Undergraduate Course: Harems, homes and streets: Gender and space in Middle Eastern literatures (IMES10052)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | The harem has come to be a symbol for Euro/American societies of all that is »wrong« with Islamicate societies. How did this space, with its many indigenous meanings, come to represent whole societies? And how has it been contested by indigenous representations? How does »the harem« come to signify domestic spaces, ritual practices, sexualities, and above all, gendered bodies? How do works from Euro/American traditions construct »the harem« and respond to earlier constructions from within Arab-Islamicate culture, and how are they in turn buttressed, countered, complicated, or rejected by fiction and autobiography produced in Muslim-majority societies in the 19th and 20th centuries? This course asks how gender, sexuality, and the body emerge through cultural representations, as we read European representations of gendered seclusion and harem life, historical essays that take up seclusion as lived reality in the early Islamic period as well as later (e.g., in the Ottoman Empire) and more recent memoirs, which also provide a critique of seclusionary practices that emerged with the rhetorics of modernity. Finally, we will read fiction through which Muslim women of the past century have interrogated, critiqued, and at times lauded practices of gender segregation. We will read selectively from recent theoretical literature on the social construction and gendering of space. |
| Course description |
Not entered
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | Before enrolling students on this course, you are asked to contact the IMES Secretary to ensure that a place is available (Tel: 504182, e-mail imes@ed.ac.uk). |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should have at least 3 courses in a suitable subject area at grade B or above (or be predicted to obtain this). We will only consider University/College level courses. |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students should:
1. Be familiar with some key organizing concepts of Middle Eastern societies concerning gender and space, as modulated by historical specificities that have generated different practices across time and space.
2. Recognize major outlines of current debates on gender and space emerging from a variety of historically and geographically specific contexts, and be able to think critically about their applicability to Middle East and/or Islamicate contexts.
3. Understand how controversies over ?veiling= have entered into shifting practices and representations of gender and space in both Middle Eastern and Euro/American contexts, and the significance of issues of ?veiling= and ?seclusion= to contemporary gender studies focused on Middle Eastern contexts, especially in the disciplines of history and literature.
4. Be able to conduct in-depth, critical analysis and comparative studies of a selection of key works from modern Arabic, Turkish and/or Persian literature (in translation) in relation to current theoretical debates.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | IMES Harems |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Marilyn Booth
Tel: (0131 6)50 7181
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Eleanor Birch
Tel: (0131 6)50 4182
Email: |
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