Anti-Imperialist Feminism Panel

Monday, November 21, 2022 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM EST
Online Location

Even in the digital age, where one is exposed to global movements against repression with the touch of a screen, imperialist feminist narratives on women and queer struggle in the global south continue to resurface. In collaboration with Arab Studies Institute and Middle East and Islamic Studies, Women and Gender Studies is holding an Anti-Imperialist Feminism panel, a discussion that seeks to address the embedded white supremacy, saviorism, and colonial undertones in western and liberal feminism and break down its detriment. The panel aims to decenter western feminism, and highlight the multiplicity of feminist resistance globally and the importance of contextualizing feminist movements. The panel will feature speakers closely tied to women and queer resistance movements in the global south including UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Davis, Jennifer Mogannam, and Rutgers Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Doctoral Candidate Meryem Uzumcu.

Dr. Jennifer Mogannam

Jennifer is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies at UC Davis with ties to the program in Middle East/South Asian Studies. Jennifer is a critical, transdisciplinary scholar of ethnography, oral history, and cultural criticism who received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and her MA in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut (AUB). Her work examines 20th and 21st century Palestinian and Arab transnational movements and third world solidarities, with an eye for analyzing movement praxis for liberated futures. Her work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, borders, colonialisms, global scales of race and indigeneity, and resistance and is grounded in transnational, women of color, indigenous, and Palestinian feminist methods and lenses of liberation. As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, she is composing her book manuscript, Gendering Revolution: Palestinian-Lebanese Transnational Resistance and Decolonial Feminisms, which frames the stakes and limits of revolution for the stateless, the refugee, and the citizen as defined by active participant narrations of revolution in 1970s Lebanon. This work intervenes in the question of coalition building and power in movement praxis, gendered labor in anti-colonial struggle and redefining and resisting epistemic violence on the path of decolonization. 

She was a Border Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective Research Cluster Member at the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz and a founding participant in UC San Diego’s Critical Immigration and Refugee Studies research group, which received funding and recognition from the University of California Center for the Humanities. She has also been awarded for teaching excellence and social justice pedagogy at UC San Diego. Her publications have been placed in American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, Social Identities and Amerasia with a forthcoming piece for an Oxford Encyclopedia volume. She stays actively engaged and grounded in her local and transnational communities as an organizer of Palestinian and Arab American community spaces for nearly two decades, most recently with the Palestinian Feminist Collective. Her work, while often historical, is also always forward looking, toward the possibilities of decolonization and building a new world.

Meryem Rabia Uzumcu

Meryem is a PhD student at Rutgers Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies department, where she researches Kurdish dispossession and refusal in the afterlives of Turkey’s secular silencing. She is a graduate of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies at NYU, where she completed her M.A. thesis on activist Kurdish- Armenian reconciliation discourses in Diyarbakir, Turkey under the auspices of the FLAS fellowship. She also completed her undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, where she earned her B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, and Planning and Public policy with High Honors. She was an alumni of the Douglass Residential College, as well, where she participated in PLEN and the Global Village programs. Having lived in multiple contexts, she wishes to revist earlier scripts in her family history, which outline their complicity and silence during the Armenian genocide, like many other Turks and Kurds in the region. She wishes to engage with discourses that reckon with the Armenian genocide in her family’s home city of Diyarbakir (by way of Bitlis), whether it be in activist circles, or in the form of oral histories of unofficial and official narrative. Her past oral history research has touched on this collective silence and complicity in the aftermaths of the genocide, which she now wishes to further probe in narratives of alterity that enter dreams, folklore, black magic, and rumor. Present day gendered and sexed logics play their own role in the continued silence that plagues genocide denial. Meryem wishes to highlight and outline the overlaps in the constitutive sexed/raced assemblages for continued nationalism.

Meryem wishes to interrogate the logics that underpin femicide and genocide as processes, not events, constitutive of each other. She is interested in researching the practice and implications of treasure-hunting in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide in Diyarbakir and Bitlis, Turkey from a feminist and disability studies framing. What kinds of lifeworlds / spaces of death do practices like treasure-hunting extract from but also generate? What types of ethnic, raced, as well as gendered and sexed assemblages constitute the national imaginary in once multicultural spaces? In spaces of genocide, maiming, and erasure, how does gender, race, ethnicity, and sex frame and script livibility/futurity? Within the national imaginary, how do gendered and sexed logics constitute and relate to one another by way of policy, but also rumor, folklore, dreams to create national subjects and/or accomplices of the Turkish state? Meryem wants to explore national (gendered, raced, sexed) violation as a constituting factor in both genocide and femicide, by interrogating the overlaps in gendered and raced logics.

Zainab Altuma

Zainab Altuma is a writer and student at Syracuse University, studying Political Science and Women and Gender Studies on the Pre-Law Track. They have spent the past few years examining and understanding what imperialist, white feminism looks like and deriving theory from Black and Brown feminists and women’s rights movements under colonization. Their work offers a new way of understanding feminist framework from a lens that honors oral storytelling of the people on the ground.