Secularisms (Social Text Book) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822341492 ISBN 13: 9780822341499

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

At a time when secularism is put forward as the answer to religious fundamentalism and violence, Secularisms offers a powerful, multivoiced critique of the narrative equating secularism with modernity, reason, freedom, peace, and progress. Bringing together essays by scholars based in religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, science studies, anthropology, and political science, this volume challenges the binary conception of "conservative" religion versus "progressive" secularism. With essays addressing secularism in India, Iran, Turkey, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this collection crucially complicates the dominant narrative by showing that secularism is multifaceted. How secularism is lived and experienced varies with its national, regional, and religious context. The essays explore local secularisms in relation to religious traditions ranging from Islam to Judaism, Hinduism to Christianity. Several contributors explicitly take up the way feminism has been implicated in the dominant secularization story. Ultimately, by dislodging secularism's connection to the single (and singular) progress narrative, this volume seeks to open spaces for other possible narratives about both secularism and religion-as well as for other possible ways of inhabiting the contemporary world. Contributors: Robert J. Baird, Andrew Davison, Tracy Fessenden, Janet R. Jakobsen, Laura Levitt, Molly McGarry, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Taha Parla, Geeta Patel, Ann Pellegrini, Tyler Roberts, Ranu Samantrai, Banu Subramaniam, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Angela Zito

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janet R. Jakobsen is Director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics and a coeditor of Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race and a coeditor of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question. Jakobsen and Pellegrini are coauthors of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.

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"Do you think you already know what "secularism" means? One virtue of this book is that the authors examine several modes and dimensions of secularism in different places, always closely attentive to the specific religious practices with which it is imbricated. Another is that the essays, taken together, loosen up the political imagination, allowing us to think outside the two-slot system--'either secularism or theocracy'--which has such debilitating effects on political thought. An admirable collection of essays."--William E. Connolly, author of "Capitalism and Christianity, American Style"

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SECULARISMS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4149-9

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION TIMES LIKE THESE Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini.................................................................................1CHAPTER ONE (UN)VEILING FEMINISM Afsaneh Najmabadi.................................................................................................39CHAPTER TWO SECULARISM AND LAICISM IN TURKEY Taha Parla and Andrew Davison.........................................................................58CHAPTER THREE WOMEN BETWEEN COMMUNITY AND STATE: SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE UNIFORM CIVIL CODE DEBATES Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.......................76CHAPTER FOUR OTHER MODERNS, OTHER JEWS: REVISITING JEWISH SECULARISM IN AMERICA Laura Levitt.......................................................107CHAPTER FIVE DISAPPEARANCES: RACE, RELIGION, AND THE PROGRESS NARRATIVE OF U.S. FEMINISM Tracy Fessenden...........................................139CHAPTER SIX LATE SECULARISM Robert J. Baird........................................................................................................162CHAPTER SEVEN WHAT TANGLED WEBS WE WEAVE: SCIENCE, SECULARISM, AND RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA Banu Subramaniam.................................178CHAPTER EIGHT SECULARIZING THE PAIN OF FOOTBINDING IN CHINA: MISSIONARY AND MEDICAL STAGINGS OF THE UNIVERSAL BODY Angela Zito.....................205CHAPTER NINE GHOSTLY APPEARANCES Geeta Patel.......................................................................................................226CHAPTER TEN "THE QUICK, THE DEAD, AND THE YET UNBORN": UNTIMELY SEXUALITIES AND SECULAR HAUNTINGS Molly McGarry....................................247CHAPTER ELEVEN TOWARD SECULAR DIASPORA: RELOCATING RELIGION AND POLITICS Tyler Roberts.............................................................283CHAPTER TWELVE FEMINISMS AND SECULARISMS Kathleen Sands............................................................................................308CHAPTER THIRTEEN CONTINUITY OR RUPTURE? AN ARGUMENT FOR SECULAR BRITAIN Ranu Samantrai.............................................................330BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................................................353CONTRIBUTORS.........................................................................................................................................387INDEX................................................................................................................................................391

Chapter One

(UN)VEILING FEMINISM

Afsaneh Najmabadi

Contrary to what the title of this essay may conjure, this essay is not about (un)veiling as a contemporary practice in Islamicate societies-about which there is now a very lively and enormous literature. It is about how feminism itself may have worked as a veil, about the veiling work of feminism as a boundary marker for the secularism of Iranian modernity. My hope in rethinking the history of feminism is to seek out possibilities for the present moment of Iranian politics. I mean to be provocative but not accusatory, seeking to unpack the implications of feminism's imbrication in the secularism of modernity. By unfolding the veiling work of Iranian feminism in its past history, I hope to envisage possibilities for "building working alliances" in contemporary Iranian gender politics.

Let me emphasize at the outset my refusal to generalize the ideas of this essay to all Islamicate societies. One of the problems with current discussions of Islam and feminism is ahistorical generalizations. These generalizations screen away vast historical and contemporary differences among countries as diverse as Algeria, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, to name just a few. My argument assumes historical specificity; it assumes that to understand what is going on in Iran today, we need to look at the specific contingent configurations of the politics of modernity in that country. What may or may not be generalizable cannot be known from what is assumed to be Islamic, modern, feminist, or secular by any prior definition of these terms. For instance, the configurations of Islam, feminism, nationalism, and secularism that are now unfolding in Iran have very much to do with the fact that an Islamic republic has been in power for the past twenty-eight years, one that came out of a mass popular revolution. As a very hybridized phenomenon, these developments go beyond previously dominant and accepted political paradigms. We have an unshaped and fluid muddle with women as key producers of it. Two concepts, feminism and civil society, move through this complex reconfiguration and acquire new meanings while crafting a discursive space more marked by opacity than transparency, thereby challenging our previous certainty about what divides Islam from un-Islam, secular from religious. Consider this: The editors of Iran's two most prominent feminist women's periodicals, Zanan (Women) and Huquq-i zanan (Women's Rights), had previously been editors of Zan-i ruz (Today's Woman), a women's weekly published by the Kayhan Institute. This institute is possibly the most ideologically and viciously rigid Islamist cultural organization in Iran (a self-conscious ideological state apparatus if there ever was one), and it publishes a large number of dailies, weeklies, and other periodicals marketed to different segments of the population. How can we make sense of this bastion of Islamist hard-liners producing a lineage of feminist editors? What is the meaning of these emergences in the overall political mapping of contemporary Iran?

WOMAN AND THE CULTURE OF REVOLUTION

The legal and social restrictions that women have faced in Iran since the 1979 revolution are widely reported. Seemingly trivial matters, such as the shape and color of a woman's scarf or the thickness of her stockings, have been matters of public policy and disciplinary measures. Women are far from legal equals of men. Despite years of hard work by women activists, both inside and outside the parliament, many discriminatory laws passed within the first few months and years of the Islamic Republic remain on the books and in full force. Many secular feminists continue to feel silenced, if not repressed or exiled, by the dominant cultural and political climate.

Yet the past two decades have also witnessed an incredible flourishing of women's intellectual and cultural production. Twenty-eight years after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, not only have women not disappeared from public life but they have an unmistakably active and growing presence in practically every field of artistic creation, professional achievement, educational and industrial institutions, political participation, and even in sports activities. It would be tempting for a secular feminist such as myself to claim that Iranian women have achieved all this despite the Islamic Republic, against the Islamic Republic, and even against Islam as the dominant discourse. Indeed, for some women it has been this deep existential sense of proving themselves against all odds that became the creative energy of their productions.

Yet it is not only oppositional energy that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822341492
• ISBN 13: 9780822341499
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 418
• Herausgeber: Jakobsen Janet R.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland