Department of Anthropology and USC
Gould School of Law
"Behind the Veil: Fadela Amara and the Battle over French-Muslim
Women’s Bodies"
Monday, November 9, 2009
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: East Pyne 127
Abstract:
While many are familiar with the French ban on Muslim women's headscarves and the racial tensions underlying the banlieux riots of 2005, little research has explored the mutual imbrication of these controversies. This paper explores that overlap through the story of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, a French-Muslim women's organization founded by Fadela Amara--a practicing Muslim and high school dropout. In her life of political activism and leadership, Amara became the spokeswoman for a generation of Muslim immigrant girls by speaking out against domestic violence and cultural oppression. At the helm of Ni Putes, Amara supported the 2004 law banning the Muslim veil revealing her intriguing faith in the ability for State patriarchy to supplant domestic patriarchy in the control over Arab women's bodies. Perhaps an extension of this fealty, Amara was ultimately appointed Secretary of State for Urban Policy and has become the highest ranking Arab woman in France. Her story reveals the complicated interaction of public and private lives for French immigrant women, as well as the ambiguous relationship between immigration, citizenship, activism, and State authority. This paper is part of a larger dissertation project on the “crisis” of national identity and belonging in France in the years leading up to the May 2005 referendum on the European Constitution. There, the French population became the first to say ‘No’, temporarily ending the campaign for a more singular Europe. In the context of that larger project, this paper serves as a key ethnographic example of the fight over French national identity and belonging. Combining analytical tools from legal scholarship, history, and ethnography, it presents a creative intervention in the anthropological study of power, politics, and law.
Lindsay Reckson, Princeton University, Department of English
"Jamesian Fringe: Eccentric Women, Ecstatic Bodies, and the Politics of
the Margin in The Bostonians "
Thursday, December 3, 2009
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: East Pyne 127
Abstract:
Henry James famously described his minor female characters as ficelles, devices of “delightful dissimulation” that serve simply to expedite the demands of novelistic form. Such figures were mere vessels of “amusement,” purely marginal to the realist narrative as James outlined it. But as James also acknowledged, his ficelles (a stage device, but also literally in French a thread, bit of string or fringe) were unruly creations, often threatening to upset the formal economies of his fiction. Starting from what may seem like a merely formal concern in James—with the ficelle as a symptom of realist excess—my paper explores the explicitly gendered, political nature of this constitutive surplus. I argue that the ficelle functions as what we might call (after Kristeva) an “internal exclusion” in James, at the margins and yet provocatively central to the politics of the realist project. Nowhere is this internal exclusion more apparent than in The Bostonians (1886), where the decorative and radical notions of “fringe” coalesce in James’s treatment of the U.S. suffrage movement. As John Carlos Rowe has noted, James remains something of an uncanny figure for feminists, as his fiction seems to expose the marginal positions occupied by fin-de-siècle women while insisting on such marginality as a formal exigency. I argue in contrast that the margin is never purely formal in James, whose “zeal” for the ficelle betrays his own investment in embodied forms of excess and eccentricity. Building on what James described as the “ecstasies of method,” I suggest that James employed ecstasy as method, a means of de-centering both the realist text and the gendered social experience it aimed to represent. In turn, I argue that to read the Jamesian fringe is to recover the possibility of a radically inclusive realist agenda.
Oded Zinger, Princeton University, Department of Near Eastern Studies
"'When One's Women Turn Things Upside Down': the Marital Woes of a
Medieval Egyptian Country Physician"
Thursday, December 10, 2009
12:00 - 1:30 pm
Location: Chancellor Green 105
Abstract:
In the first years of the thirteenth century, a Jewish physician hiding from creditors in the Egyptian countryside wrote a long and bitter letter to his uncle. Linking his financial disasters to his sad marital life, the writer movingly mourns the death of his beloved first wife while acidly ranting against his second wife. This unique and previously unpublished letter from the Cairo Geniza sheds light on the realities of marital life of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt when husbands and wives living in geographical separation was a ubiquitous reality. Trying to re-construct the physician’s marital history from his confused narrative reveals the complex history of a marital dispute that stretched over many years and has seen attempts at reconciliation, legal actions, informal negotiations and flight. Going beyond marital realities, the letter allows us to examine the strategies and tactics, both in action and in narrative, that were open to the participants. Wealth, professional ties, social and local prestige, religious law and, most significantly, children, were all thrown into the cauldron of marital life which on occasions boiled over and in other times was brought to a gentle simmer. Finally, a literary reading of the letter as an ego-document reveals how the physician maneuvers between the constraints of social expectations and his personal anxieties. Examining the language of the letter shows how the physician constructed, against all evidence to the contrary, the images of his ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wives and fleshes out his conception of gender roles, both feminine and masculine, and what happens when these are overturned. Reading this letter in a way that is sensitive to the complex and ambiguous nature of marital life goes against the prevailing tendency of scholars to study the marital documents of the Geniza from a limited and solely legal perspective.
