Nottingham Contemporary

The Study Sessions "After Orientalism - Contemporary Politics of Representation of the Middle East" took Edward Said’s canonical book Orientalism as the point of departure. Our guest speakers brought new and critical understandings of the violence involved in Western representations of the ‘East’ in contemporary politics and conflicts, image production and mediation, gender representation, art and literature.

Representations of Femininity: The Complex Matter of Agency, with Amal Treacher Kabesh

Feminist postcolonial theory is ambivalent about women and agency as on the one hand feminists advocate that women should pursue freedom from oppression, be active and independent. Alongside these demands, feminist theory is engaged with tracing through the various ways that women are oppressed (through various socio-cultural-political structures) and for some academics emphasis is placed on the internalisation, and perpetuation, of these repressive structures. The vexed matter of women, agency, choice and autonomy is at the fore of many debates within feminist postcolonial theory. The tendency is for many Western feminists to position women from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia as victims solely of patriarchal and familial structures that are firmly embedded within oppressive socio-political configurations. From this vantage point of superiority ‘brown’ women are perceived and represented as in need of rescuing from ‘dangerous brown men’. Edward Said’s theoretical framework is a starting point for thinking through matters of agency in relation to both men and women and to challenge western accounts of power, agency and subjection. In this paper I will explore the issue of how agency is judged in relation to women who inhabit a specific patriarchal society and this entails a focus on matters of power and recognition.