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Title
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Women's rights in repetition : nation building, solidarity, and Islam in Zanzibar
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Creator
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Ott, Jessica Marie
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Date
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2020
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Collection
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
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Description
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Women's rights are commonly understood as having emerged out of major women's conferences from the 1970s onward and as aligned with major UN conventions. But contemporary women's rights in Zanzibar reflect a longer history of women's movements on the islesand a greater diversity of influences, including socialist state feminism in the 1960s and the increasing engagement of activists with transnational Islamic feminist network. This dissertation explores historical continuities and...
Show moreWomen's rights are commonly understood as having emerged out of major women's conferences from the 1970s onward and as aligned with major UN conventions. But contemporary women's rights in Zanzibar reflect a longer history of women's movements on the islesand a greater diversity of influences, including socialist state feminism in the 1960s and the increasing engagement of activists with transnational Islamic feminist network. This dissertation explores historical continuities and discontinuities between three women's movements in Zanzibar, beginning with a socialist state feminist movement in the 1960s that presented women as embodying umoja [unity] and as at the front lines of building and developing the nation. Second, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in the wake of a global human rights and democratization movement, a media-based women's movement emerged on the isles. Women journalists translated transnational women's rights ideas into a Zanzibari cultural context, in the process imbuing them with language and imagery from the socialist past. Third, in the 2010s, Zanzibari women's rights activists engaged with a transnational Islamic feminist network as they sought to reform the archipelago's Islamic kadhi's courts. Representing a departure from UN understandings of women's rights, Zanzibari civil society activists relied most heavily on Islamic feminist arguments in their 2017 kadhi's court reform efforts.In my dissertation, I put forth several arguments related to rights and memory, including an overarching methodological argument that women's rights are best understood from an ethnohistorical approach. In Chapter 1, I argue that Zanzibari women's understanding of rights-which are often imbued with language from the socialist 1960s-are informed by their own political alignments and by memory. Using a case study approach, I argue in Chapter 2 that one woman's appropriation of historical language during a millennial media-based women's movement did not represent her endorsement of the past but rather her efforts to mediate collective memory. I argue throughout my dissertation that anthropological frameworks for understanding human rights should incorporate historical memory as a central analytic concept.In Chapter 3, I transition from relying on archival evidence and a few oral histories to relying on participant observation, interviews, and media sources. I chronicle the efforts of a coalition of Zanzibari women's rights activists to reform the archipelago's Islamic legal system, during which they relied on a transnational Islamic feminist network and to a lesser degree on transnational women's rights conventions. Activists passed some reforms but were unable to convince lawmakers to allow women to serve as kadhis [Islamic judges], which highlights the limits of transnationalism in a local context. Activists plan to harness an increasingly faith-based umoja in their continuing efforts to ensure the right of women to serve as kadhis. Chapter 4 is similarly ethnographic and explores the grassroots social involvements of a non-elite woman from the Tanzanian mainland in a women's madrasa [Islamic studies group] and in a women's vicoba [savings cooperative]. Her negotiations of agency across different social groups are multiple, nonlinear, and often contradictory, which reflects relational understandings of rights and obligations as well as the multiplicity and diversity of Zanzibari communities. It also highlights the continuing resonance of gendered language, ideas, and imagery from the socialist past, even in the midst of a deeply rooted Islamic revival. The future for women in Zanzibar will depend in part on how they negotiate multiple solidarities-that often come with different expectations and obligations in their daily lives.
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Title
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Women writing men : genre, narrative authority, and "mind writing" 1752-1817
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Creator
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Kane, Jessica
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Date
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2019
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Collection
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
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Description
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"I argue that women writers of the long eighteenth century used readers' expectations about genre to reimagine their forms through expanding the socially- and narratively-limited roles of female characters. My chapters demonstrate how the female protagonists in four different texts---Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Frances Burney's Evelina, Elizabeth Inchbald's Animal Magnetism, and Jane Austen's Persuasion---take on the attributes of a narrator and author by creating both their male love...
Show more"I argue that women writers of the long eighteenth century used readers' expectations about genre to reimagine their forms through expanding the socially- and narratively-limited roles of female characters. My chapters demonstrate how the female protagonists in four different texts---Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Frances Burney's Evelina, Elizabeth Inchbald's Animal Magnetism, and Jane Austen's Persuasion---take on the attributes of a narrator and author by creating both their male love interests and their stories through what I call "mind writing." "Mind writing" takes the "mind reading" of cognitive literary studies back to textuality, exploring the ways that one character asserts the thoughts, feelings, actions, or intentions of another in ways analogous to a narrator. "Mind writing" another character in these texts allows the protagonist to control where the story is going and what it is doing, ultimately allowing her to parallel the work of an author. The effect is both social and narratological, as these women characters transcend the usual definitions and limitations of both "woman" and "character." Since all four of my texts work within established genre logics and patterns, breaking these expectations via "mind writing" also means that readers must re-evaluate their own positions in relation to the text. Readers of genre fiction believe they know what they are getting when they pick up a text within that field, whether in the eighteenth century or today. By flipping the script on their readers Lennox, Burney, Inchbald, and Austen rewrite their audiences just as their female characters rewrite their stories. And because generic conventions often put the reader in a position of power, either because they can pass judgement on the characters or because they know something the characters do not, refashioning the genres puts readers in a subordinate position, re-evaluating our assumptions about the stories, ourselves, and the world on which the story comments."--Pages ii-iii.
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