Gender and Globalization – serie

In 1910, when Khedive Abbas II married a second wife surreptitiously, the contrast with his openly polygamous grandfather, Ismail, whose multiple wives and concubines signified his grandeur and masculinity, could not have been greater. That contrast reflected the spread of new ideals of family life that accompanied the development of Egypt's modern marriage system. Modernizing Marriage explores the evolution of marriage and marital relations, shedding new light on the social and cultural history of Egypt. Family is central to modern Egyptian history and in the ruling court did the ""political work."" Indeed, the modern state began as a household government in which members of the ruler's household served in the military and civil service. Cuno discusses political and sociodemographic changes that affected marriage and family life and the production of a family ideology by modernist intellectuals, who identified the family as a site crucial to social improvement, and for whom the reform and codification of Muslim family law was a principal aim. Throughout Modernizing Marriage, Cuno examines Egyptian family history in a comparative and transnational context, addressing issues of colonial modernity and colonial knowledge, Islamic law and legal reform, social history, and the history of women and gender.

Chronicling the experience of young Andean families as their lives extend between the Ecuadorian highlands and New York City, this book takes an in-depth look at transnational labor migration and gender identities. Jason Pribilsky offers an engrossing and sensitive account of the ways in which young men and women in these two locales navigate their lives, exploring the impact of gender, generation, and new forms of wealth in a single Andean community. Migration has been a part of the Andes for centuries, yet the effects of transnational labor on the individuals and communities remain largely undocumented. The author draws on firsthand observations of everyday lives to explore issues of transnational marriages and material consumption in the region. Pribilsky presents a study that is both engaging and challenging, a vital contribution to the fields of Latin American studies and immigration studies.

The essays in this collection examine issues of gender, family, and law in the Middle East and South Asia. In particular, the authors address the impact of colonialism on law, family, and gender relations; the role of religious politics in writing family law and the implications for gender relations; and, the tension between international standards emerging from UN conferences and conventions and various nationalist projects. Employing the frame of globalization, the authors highlight how local and global forces interact and influence the experience and actions of people who engage with the law. By virtue of a 'south-south' comparison of two quite similar and culturally linked regions, contributors avoid positing 'the West' as a modern telos. Drawing upon the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, and law, this volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of the complicated history of jurisprudence with regard to family and gender.

Policing Egyptian Women delineates the intricate manner in which the modern state in Egypt monitored, controlled, and ""policed"" the bodies of subaltern women. Some of these women were runaway slaves, others were deflowered outside of marriage, and still others were prostitutes. Kozma traces the effects of nineteenth-century developments such as the expansion of cities, the abolition of the slave trade, the formation of a new legal system, and the development of a new forensic medical expertise on these women who lived at the margins of society. Kozma makes use of extensive archival material to chronicle the everyday interactions of nonelite women at the police station and in the courts. From honor killings to child marriages to female slavery, Kozma presents an in-depth depiction of women’s experiences in Khedival Egypt. In an era when women and blacks were thought uneducable, Kozma shows that Egypt was training black women in what was then modern medicine. Known as hakimas, these female doctors played an important role in transforming how women were treated in the court system. Illustrating the ways in which the practices of the modern state gave rise to modern subjectivities, Kozma demonstrates how subaltern women experienced and helped shape nineteenth-century modernity.

Imperial Citizen examines the intersection between Ottoman colonialism, control of the Iraqi frontier through centralization policies, and the impact of those policies on Ottoman citizenship laws and on the institution of marriage. In an effort to maintain control of the Iraqi province, the Ottomans adapted their 1869 citizenship law to prohibit marriages between Ottoman women and Iranian men. This prohibition was an attempt to contain the threat that the Iranian Shi’a population represented to Ottoman control of their Iraqi provinces. In Imperial Citizen, Kern establishes this 1869 law as a point of departure for an illuminating exploration of an emerging concept of modern citizenship. She unfolds the historical context of the law and systematically analyzes the various modifications it underwent, pointing to its farreaching implications throughout society, particularly on landowners, the military, and Sunni women and their children. Kern’s fascinating account offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the Ottoman Iraqi frontier and its passage to modernity.

This pioneering ethnographic work centers on the dynamics of female authority within the religious life of a conservative Muslim community in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan. Peshkova draws upon several years of field research to chronicle the daily lives of women religious leaders, known as otinchalar, and the ways in which they exert a powerful influence in the religious life of the community. In this gender-segregated society, the Muslim women leaders have staked out a vibrant space in which they counsel and assist the women in their specific religious needs. Peshkova finds that otinchalar’s religious leadership filters into other areas of society, producing social changes beyond the ritual realm and challenging stereotypical definitions of what it means to be a Muslim woman.Weaving together the stories of individuals’ daily lives with her own journey to and from post-Soviet Central Asia, Peshkova provides a rich analysis of identity formation in Uzbekistan. She presents readers with a nuanced portrait of religion and social change that starts with an individual informed but not determined by the sociohistoric context of the region.

In 1910, when Khedive Abbas II married a second wife surreptitiously, the contrast with his openly polygamous grandfather, Ismail, whose multiple wives and concubines signified his grandeur and masculinity, could not have been greater. That contrast reflected the spread of new ideals of family life that accompanied the development of Egypt’s modern marriage system. Modernizing Marriage explores the evolution of marriage and marital relations, shedding new light on the social and cultural history of Egypt.Family is central to modern Egyptian history. Family in the ruling court did the “political work,” and, indeed, the modern state began as a household government in which members of the ruler’s household seved in the military and civil service. Cuno discusses political and sociodemographic changes that affected marriage and family life and the production of a family ideology by modernist intellectuals, who identified the family as a site crucial to social improvement, and for whom the reform and codification of Muslim family law was a principal aim. Throughout Modernizing Marriage, Cuno examines Egyptian family history in a comparative and transnational context, addressing issues of colonial modernity and colonial knowledge, Islamic law and legal reform, social history, and the history of women and gender.

September 11 has become a temporal and symbolic marker of the world’s brutal entry into the third millennium. Nearly all discussions of world politics today include a tacit, if not overt, reference to that historical moment. A decade and a half on, Winter considers the impact of 9/11 on women around the world. How were women affected by the events of that day? Were all women affected in the same way? Based on theoretical reflection, empirical research, and field work in different parts of the world, each chapter of the book considers a different post-9/11 issue in relation to women: global governance, human security, globalized militarism, identity, and sexuality in transnational feminist movements.

The year 1995, when the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, marks a historical milestone in the development of the Chinese feminist movement. In the decades that followed, three distinct trends emerged: first, there was a rise in feminist NGOs in mainland China and a surfacing of LGBTQ movements; second, social and economic developments nurtured new female agency, creating a vibrant, women-oriented cultural milieu in China; third, in response to ethnocentric Western feminism, some Chinese feminist scholars and activists recuperated the legacies of socialist China's state feminism and gender policies in a new millennium. These trends have brought Chinese women unprecedented choices, resources, opportunities, pitfalls, challenges, and even crises. In this timely volume, Zhu and Xiao offer an examination of the ways in which Chinese feminist ideas have developed since the mid-1990s. By juxtaposing the plural ""feminisms"" with ""Chinese characteristics,"" they both underline the importance of integrating Chinese culture, history, and tradition in the discussions of Chinese feminisms, and, stress the difference between the plethora of contemporary Chinese feminisms and the singular state feminism.The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary collection address the theme of feminisms with Chinese characteristics from different perspectives rendered from lived experiences, historical reflections, theoretical ruminations, and cultural and sociopolitical critiques, painting a panoramic picture of Chinese feminisms in the age of globalization.