People

2012

2012

Sameh, Catherine

  • Job Placement: Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Irvine
  • Webpage: http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6091
  • Committee: E. Brooks, J. Puar, J. Regulska, O. Alidou
  • Dissertation: Signatures, Rights, Networks: Iranian Feminism in the Transnational Sphere

Bio

In July 2010, Catherine Sameh was hired as Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She was responsible for the Center's media productions, including the well-respected webjournal Scholar & Feminist Online. She was also in charge of transnational collaborations with peer centers globally. Catherine's work at the Barnard Center for Research on Women drawed on her expertise on transnational feminism developed in her dissertation. In May 2014, Catherine accepted a tenure-track position in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Department at UC Irvine.

Abstract

My dissertation explores how Iranian feminists are mobilizing new discourses and creating dynamic transnational networks, enabled in part by cyber and print cultures. I investigate the ways in which Iranian feminist praxis consequently disrupts and reframes the putative opposition between secularism and Islam, and the multiple binaries assembled through this opposition—democratic versus authoritarian; liberatory versus oppressive; egalitarian versus patriarchal; and modern versus backwards. Within a multimethodological and interdisciplinary framework, I examine three sites of Iranian feminist activism. I consider the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grassroots feminist movement that emerged in Iran in 2006, which utilizes Islamic human rights discourses and grassroots, democratic practices to engage the state in reforming family law. I also investigate the transnational network structure of the campaign, reflecting on the particular praxis offered by campaigners in the Iranian diaspora. Finally, I examine the writings and reception of Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. As a Muslim, feminist and human rights activist, Ebadi emphasizes the compatibility of Islam with human rights, thereby disrupting discourses that counterpoise them. Considered together, these three sites of Iranian feminism destabilize Western hegemony over Iran, consolidated through discourses which pit “superior” liberal democracies over “backward” Islamic nations. This oppositional staging gains purchase through geopolitical relations of power, including some iterations of global feminism, which deploy neocolonial saving and rescue narratives in the name of women’s human rights. Concomitantly, transnational feminist theory, which has destabilized the normative authority of Western hegemony and global feminism, can also often reify the very power relations it seeks to critique. By emphasizing the dangers, limits, and dilemmas of transnational feminist work, transnational feminist theory can neglect critical feminist projects on the ground, effectively writing some women out of history. My dissertation considers how Iranian feminists in Iran and the diaspora challenge these various modes of epistemic silencing. Through a close examination of the praxis of Iranian feminists, reflected primarily through the narratives of the activists themselves, my dissertation contributes to feminist theories of agency and helps revitalize transnational feminist studies.

Garrido, Anahi R.

Bio

 

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women participating in queer spaces in Mexico City, at a moment in which sexual citizenship is being redefined in Mexican society. More specifically, this research considers how the social organization, discourses and practices of intimacy have shifted for women participating in queer spaces in Mexico City since the 1960s. My study looks at how the emergence of these transcontinental debates intertwines with the new nationalist rhetoric that has proclaimed Mexico as a pluriethnic and multicultural (instead of mestizo) nation. After positioning these debates in processes of national identity and transnational dynamics, I explore through my ethnographic data, how gay and lesbian individuals in Mexico City have reconfigured their views on intimacy (i.e. love, friendship, sexuality) since the 1960s, and in particular in the midst of these changes on sexual citizenship. I focus particularly on women participating in queer spaces. I suggest that if we truly are to understand queer lives in Latin America, it is imperative to engage with discourses on intimacy produced through the State and other institutional actors and the ways in which these are experienced, rather than primarily centering our analysis on ontological questions as research on same-sex sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean has continuously emphasized. My qualitative research is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Mexico City for 10 months in 2009-2010, including participant observation, 45 qualitative interviews and the review of newspapers of record. It is also influenced by seven intermittent years of everyday life in Mexico City since 1998 and a previous anthropological fieldwork research in 2000. Ultimately, my study contributes to the fields of the anthropology and sociology of intimacy, interdisciplinary studies on gender and sexuality in Latin America and notions of sexual citizenship, nationalism, space and place.