Lerna Ekmekçioğlu Friday, February 25
3-5 PM E51-095 Reclaiming Lands, Reclaiming Wombs in the Middle East: Gender and the Politics of Inclusion after Genocide How do people re-negotiate gender order in the immediate aftermath of ruptures in their history such as war, genocide, partition, invasion, and occupation? What does it take for a community to change, however temporarily, its traditional patriarchal rules for descent in order to include the formerly excluded? I will explore these and similar questions by focusing on post-World War I Armenian, Turkish, and international efforts to rescue and reintegrate Armenian women and children trafficked into Muslim households during the 1915-16 genocide. An analysis of Ottoman Armenian public policy responses towards survivors of sexual violence, and the children born to them, reveals the multiple ways in which the functioning of refugee aid organizations rendered fatherhood irrelevant to determine war babies’ ethnic belonging. The same logic turned rape victims of child-bearing age into the champions of a future Armenia. Many such national heroines, however, remained reluctant to bear “a fetus of suffering” and found ways, such as infanticide and suicide, to retain control over their reproductive capacities. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu currently holds an Armenian Studies Program Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Department of History, University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Boğaziçi University (Istanbul) in 2002, her M.A. from New York University in 2004, and her PhD from NYU in 2010 in the joint program of the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies. Her dissertation, “Improvising Turkishness: Being Armenian in Post-Ottoman Istanbul (1918-1933),” was supported by numerous grants such as the American Association of University Women International Fellowship, American Research Institute in Turkey, and NYU Humanities Initiative. In addition to publishing in the Journal of Armenian Studies, Dr. Ekmekçioğlu has co-edited a volume in Turkish focusing on the history of Turkish Armenian feminist writers at the turn of the twentieth century. She knows Armenian, Turkish (modern and Ottoman) and Greek and has conducted research in Beirut, Istanbul, Yerevan, and Athens. During her doctoral education at NYU and post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan Dr. Ekmekçioğlu has taught courses on Middle Eastern societies, war and peace, Islam, gender, and Mongol and Ottoman Empires. For more information contact mcoll...@mit.edu
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