Gender and
Sexuality Studies

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Tulane offers a broad interdisciplinary investigation of gender and sexuality as social, cultural, and political phenomena. The program offers a Major and Minor in addition to a Graduate Certificate. Students may choose from over forty courses taught by faculty from fourteen academic departments, four other SLA programs, and four Tulane University Schools.

“Feminism and Islam,” GESS Special Topics Course for Fall 2013
Esra Özcan, Instructor

Course Description

In this course, we will investigate feminism and Islam in global as well as in diverse local contexts. The course will explore the ways in which feminism has been interpreted, appropriated, utilized, challenged or simply rejected by women in various Muslim countries. We will investigate how the histories of westernization, modernization, secularism and economic liberalism have shaped women’s movements in Muslim countries, and how the multilayered questions brought by these sweeping processes continue to unite or divide women and men equally. In the course of the semester, we will also focus on the debate over the veil and headscarf as an epitome of these complex issues, and analyze how women’s bodies have become a major site for the controversies over westernization, anti-westernization, commercialism, tradition and modernity. Muslim women are both the agents and objects of this complex debate that currently takes place on a global level and transforms feminist movements in the West. In short, this class aims to deconstruct the term “Muslim woman” to unravel its multiple meanings and analyze it in relation to competing cultural and political projects both in the East and the West. Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Iran and European countries with large Muslim populations will be our main sites.