Seminar MA (BA): Art, Youth and Feminist Activism in the Middle East

The Middle East has been the site of profound shifts in terms of processes of state building, self-determination, military struggles, women’s movements, and cultural production. Women’s mobilisation for gender-based equality and justice and the youth’s demands for transparency, access to resources and public space have been key drivers in these struggles. Aside from youth and feminist, it has also been the artists whose work finds a powerful visual and literary language to address war, patriarchy, misogyny, religious conservatism, and more recently the onslaught of ISIS - and how these interconnections impact women’s understanding and sense of space, identity, sexuality, and body politics. This course maps out and portrays the main actors behind these dynamics in the Middle East, with a special focus on the Levant (Palestine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Turkey). The course draws on interdisciplinary sources and is theoretically situated within post-colonial and transnational feminist theory, drawing on gender and development studies, as well as critical resistance and social movement theories.