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- All Subjects: Women's Studies
Description
This dissertation aims to explore the diverse ways in which piety is conceptualized and cultivated by highly-educated Muslim women in Turkey. These women hold active positions within the secular-public sphere while trying to keep their aim of becoming pious in their own way, in relation to their subjective understanding of piety. After a detailed analysis of the formation of the secular modern public sphere in Turkey, in relation to the questions of modernity, nation-building, secularism, Islamism, and the gender relations, it gives an account of the individual routes taken by the highly educated professional women to particular aspirations of piety. The individual stories are designed to show the arbitrariness of many modern binary oppositions such as modern vs. traditional, secular vs. religious, liberated vs. oppressed, individual vs. communal, and etc. These individual routes are also analyzed within a collective framework through an analysis of the activities of two women's NGO's addressing at their attempt of building a collective attitude toward the secular-liberal conception of gender and sexuality. Finally the dissertation argues that Turkey has the capacity to deconstruct the aforementioned binary categories with its macro-level sociopolitical experience, and the micro-level everyday life experiences of ordinary people. It also reveals that piety cannot be measured with outward expressions, or thought as a sociopolitical categorization. Because just like secularism, piety has also the capacity to penetrate into the everyday lives of people from diverse sociopolitical backgrounds, which opens up possibilities of rethinking the religious-secular divide, and all the other binaries that come with it.
ContributorsTopal, Semiha (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Cady, Linell (Committee member) / Ali, Souad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The traditional site of Rachel's Tomb is located just south of Jerusalem on the border of Bethlehem. In recent years, Rachel's Tomb architectural appearance and cultural significance have shifted dramatically in the last two decades and the Biblical figure of Rachel has evolved in the Jewish imagination as a figure "emplaced" there as well. The original stories that have drawn visitors to the site have developed from Biblical and Rabbinic texts, yet contemporary visitors to the site have their own perspectives and stories to tell, grounded in religious tradition, nostalgia, and current political and social realities. At the traditional site of her tomb, Rachel has served for at least the last century as something like a "patron saint" for Jewish women's domestic issues, but her intercessory abilities have recently been expanded. Her special relationship to Zionism through her connections to the Biblical notions of Jewish "return" and end-times "redemption" have been recast to fit contemporary political viewpoints and contestations. In addition, she has developed into a kind of national "mater dolorosa," representing the collective grief for deaths through acts of political violence, particularly women's deaths. This project traces the ways in which current narrative and praxis at the traditional site of Rachel's Tomb have developed as well as the ways in which current perceptions of the site-and Rachel as the cultural figure associated with the space-draw upon temporally-situated interpretations of her textual tradition, as well as affective discourse and collective cultural memory.
ContributorsAnderson, Carli (Author) / Gereboff, Joel (Thesis advisor) / Mirguet, Francoise (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019