WMF Organizes a Session on Arab Cultural History During the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women
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The Women and Memory Forum (WMF) took part in the 2002 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, held between 6 and 9 June, at the University of Connecticut, the United States of America. The WMF organized a panel entitled “Revising Discourses in Arab Cultural History” to discuss women’s roles and the politics of gender representation and construction.
During the WMF panel, Omaima Abou-Bakr and Hoda al-Saadi presented their research on the lives of Arab women theologists and Sufi mystics during the Middle Ages, focusing on their careers and activities in the public sphere. Sahar Sobhi also presented her research on the representations of Egyptian women by Western women within the context of imperial-colonial encounters. Rania Abd al-Rahman contributed to the panel with a paper on women’s gender discourses in women’s journals in the late 19th century. Hoda Elsadda’s presentation deconstructed and redefined the conceptual and cultural categories of nationalist, modernist, and colonialist discourses in the early 20th century.
