PLEASE NOTE THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELED _____
From: Amberly Steward [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 10:17 AM To: '[email protected]' Subject: March 17, 6PM - Minarets After Marx: Gender, Islam and the Headscarf Debate in Postsocialist Bulgaria ============================================================== MIT Anthropology Presents: Minarets After Marx: Gender, Islam and the Headscarf Debate in Postsocialist Bulgaria A presentation by Kristen Ghodsee Professor of Gender and Women's Studies - Bowdoin College Thursday, March 17 6:00 PM Rm. 16-220 ============================================================== Description Gender equality was one of the core ideological tenets of 20th century communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The hyper-modernist formula for a functioning proletarian democracy included rapid industrialization, which required the full integration of women into the formal labor force. In Bulgaria, the so-called emancipation of Muslim women was a particularly urgent goal and a litmus test for the triumph of scientific socialism over what was considered the feudal backwardness of Islam. For over four decades, all of the coercive powers of the centralized state were funneled into suppressing local Islamic traditions and radically reimagining gender norms among the country's Muslim minority. After the collapse of communism in 1989, Bulgaria's Muslims were free to embrace their religious and ethnic identities, but found their communities bitterly divided with regard to any potential Islamic revival. There were those who maintained allegiance to the secular communist project, those who wished to revive local Muslim traditions from before the communist era, and those who chose to embrace a new form of universalist 'orthodox' Islam being imported into the Balkans through the work of international Islamic charities. Many of these debates revolve around the re-inscription of more conservative gender roles for women, and an ongoing debate over the Islamic headscarf has become a potent symbol of this conflict. This talk examines the local meanings of the headscarf as a political and religious symbol and the complicated array of factors informing the selective embrace of 'orthodox' Islam in Bulgaria today. Biography Kristen Ghodsee is the John S. Osterweis Associate Professor in Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Duke University Press, 2005), Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press 2009), and numerous articles on gender, civil society, and Islam in Eastern Europe. She is the winner of national fellowships from NSF, Fulbright, NCEEER, IREX and ACLS as well as the recipient of residential research fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Max Planck Institute in Rostock, Germany, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her third book, Lost In Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Socialism is forthcoming with Duke University Press in the fall of 2011.
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