It is true that diverse groups of women approached the city from different angles, with distinct intents, and with unequal pace. The relationship between women and the public space was an intricate one, defined along the lines of class, ethnic and religious identity, age, and historical moment. Heterogeneous everyday experiences and domestic spaces of women determined their relation to and presence in public arenas. For that matter, women from different class, religious, ethnic or immigrant backgrounds also had manifold linkages within themselves and with the urban space. Furthermore, the city was more than its economic and ethnic geography; urban sexual geography crosscut them, in both ideological and physical terms. For instance, the presence of elite women in working-class neighborhoods would be a breach of proper sexual geography, since only working women and prostitutes (having a thin line in-between) were allowed there. Thus, definitions of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality were all intermixed in the urban geography.
However, women from diverse backgrounds succeeded in challenging and negotiating the overimbued sexual division of urban space. Both through rivalries and alliances amongst themselves, they formed new urban relations and spaces and empowered themselves to have a say in changing the urban structure regarding neighborhoods, streets, schools, workplaces, legal regulations, and public spaces.
In that respect, the workshop attempted to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of women in the midst of altered, or redefined economic, social, political, and cultural contexts of the late- and post-Ottoman cities. It reconsidered the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain, in which even today they are faced with obstacles and resistance as legitimate actors. In cities, neither designed for nor controlled by women, women had to reimagine and reconceive the city before they would create female-controlled public and semipublic spaces.
Schedule:
Thursday, May 27
10 am — 11 am
Opening
Ulrike Freitag (Director of the ZMO), "Welcome"
Nazan Maksudyan (Fellow of EUME 2009/2010), "Women in the City, the City of Women"
Session 1: Women and the City: Reorganization of Urban Life Late Ottoman Empire
Part 1
11.30 am — 1 pm
Iris Agmon (Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva), "Women in Late-Ottoman Palestinian Cities and the Unresolved Question of Mute Historical Voices"
Nora Lafi (ZMO), "Late Ottoman and Early Republican Visions of North African Women: Between Ottomanity and a New Turkish Orientalism"
Chair: Dyala Hamzah (ZMO)
Part 2
2.30 pm — 4 pm
Gülhan Balsoy (Işık University, Istanbul), "Gendering the Urban Transformation in the Late Nineteenth Century Istanbul: The Case of Haseki Women's Hospital and Maternity Clinic (Viladethane)"
Nil Birol (Central European University, Budapest), "'What is the Imperial End to Us?': A Gendered Perspective from the Russian Tatar Women to the Ottoman Elite Women in 1910s Istanbul"
Chair: Marc Baer (California, Irvine/ZMO)
Keynote Speech
6 pm — 7 pm
Leyla Neyzi (Sabancı University, Istanbul), "Teşvikiye: The Making of an Elite Neighborhood and Narratives of Nostalgia in Istanbul"
Film-screening and discussion
7 pm — 8 pm
Remembering and Forgetting in the City: Finding Zabel Yesayan (directed by Talin Suciyan & Lara Aharonian)
Friday, May 28
Session 2: Women in the City: Redefinition of Gender in Post-Ottoman Cities
Part 1
9.30 am — 11 am
Sevgi Adak (Leiden University, Amsterdam), "Women and Unveiling in the Post-Ottoman Public Sphere: Secularist Reforms and Women's Agency in Early Republican Turkey"
Ellinor Morack (FU Berlin), "Challenging Established Concepts of Identity and Belonging: Population Exchange and Intercommunal Marriages in Izmir"
Chair: Munir Fakher Eldin (Fellow of EUME 2009/2010)
Part 2
11.30 am — 1 pm
On Barak (Princeton University), "When Voices Could Leave Bodies: Egyptian Women, Telephones, and the Boundaries They Crossed"
Vahé Tachjian (ZfL Berlin), "Mixed Marriage, Prost Vahé Tachjian itution, Survival: Reintegrating Armenian Women in Post-Ottoman Aleppo"
Ulrike Freitag (Director of the ZMO), "The Merry Women of Jeddah – The Festival of al-Qays"
Chair: Nazan Maksudyan (Fellow of EUME 2009/2010)
Session 3: Gendered Reinscription of the City: Women and Literature
2.30 pm — 4.30 pm
Haytham Bahoora (University of Colorado; Fellow of EUME 2009/2010), "Prostitution in Twentieth Century Iraqi Literature"
Christoph Herzog (Bamberg University), "The Urban Experience in Ottoman / Turkish Womens' Memoirs"
Chair: Kirsten Scheid (American University in Beirut; Fellow of EUME 2009/2010)
