Preliminary Programme

“Civilizational Temporalities in Distant Geographies: Feminist Perceptions of Empire in Late-19th Century France” examines French feminists’ politically and socially constructed senses of time, temporal frameworks that emerged at the intersections of race, religion, and class, and through which they simultaneously viewed Paris and the colonies. This paper looks at activist women’s anthropologically-influenced conceptualizations of the relative and shifting nature of cultural development and the concomitantly fluid character of racial hierarchies. It places these feminists within the context of the era’s conflicting civilizational and racial theories. Militant women promoted a range of differing programs, from an assimilationist imperialism intended to establish republican rights at the expense of indigenous culture in Algeria, to an anti-imperialist reification of indigenous culture at the expense of gender equity in New Caledonia. They cautioned that without improved gender equity in France, the nation faced the threat of slipping back to a pre-civilized, barbaric age; historical time could move both ways. The combination of the literal spatial and perceived temporal differences complicated and pluralized feminist analyses of power relations within the context of imperial expansion. (Show less)

History of the left in Iran and Turkey was written predominantly by the male members of the leftist organizations, which occupied a prominent place in politics and society in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite women’s significant contribution and participation in large numbers in the leftist organizations, their presence was mostly forgotten due to the lack of documentation and negligence of their male comrades. The only exceptions are the recent appearance of memoirs, autobiographical novels and commentaries by women members of these illegal and underground leftist organizations. Thus, there is still a significant gap in our understanding of the history of leftists movements in particular and social movements in general in these countries. In this respect, a comparative study of women’s activism—especially their motivations, perceptions and experiences—in underground leftist organizations in Iran and Turkey, which benefits from the rich literature about Latin American guerrilla women, will be an important contribution. This study aims exactly at making this contribution.

Latin American guerrilla movements were a source of inspiration and model in the emergence of similar groups in other parts of the world, namely Iran and Turkey. Latin American slogans, strategies, and experiences set an example for those men and women who set their heart on guerrilla warfare against what they perceived as injustice, oppression, and exploitation of the authoritarian regimes in Iran and Turkey. However, even if they were following the ideal of Latin American guerrillas and trying to adopt their methods, the political and cultural context that they were fighting in was essentially different. Taking these social, political, and cultural factors into account, I compare and contrast the experiences of Iranian and Turkish women participated in illegal and underground leftist organizations with those of Latin American guerrilla women who were taken as the ideal examples.

There are many studies analyzing Latin American guerrilla women from various perspectives with regards to their motivations, backgrounds, and experiences. This comparatively rich literature provides us with various methodological and theoretical tools that we can employ in other cases. Not only do we have fair amount of information about women’s experiences in guerrilla movements from this literature, but we also derive insights into the methods to study women’s presence in such revolutionary movements.

With a comparison of Iranian and Turkish cases, against the methodological and historical backdrop of the Latin American experience, this paper questions if we can talk about a common gendered experience for women in underground revolutionary movements. It also sheds light on the differences in such experiences as a result of social and cultural settings. Memoirs and novels, in this sense, are especially important to include cultural, as well as personal, dimensions into the picture. By including this latter aspect of the question, this study provides us with a multi-dimensional analysis of everyday gendered experiences of women in such extraordinary circumstances.

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This paper examines the ways in which mothers, wives and widows of Argentina’s revolutionary soldiers shaped popular understandings of citizenship in the individual letters and petitions they sent to early republican leaders. In a period when the ideal of male war service became the touchstone of citizenship, women used petitions to demonstrate their own participation in national politics as conscious actors in the process of nation-state. Indeed, for women, petitions served as one of the principal avenues of political participation. The analysis is based on a database of 700 petitions submitted to authorities in the province of Córdoba between 1810-1860. Of those, 60% were submitted by provincial women. The analysis examines themes that dominated these documents as Córdoba’s women sought relief by writing to state authorities. They narrated the toll that war had taken on their families, detailing the impact of events and government policies on their lives. Petitioners did not simply lament their fate. Rather, they implored officials to intercede on their behalf, offering concrete recommendations on how authorities might employ the state’s power and resources to ameliorate their hardships. The just resolution of their appeals, petitioners intimated, was a fitting demonstration of the new leaders’ determination to recognize the patriotic sacrifices of single mothers, abandoned wives and elderly widows in post-colonial Argentina. Though couched in deferential and humble phrases, the wide-spread act of writing petitions served as a crucial bridge between colonial and post-colonial legitimacy as women petitioners transformed a traditional form of redress by expanding its use among the popular sector and incorporating novel demands that contributed to the ideological transformation from colony to republic. (Show less)