Category: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues
How men are socialized into being ‘men’ or ‘boys being boys’ has a lot of consequences for both men and women. In this post two videos that shed some light on this issue. The Smell of Burning Ants is a haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. The film provokes the viewer to reflect on how our society can deprive boys of wholeness. And in the TED video Tony Porter gives a brief introduction to what it means how we define masculinity.
An increasing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences have begun to investigate the important shifts taking place in discourses of sexual freedom and gender equality across the continent. These shifts open up new arenas for ethnographic and other empirical research. What role do sex and gender play in various European nationalisms? In which cultural terms are sexual and gender boundaries articulated? What different trajectories can be discerned, and how can differences between countries be explained? What are the effects of these transformations at the level of the formation of community and subjectivity? How do these discursive shifts become tangible in everyday life? And how can sexual politics avoid the trap of exclusionary instrumentalization without renouncing its emancipatory promise? These and more questions will be addressed at the conference Sexual Nationalisms – Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Belonging in the New Europe. More information here.
Last week it was Everybody Draw Muhammad Day meant as a protest against attempts to limit freedom. At the same time the burqa ban is on its way Europe. As is the case in many of the cartoon-like controversies of recent, the complexity of political and religious issues pertaining to depictions of the sacred key symbols and freedom of speech, was reduced to a polarization of two antagonistic and mutually intolerant activisms: islamist groups vs. free freedom. Althought both the ban and the cartoon day may be aimed at radical it in fact targets Muslim as a whole. Both the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day and the burqa bans have in common that they are attempts to express and affirm a moral superiority over Muslims that need to be freed from their patriarchic religion that limits people’s freedom.
Een groep moslim studentes schreef vorige week een brief waarin zij de eenzijdigheid van het debat over de hoofddoek aan de kaak stelden. Naima Azough van GroenLinks schreef daar een reactie op. In beide brieven is een belangrijke plaats ingeruimd voor het begrip vrije keuze en vrije wil. Vrije keuze en vrije wil zijn echter illusies, maar wel hele belangrijke.
Naima Azough reageerde op een brief van een groep studentes over meerzinnigheid en meerduidigheid van de hoofddoek: heb je meer eer met een hoofddoek?
In haar proefschrift uit 1993, “Eén dochter is beter dan duizend zonen’. Arabische vrouwen, symbolen en machtsverhoudingen tussen de sexen, betoogt antropologe Edien Bartels dat Arabische moslimvrouwen geen passieve slachtoffers van onderdrukking door mannen zijn, maar actieve individuen die vanuit hun eigen positie in de samenleving een eigen visie op de sociale realiteit ontwikkelen, eigen strategieën ontwikkelen en strategisch gebruik maken van allerlei symbolen om macht uit te oefenen.
In several previous posts I have paid attention to the use of images of Muslim women in government ads. Such campaigns usually evoke some debate and yes we have a new one again.
Vandaag is het Pink Hijab Day! Of het nu een Pink Hijab Day of Borstkanker Ontsluierd is…het stimuleren van bewustzijn over kanker, het promoten van zelfonderzoek en het inzamelen van fondsen is voor iedereen van belang. Kanker heeft namelijk de heel vervelende eigenschap zich niet aan symbolische grenzen te houden.
It seems that, with a few notable exceptions, people in the Netherlands have been accustomed to the headscarf. The burqa or niqaab however is a different matter. As did his fellow social democrat Aboutaleb a few years ago, current mayor of Amsterdam, Cohen, stated that women with a burqa should not be allowed to receive benefit. By politicizing gender in relation to Islam, women become the core of the struggle between Muslims and native Dutch people over the control of the Muslims in the Netherlands. They have become the embodiment of the Islam debate and integration debate as well as many internal Muslim struggles.
Sometimes particular debates become very irritating. In particular because they seem to return every year. The headscarf debate is probably the clearest example. Following the debates in Antwerp and among feminists the debate has also hit the Netherlands. What is at stake in this whole debate on both sides is a struggle for the right of women not to be judged on (and reduced to) their appearance but since it seems to be a debate between white, non-Muslim feminists as well it is also about something else.
