Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/15366936-9547980
Taneem Husain
In the United States’ current cultural and political climate, stereotypes of Muslims, such as the destructive terrorist and oppressed burqa-clad woman, are ever-present. For Muslim Americans, breaking outside of these stereotypes is fraught: merely contesting these stereotypes is insufficient for inclusion. Muslim Americans are often required to construct central aspects of their identities—particularly religion, gender, and sexuality—so they become acceptable to mainstream American sensibilities, thus becoming “good” Muslims. This essay theorizes an alternative to this good/bad binary by imagining a “queer” Muslimness through Usama Alshaibi’s 2011 film Profane. Profane centers on Muna, a Muslim Arab-American professional dominatrix who attempts to reconcile her perverse sexuality with her religious identity. In doing so, she unravels understandings of both her role as a dominatrix and her Muslim identity, questioning the boundaries of these categories. Using queer of color critique and feminist theorizing on BDSM, this essay examines how Muna demands recognition of her Islamic sexuality and perverse Islam, navigating tensions as she disidentifies with these categories. While her attempts at recognition inevitably fail, Muna continues to insist on Islamic sexuality/perverse Islam by consuming the jinn that haunts her throughout the film. This essay demonstrates how Muna’s refusal to succumb to tensions of essentialized identity—particularly through linking religion and perverse sexuality—works to refute the standard monolithic view of Muslim American identity. Ultimately, in emphasizing how nonnormative and perverse religious practice helps build queer perspectives on identity, this paper expands queer theory’s burgeoning analyses on Muslim identity.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-23DOI: 10.1215/15366936-8913085
Ramya Sreenivasan
Abstract:This review article is a state of the field review, based on six recent monographs and edited volumes published in the United States, India, and England, all pertaining to women's studies or women's history in South Asia.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-23DOI: 10.1215/15366936-8913199
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
March 25, 2020. It’s four in the morning. Since becoming a father, I’ve intentionally begun to wake up earlier and earlier. I’m trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to disturb my spouse, Martine, and our toddler, both asleep in the next room. With the new demands of parenthood, I’ve had to carve out moments like this. Quiet, early morning moments to get academic work done. A sliver of time before the routines of childcare. But this morning is different. Houston has just issued a stay-at-home order because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonessential workers are to stay at home. I’m a nonessential worker, an assistant professor. I teach in the humanities, a constellation of disciplines already insecure about their continued existence. I’m seated on the worn couch in our one-bedroom apartment’s living room, a split space. Half living area. Sofa, television, low table. Half play area. Our toddler’s toys scattered about the carpet in chaotic disarray. Like so many other people, I have a difficult time imagining how I’m going to work from home for the foreseeable future. In-person classes have been abruptly canceled, and I don’t knowwhere I’mgoing to host my first online seminar meeting in this cramped space. I’m scheduled to teach Jamaica Kincaid’s novella, Lucy (1990), a profound, semiautobiographical narrative that reveals the complicated gendered, racialized, and transnational dynamics of migrant caregivers in the United States. It’s a story about the limits of care. I think it makes the most sense to teach from our kitchen
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Pub Date : 2021-07-23DOI: 10.1215/15366936-8913162
Destiny Wiley-Yancy
Abstract:The Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization's (AAPSO) Presidium Committee on Women met to prepare for the United Nations Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya. The committee aimed to tackle the impact of colonialism and imperialism and the ways they disproportionately impacted the lives of women. The AAPSO wanted to do this through a series of workshops focusing on the status of women in apartheid South Africa, the destabilization of women and children in Africa and Asia, the burden of debt in developing countries, and the subversive role of transnational corporations in mass media. The committee also recognized that women, particularly in Africa and Asia, formed the forefront of resistance movements, driving the struggle. This meeting shows that the Presidium Committee on Women optimistically saw women's social justice as an integral component to the larger anticolonial and anti-imperial project.
{"title":"Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) Presidium Committee Nairobi Preparations","authors":"Destiny Wiley-Yancy","doi":"10.1215/15366936-8913162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-8913162","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization's (AAPSO) Presidium Committee on Women met to prepare for the United Nations Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya. The committee aimed to tackle the impact of colonialism and imperialism and the ways they disproportionately impacted the lives of women. The AAPSO wanted to do this through a series of workshops focusing on the status of women in apartheid South Africa, the destabilization of women and children in Africa and Asia, the burden of debt in developing countries, and the subversive role of transnational corporations in mass media. The committee also recognized that women, particularly in Africa and Asia, formed the forefront of resistance movements, driving the struggle. This meeting shows that the Presidium Committee on Women optimistically saw women's social justice as an integral component to the larger anticolonial and anti-imperial project.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"20 1","pages":"174 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41329872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-23DOI: 10.1215/15366936-8913129
Sreyoshi Sarkar
Abstract:Women living in the South Asian conflict zone of Kashmir have been represented by mainstream media and film as mainly victims of the Indian state power's political and sexual violence, as protestors who are supporting their men's insurgency in Kashmir, or as aligned with local Islamic militant groups. This obscures their nuanced testimonies, political objectives, and multivalent agencies within the conflict zone. The author shows how Vishal Bharadwaj's 2014 film Haider, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, disrupts such erasures to highlight Kashmiri women's lived experiences in the conflict zone at intersections of everyday and extraordinary violence. By close reading scenes from the film via cinematic structure, dialogue, acting, camerawork, and mise-en-scène, the author shows how Haider not only mounts a scathing critique of the Indian occupation of Kashmir but also underscores the need for more capacious considerations of postcolonial feminisms as emergent from lived experiences versus adhering to established checklists approved by Euro-American feminism. The film's investments in its female protagonists—Ghazala and Arshia—more than the men also uncovers the former's redefinitions of azadi (freedom) as not just about Kashmiri political autonomy from India and Pakistan but also about nonviolence, equality, and justice for women and by extension all marginalized populations in Kashmir.
{"title":"Engendering Protest and Rethinking \"Azadi\" in Kashmir in Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider","authors":"Sreyoshi Sarkar","doi":"10.1215/15366936-8913129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-8913129","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Women living in the South Asian conflict zone of Kashmir have been represented by mainstream media and film as mainly victims of the Indian state power's political and sexual violence, as protestors who are supporting their men's insurgency in Kashmir, or as aligned with local Islamic militant groups. This obscures their nuanced testimonies, political objectives, and multivalent agencies within the conflict zone. The author shows how Vishal Bharadwaj's 2014 film Haider, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, disrupts such erasures to highlight Kashmiri women's lived experiences in the conflict zone at intersections of everyday and extraordinary violence. By close reading scenes from the film via cinematic structure, dialogue, acting, camerawork, and mise-en-scène, the author shows how Haider not only mounts a scathing critique of the Indian occupation of Kashmir but also underscores the need for more capacious considerations of postcolonial feminisms as emergent from lived experiences versus adhering to established checklists approved by Euro-American feminism. The film's investments in its female protagonists—Ghazala and Arshia—more than the men also uncovers the former's redefinitions of azadi (freedom) as not just about Kashmiri political autonomy from India and Pakistan but also about nonviolence, equality, and justice for women and by extension all marginalized populations in Kashmir.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"20 1","pages":"126 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47694858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-23DOI: 10.1215/15366936-8913118
Uddipana Goswami
Abstract:A reflection on the different forms that violence against women takes in militarized societies like that in Assam in Northeast India. A young girl living with an abusive father is married off to an abusive husband. Like other women living with quotidian violence, she devises coping mechanisms: often the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred. The unbearable burden of a life abused (and its grim ending) can be made bearable only through recourse in the unreal and the magical.
{"title":"Body, Bones, and All","authors":"Uddipana Goswami","doi":"10.1215/15366936-8913118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-8913118","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A reflection on the different forms that violence against women takes in militarized societies like that in Assam in Northeast India. A young girl living with an abusive father is married off to an abusive husband. Like other women living with quotidian violence, she devises coping mechanisms: often the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred. The unbearable burden of a life abused (and its grim ending) can be made bearable only through recourse in the unreal and the magical.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"20 1","pages":"84 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46981909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-23DOI: 10.1215/15366936-8913225
N. Kang
Cave-like, a lash-fringed darkness they would handle it, she and her little sister, this city life. Lit fire-flowers in the loamy sky every July 4, visited the inner harbor, cookouts in backyard squares, watched the matte black animate, sentient, lip-gloss sticky stars, how the easy smoke erased the hot stench of singed skin, the corner men’s amino-sweet roaring, daubed with piss and weed and diluted cologne, a vial or two clinking amid the cop’s dry barking, the nervous leg-jiggles, side-eye, thistle-brush beards cut like wet onion tops, glinting acrid and beige as the fingernails of the supine body slept on the bench’s cool slats reading Greatest City in America. Someone was sighing thickly, saying the dead man’s teeth looked like lemon salt that just missed the rim and hit the mouth with a steel punch or the musical velocity of cherry blossom petals scattering in violent spring rain.
{"title":"In Blocks of Light, She Calls Back","authors":"N. Kang","doi":"10.1215/15366936-8913225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-8913225","url":null,"abstract":"Cave-like, a lash-fringed darkness they would handle it, she and her little sister, this city life. Lit fire-flowers in the loamy sky every July 4, visited the inner harbor, cookouts in backyard squares, watched the matte black animate, sentient, lip-gloss sticky stars, how the easy smoke erased the hot stench of singed skin, the corner men’s amino-sweet roaring, daubed with piss and weed and diluted cologne, a vial or two clinking amid the cop’s dry barking, the nervous leg-jiggles, side-eye, thistle-brush beards cut like wet onion tops, glinting acrid and beige as the fingernails of the supine body slept on the bench’s cool slats reading Greatest City in America. Someone was sighing thickly, saying the dead man’s teeth looked like lemon salt that just missed the rim and hit the mouth with a steel punch or the musical velocity of cherry blossom petals scattering in violent spring rain.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":"20 1","pages":"246 - 247"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45498828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-23DOI: 10.1215/15366936-8913096
Sri Craven
Abstract:This short story examines the class and caste dimensions of gender under economic liberalization in India through the experiences of its protagonist, Rani. It elicits the ways the new economic model purportedly ushers in a new modernity, even as the conditions of the poor remain the same within historically established social hierarchies and the damage inflicted on the environment.
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