Abu-Lughod speaks on the "Muslimwoman"

By Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine Staff

Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, will deliver the 2015 Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder this month.

Abu-Lughod’s talk is titled “Caught in the Cross-Publics of the ‘Muslimwoman.” It is scheduled for Friday, Feb. 13, at 4:00 p.m. in the Hale Sciences Building, Room 270 on the CU-Boulder campus.



Abu-Lughod, an anthropologist who has been writing about Muslim women for more than thirty years, will question common assumptions about what it means to be Muslim and female. Abu-Lughod argues that Western media portrayals have perpetuated stereotypes of Muslim women as abused and oppressed.

In her latest book, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?”, Abu-Lughod challenges the common misperception that Muslim women need to be rescued. Abu-Lughod believes that the plight of inequality experienced by Muslim women has little to do with their religion, and more to do with poverty, war, government abuses and global tensions in general.

Abu-Lughod uses the term “Muslimwoman” as a one-word symbol of the overly simplistic portrayal that female practitioners of Islam typically experience.

The term “Muslimwoman” was first used by miriam cooke in a 2008 article to describe how female practitioners of Islam “are no longer thought of as individuals.” According to cooke, the headscarf in particular sets Muslim women apart from women of other religions and subjects them to discrimination. The use of one word to symbolize their singular identity in the media “draws attention to the emergence of a new singular religious and gendered identification that overlays national, ethnic, cultural, historical, and even philosophical diversity.”

According to Carla Jones, CU-Boulder professor of anthropology who is organizing the talk, Abu-Lughod “has been trying to question the idea of whether Muslim women really need to be saved, because that’s part of the way the war on terror has been justified -- to save Muslim women from Muslim men.”

While stories of the oppression, abuse and lack of freedom experienced by Muslim women often fill the news headlines, the true stories of Muslim women’s lives are quite different.

“It’s a complicated answer, and the question is too simple,” Jones says. “The question is ‘Is this religion (Islam) good or bad for women?’ Ask that question and take out the word ‘Islam’ and put in Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism, and you’ll see how naïve the question is.”

Jones describes Abu-Lughod’s typical encounters with the media. “Whenever the media would call her up, they would ask, ‘Tell us about Muslim women and their miseries so we have a better idea of why we are fighting these wars.’”

“The premise of the question was always problematic for her,” Jones explains. “She couldn’t answer the question because she didn’t think their lives were miserable. Or if they were miserable, it wasn’t because they were Muslim. It was because they were in a war zone or they were poor or for other political and economic reasons.”

Jones contends that when Abu-Lughod “complicates” the picture for the media, by giving them an answer that they did not want or expect, the media are not very responsive.

“Because the message she was conveying wasn’t what they wanted to hear, it fell on deaf ears, so the book didn’t get the kind of audience that would most benefit from hearing it,” explains Jones.

About Abu-Lughod’s talk, Jones says, “She will talk about the audiences that the book has and has not received. It will be an analysis of the afterlife of trying to counter a stereotype and how pernicious these ideas can be.”

Below is a summary of the talk, provided by Abu-Lughod:

“What happens when an anthropologist with deep commitments to ethnography in local communities finds her subjects caricatured and catapulted to the center of popular media attention? Can ethnography unsettle the political common sense? In this lecture, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod will reflect on the passionate and polarized after-life of her attempt to intervene in debates about Muslim women and their rights. Her latest book, ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’, was intended to present alternatives to the highly mediated public production of ‘the Muslimwoman’ through a mix of ethnography and critical analysis. Yet the book was greeted with silence by the targeted U.S. liberal public. Two unanticipated marginal counter publics took up the book--one with rage and the other with touching and personal affirmation. What can this tell us about public ethnography, and about the paradoxes of transnational feminism?”

This talk is free and open to the public.

A reception will follow the talk.

For more information, contact please contact:

Carla Jones, CU-Boulder, Professor of Anthropology
Email: carla.jones@colorado.edu

This talk is sponsored by CU-Boulder’s Department of Anthropology.

Posted Feb. 3, 2015