November 6, 2024
Presented by Prof. Lucia Sorbera, chair of Arabic language and cultures at The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Sex and desire were not taboo in the pre-modern Muslim world, where a broad corpus of interdisciplinary literature, ranging from juridical and medical treatises to collections of poetry and short stories, represented them as a natural part of the human experience. It is in the context of the colonial encounter with the far more puritan European cultures that Muslim majority countries developed stricter visions about sex, sexuality and desire. How did women and LGBT people respond to these normative and binary trends throughout the twentieth and the early decades of the twenty-first century? Which discourses did they articulate to counter social conservatism and neo-patriarchy? In this lecture, Prof. Sorbera will address these questions, and provide an analytical survey of the sources and main discourses produced by Arab and Muslim women about the intersection of sex, desire, power, politics, and the twentieth century international orders.
Prof. Lucia Sorbera is the Chair of Arabic Language and Cultures at The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. She will present the talk via Zoom, with a live audience. A Q and A after the talk will be moderated by Prof. Katie Oliviero, Chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson.
Further information
- Location: Althouse 106
- Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
- Cost: Varies