cfp.english.upenn.edu

"Re-Positioning and Re-Constructing Muslim Women’s Identity"

Muslim women have been the subject of interrogation and questioning both in the Muslim world and in the non-Muslim world. A relentless questioning of their ‘role,’ ‘subjectivity,’ and ‘identity’ has been fair game for both intellectual and popular debate. This debate has become more pronounced in the aftermath of 9/11, break-up of the Russian block, migration of Muslims (refugees and others) from their native countries, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and after the Arab Spring. The ‘face’ of the Muslim woman stares back at the onlooker from the covers of magazines, from Orientalized and romanticized visions to that of women suppressed by patriarchy and illiteracy. This panel then aims to explore texts of the silenced, excluded, marginalized and celebrated Muslim women. It examines how each woman tells her story, constructs and reconstructs her identity, speaks beyond the confines of the ‘Other’, and negotiates her identity in a globalized and imperial world.

A comparative examination of the representation of Muslim women in literary studies, migration and diaspora studies, transnationalism, translation studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and postmodern studies begin to ask how identity has been created and how it actually affects subjectivity. The question at stake in this panel is how these disciplines mirror and/or re-position and re-construct Muslim women’s identity in the new global world.

This panel aims to explore questions of a Muslim Women’s identity in all its facets. We invite papers that explore, define, reposition, reconstruct, complicate, explicate Muslim women’s identity from a variety of scholarly perspectives including those that are based on an open definition of literature such as literary, historical, political, religious, popular media, and journalistic media literature among others. In short, this session welcomes papers on Muslim Womens’ identity from multiple disciplines, geographical areas, and scholarly perspectives.
Please submit your abstract and author bio at the ACLA 2013 website at http://www.acla.org/acla2013/propose-a-paper-or-seminar/