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NADIA GUESSOUS Monday, February 14 4pm MIT, 16-220 Tragic Moderns: The Problem of Tradition in Leftist Feminist Thought in Contemporary Morocco When Moroccan leftist feminists narrate their life stories and talk about formative influences in their lives, many recall the influence of a "traditional" and pious father figure who was just and egalitarian, and who inspired their commitment to and struggle for gender equality. If this positive invocation of an enabling tradition is noteworthy for how consistently it recurs in the life stories of a cross-section of Moroccan leftist feminists, it is equally notable for how dramatically it disappears and is displaced by a notion of tradition as obstacle to women's emancipation and progress. In this paper, I juxtapose invocations of the "traditional, pious but egalitarian" father figure with that of "the failed and disappointing leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact traditional" in order to denaturalize the feminist repudiation of tradition and think about the demands of modern, progressive subjectivity. I argue that the tragedy of leftist feminist subjectivity lies in the fact that it is predicated on locating the possibility of women's progress and feminist politics in the repudiation of the very tradition that makes it possible in the first place. This paper is based on two years of field research among founding members of the feminist movement in Morocco whose activism emerged out of their immersion in and subsequent disenchantment with the Moroccan left in the 1980s. By taking feminist constructions of tradition as an object of inquiry, this paper seeks to contribute to a non-teleological study of feminist thought and politics, and to the anthropological study of secular and progressive subjectivity. Nadia Guessous is Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor, as well as Director of Graduate Studies at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. She is currently finishing her PhD in Anthropology at Columbia University under the direction of Lila Abu-Lughod. In addition to working on her dissertation entitled "Genealogies of Feminism: Leftist Feminist Subjectivity in the Wake of the Islamic Revival in Contemporary Morocco," she has also published a short monograph entitled "Women and Political Violence during the Years of Lead in Morocco" (2009, the Moroccan Advisory Council on Human Rights). Amberly Steward Senior Administrative Assistant Anthropology Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Bldg. 16-267 Cambridge, MA 02139 p) 617.253.3065 f) 617.253.5363
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