“The Body and Gender in the Making of the Modern Middle East” offers an
interdisciplinary approach to examining how the supervision, objectification, and
disciplining of the body were integrally connected to the creation of modern modes of
governance, masculinity and femininity, new conceptions of the self and sexuality, novel
political and social imaginaries, and subject formation in urban centers of the Middle
East. Course readings and discussions will encourage students to consider how modern
institutions like schools, the army, voluntary associations, orphanages, and the hospital
played a transformative role in creating, inculcating, and spreading radically reconfigured
understandings of the body and gender throughout the region.
This course is rooted in a comparative approach to thinking about the Middle East
by exploring the following questions: What are the major historical processes that
facilitated the reshaping of normative understandings of the body, sexuality and gender in
the modern Middle East? What was the historical relationship between discursive and
institutional transformations? In what sense did these transformations in major cities like
Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
compare to that of transformations in other regions? This course encourages students to
develop their own reading of complex historical transformations in the Middle East and
express their views in class discussions and presentations, as well as in writing
historiographical essays, short research assignments, and reading response papers.
Course Requirements:
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Intended Audience:
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Class Format:
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