Michael E. Marmura Lectures in Arabic Studies 2024-25: Susanna Ferguson

Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought

Enjoy the Fall break, and please join us on the first day after the break (on a Monday instead of a Friday) for a lecture by Susanna Ferguson on a feminist conceptual history of the term "tarbiyah" and how it came to be feminized and mean raising children, through the works of Arab (women) writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

Abstract:
How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order. Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Bio:
Susanna Ferguson is a historian of women, gender, and intellectual life in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her research focuses on how questions about gender, sex, and science shaped political imaginaries in the 19th- and 20-century Arab world. Her work on gender, science, and education has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and the Arab Studies Journal. She is a longtime host, former editor-in-chief and now associate producer at the Ottoman History Podcast, where she also co-curates the series on “Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World.

For zoom registration: https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYqd-GoqDsqGtTv4gJ0Hr51y5hthn...

* This lecture is Co-sponsored by the Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies

* See the event poster: 2024-25.3.marmura.ferguson.pdf