week 11 readigs

Blog for week 11

 

In Najambadi the reading basically tells us how the transition between men and women being the controlling forces in the household. In the beginning of the Iranian society children was directed to men. It talks about how the father was the manager of the household and the wife was basically the barrier of the child. “The father not his wife was the manager of the household and in charge of discipline and education of the children and that the biological mother was not necessarily and at times not preferably the nurturer and caretaker of the child. Basically it was known with tusi that the child should be taught by the mother since she is the one having the baby there was a connection to the womb. Before tusi Kirmani was saying how the women pregnancy attitude reflects on the child like if she mad during her pregnancy the baby will come out angry, this displays that there was already being a connection between mother and child. Tusi just basically put reasoning behind why its vital for the connection between the child and womb.

 

With that connection becoming the new theory that when civilization was basically realizing that the mothers need to be educated. This importance of education to the mother became a necessity in order to fulfill the connection between the wombs, the mother teaching the child. This was kind of weird though because although mothers were recognized to receive education, their education teaching were how to maintain a household, so like cooking, sewing, cleaning etc.

 

In Dicle Kogacioglu basically it approaches the framework of women being murdered. In turkey you have honor murder, which is when the family is not pleased with that person sexual acts and life that represents that family. This assumed to be a tradition which make institutions that’s quote on quote modernization but if its modern, why is it apart of these honor killing?. It’s a cover up just the naming is different and suppose to make the morals and traditions still of honor killings acceptable in so many ways with laws and lack of acknowledgement that institutions are a part of them.

On the other hand I thought it was really interesting with the tradition called blood feud, this was between family in each family killed a male from one another. It crazy because it has the same outcome as honor killing which is death but law seems to condemn this tradition, primarily its unacceptable when honor killing has loop wholes on why this tradition will remain. The only difference is male and women.

November 10, 2015 Blogpost Reading

Through “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism, and Women in Turkey,” discussed by Deniz Kandiyoti, portrays the development of Turkey by demonstrating the transformation process it undergoes—from a ‘multi-ethnic empire’ to a secular nation state. “I have attempted to show how the appearance of women, first as objects of political discourse and later as political actors and citizens, was intimately bound up with the changing nature of the Ottoman/Turkish polity.”

The critiquing of women reformist conditions were observed in regards to ‘Westernism’ and the cultural tension between Western-oriented bureaucracies and the (opposing) Ottoman Empire. Thus, male reformers demanded change in the framework of women institutions in terms of reflecting their ideology upon the Islamic society—benefits assumed to increase the communities health as whole—the liberation of Muslim women in Turkey had been challenging in the beginning of the Second Constitutional period.

However, The Society for the Defense of Women’s Rights has been recognized on challenging and securing women’s access to paid professions. Such regimes enact in order to serve the ‘women’s world’ because Muslim women have an active role in shaping public opinion in contemporary Turkey. Lastly, three sets of new influences have emerged in the prominence of women’s rights issues seen in this period: the rise of ideology in regards to Turkism, the requirements of having a war in terms of the economy—from the Balkan War up until the end of World War I—the outcome effects on the social and economic policies from the Young Turks members of the Committee of Union and Progress.

Week 11: Afsaneh Najmabadi

"The progress of the nation was seen as dependent on the progress of women"

The reading begins by talking about how in Persian texts, the shifts in meaning from premodern to modern normative concepts reconfigured woman from "house" to "manager of the house." In premodern texts, the hope of producing the perfect Muslim man, a man of God, the father would be the manager of the house and responsible for the children's education and discipline. He was advised on how to regulate and own his wife. Unlike the modern nurturer and educator, the man was in charge of the child's upbringing. However, while the child is in the mother's womb, it's solely her responsibility to take care of that child. 

Women eventually began to appear in education books following their appearance as subjects worthy of education. They went from being part of the household to manager of the household and primary educator of the children. The progress of the nation depends on the progress of women and the level of education they receive. To conclude, women eventually began to receive equal education in Iran, but unfortunately remained subjects that were not heard throughout history as most of these texts were written by men and depicted for men. 

Week 11

Blog Week 11

Reading #1: Dicle Kogacioglu- The Tradition Effect – Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey

            In this article, these women have been placed in this situation where they are either following the rules or being prepared for their murder. In Turkey it is completely okay for someone to kill their daughter for example in order to save the honor of their family if the daughter decides to be making the wrong sexual choices. When trying to change the way people view these women and their rights we get stuck in what is called the “traditional effect” in which women can suffer through violent actions and yet it is not really discussed or looked through so much since the actions are part of tradition. But honor crimes are something that many people have been working on getting rid of.

            The JDP is one of the groups who work on giving women justice in these countries. They believe that this problem of honor killing and “suicide” is become a more common problem with young women. Their solution is to give these women and their families more education and attention to the situation. The problem is that all these resources are not so available especially in communities with high levels of poverty. Even those who work towards laws to change this still continue to shape their laws under traditional situations.What confused me about this whole article is that it doesn’t really explain as to why these honor killings are happening or what causes them to be okay. Honor killing is just something that happens and then it is done for you move on with no questions as to why this even happened.

Reading #2: Afsaneh Najmabadi- Crafting and Educated Housewife in Iran

            This reading concentrates on the power of the women with in her home as a mother and wife to the family. In reading you find out that the women is the one in charge of the schooling and education, but then there is a part where the man is also part of this due to physical learning process for boys. The women must be responsible for the nurturing part of the child while he/she is in the womb. After children are born it is their job to teach them, but they do not choose what to teach. The example they give here is almost if the man of the house is the owner and the woman becomes the manager of the household instead of the mother or wife.

            Eventually women worked to where education for women was just as good and equal value as that of men’s. But even when these women are educated many of them are not listened to because it is a world ran by men. Therefore if men decide that being good and educated means simply being a young and beautiful wife as the article states then that is all that matters because women have no say in who is heard. 

Week 11 Readings

Tuesday Reading:
The first reading began by explaining how within Persian Books it was believed to have been written by male authority because it explained how within the household men would be considered “managers” they would be in control of how their children were educated, what their wife could and could not do, including whether or not she would be able to be the caretaker of their children.The article explains, “He was one the who named him, chose a wet nurse, and was responsible for his physical and mental development”. When I read that, it was hard to process because the mother who just gave birth to her child is automatically stripped off sharing vital moments with their child due to the man being able to decide. I don’t understand how the child will ever be able to feel connected to his mother if she is put in question of raising the child. It’s explained how a “good” wife would be considered quiet and obedient basically for the man’s orders. Which is really sad because I don’t understand how someone could write about a women in this form. How does someone get to tell the rest of their readers how inferior a woman should be within their homes and society.

The rest of the reading continues to explain how if women always remain inferior within their families that it will create an unequal ad unhealthy unbalance for the upbringing of the children and society in general. How many times when women wrote powerful text about why they should be equal within the relationship that their texts were changed to benefit the man. What was specifically explained was that if women were able to receive an education, intellectual and cultural knowledge that they would be able to stand up to their husband as well as be able to take care of her own family instead of giving the man the power to control his house. All in all, the point of this texts were to benefit the children of the family. At the end, it is explained how due to the influence of those texts by the end of that century women were finally able to educate the girls within the family. Which is not the full intention of the text but it was an advancement.

Thursday Reading:
“An honor crime is commonly defined as the murder of a woman by members of her family who do not approve of her sexual behavior” (1). When I first read that, I wasn’t really sure how to process it. And as I kept on reading it reminded me of the first article and women inferiority within their relationships and society. How women’s self is not valued and it is always the man’s choice how their choices get defined and judged. It is basically explained how for western feminists honor crimes becomes problematic because it is simply a tradition that they cannot break and other people outside of their culture cannot seem to understand that. That was really shocking to me too because I don’t understand how anyone is expected to understand a killing.
The article continues to give various examples of how and why one should be able to understand these crimes. The one that stood out to me the most was the first example of how if a woman is caught within an illicit relationship and if a man were to kill her. It can be justified due to the fact that it could have been uncontrollable grief and therefore his sentence of first-degree murder can be reduced by 2/3. Because of the preservation of the family and the way it affects them is why the women’s killing is viewed “understandable”. Then it goes further on to explain as to when couples divorce it is important for a woman to not sleep around because if not she is not liable or prepared to take full custody of their children. Overall the article was summed up that no one truly knows when the line for a woman becomes blurred to justify her killing. But that the similar issues always arise whether it is legal or religiously, etc. The problem with other westerners arise when they confuse traditions and institutions. The only solution as it is mentioned is to read between the lines of the institutional discourses and work for the change. Because if not, everything will continue and nothing will ever change.

Afsaneh Najmabadi and Dicle Kogacioglu readings

      Afsaneh Najmabadi follows the reconfiguration of education and rights into a central factor of modernist imagination of women and housewives. Najmabadi locates the shift in gender performance in a “double movement” of understanding, one that combines “disciplinary techniques and emancipatory promises” to rethink “gender in the Iranian modernist imagination” (94). By this Najmabadi means that women’s rights and the regulation of practices towards women were based primarily on their potential as mothers and carers for the future of Iran. One of the main points throughout “Crafting an Educated Housewife” in the description of the new emphasis on education for girls and women was the idea that “the progress of the nation was seen as dependent on the progress of women” (102). Thus, this outlook influenced the shift from women being merely part of a household to women becoming the manager of the household. In this process of becoming the managers of the household, the “discourse of domesticity” became an important basis for women’s advancement in Iran. Rather than seeing the emphasis on “scientific housekeeping, child rearing, and husband keeping” as limiting for Iranian women in the early twentieth century, they were seen as the reason why educated women were needed “in order for families to prosper and for the country to become civilized” (109). In this regard, Najmabadi parallels Saba Mahmood’s argument that context is key for  understanding which actions constitute agency and freedom for Muslim women. Acknowledging that the emphasis on education for Iranian women was based on a model of exemplary domesticity does not devalue the fact that Iranian women in the early twentieth century were empowered by this shift in their education policies.

     As Lila Abu-Lughod has shown previously in her article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” resorting to the cultural is a common method used to give the appearance of trying to understand what Dicle Kogacioglu calls “problematic non-Western practices” (Kogacioglu 119). In the context of honor killings taking place in Turkey, Kogacioglu argues that a recentered analytical framework for analyzing these “traditional practices” should focus on the external powers influencing these occurrences, rather than explaining them through a cultural lens (Kogacioglu 119). So-called modern institutions are framed as different and complete opposite to the “native, timeless and unchanging” traditions, thus making it seem as though these two things are completely separate from one another (121). What is important to the understanding of practices in both Western and non-Western countries is that “every deployment of tradition has its effects in terms of the distribution of power,” and that, in the case of honor killings, these distributions of power will take form through institutional perpetuation of violence” (120). In essence, Kogacioglu is critical of the “tradition effect” which serves to “render invisible the complicity of sate institutions and the juridical apparatus in furthering the conditions that give rise to honor crimes” (129). For example, the juridical procedure uses many contradictions in laws that find ways to reduce and make bearable any punishments for an honor crime, instead of denouncing honor crimes by having strict and applicable punishments (123). 

     Both Najmabadi and Kogacioglu write around the dichotomous thinking of the world, where there is a strict line between “‘East’ and ‘West,’ ‘Middle East’ and ‘Europe,’ past and present, tradition and modernity” (Kogacioglu 138). These essentialist notions are mostly normalized through international news media, and are permeated with anxiety for the unknown and misunderstood. In many cases, the Western views and practices are posited as the norms and the correct way of thinking about the issues Najmabadi and Kogacioglu talk about. 

Works Cited: 

Lila Abu-Lughod. 2002. Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others. American Anthropologist 104, no. 3: 783-790. 

Dicle Koğacıoğlu. 2004. The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey. Signs 15 (2): 118-151.

Saba Mahmood. 2005."The Subject of Freedom" in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 

Afsaneh Najmabadi. 1998. "Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran" in Re-Making Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Week 10

This weeks readings were “Feminism and Modernity in the Middle east” by Lila Abu- Lughod and “The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey” by Dicle Kogacioglu. The first reading focused more on how women need an education if they want to manage their house. People believed that women didn’t need an education to manage their households because they thought that the only person that mattered in the house was the men. The men were the ones who were expected to have an education not women. This part of the reading showed how society gave this role to women, a role of inferiority. Whereas society gave men the role of authority over women, when in fact both should be equal. At the beginning of the article the author tells us how man were told that a good wife should be intelligent, piety, continence, modest, loving, able to control her tongue, be obedient to her husband and devoted to her own family. After reading this I think of how again women need to be submissive in order to be considered a good wife. Later on in the article, it explains how when women get education become more important and actually have a role in the house hold; not like before when their only job was to give birth to a child. This time they were able to give advice their husband, take care of their finances, and raise their children without the need of nanny raising their children. It was a huge step when women were able to obtain an education because it was merely an idea in the beginning, no one did anything about it. That was until Adalat published in a journal all the arguments in favor of women getting an education. One part of the article that I like was at the end when it says “Why do they not know yet that woman and man in this world are like the two wheels of a carriage: they must be equal, neither having privilege over the other. If one of the two wheels of a carriage is deficient, it will be impossible for it to move” that part was written by Shanax Azad . After reading this quote I started to think that everything does need to be balanced because when society won’t allow everyone to progress then we will be stuck in the same place. Now women are important and we need to open our eyes and see how important women are in society.

The second article was about the honor of crime and how women are killed by their own family members if they do not approve of their sexual behavior. After reading this article I began to relate it to the women genocide in Central America and how these types of crimes are dismissed. In the article it says that when a women in killed because of honor crime it is fine because that is their tradition. A tradition that you can not change. However when a man is affected by this tradition then the state institution will try anything to make sure it doesn’t happen to a man. Again I related this to the women genocide because in those countries when a women is killed no one would say or do anything because the judicial system would work in favor of the killers just like the judicial systems works in favor of the people that killed the women because of the honor crime. For example when I was reading a part in the article that stated that the judges would use articles of the criminal code to reduce the sentence of someone that was on trial because of an honor crime, which is completely ridiculous. It was interesting how when judges were asked about what their thoughts were in these types of crimes they were simply said that it was s unlucky and cruel turn of tradition. They have the power to do something about it but prefer to stay quiet. This article shows the cruel reality of how a man’s life is more valuable than a women’s life, which I think is this week’s reading connect  because both of the articles have a similar theme that is how women are not treated equally and how society does nothing to change this.