Event Details

In partnership with FASS Decolonisation, ELCW welcomes Professor Marilyn Booth (Oxford) - co-winner of Man Booker International Prize, 2019 - for International Women's Day.

This lecture focuses on Marilyn Booth's recently published intellectual biography of early Arabic feminist Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1850-1914), a study of her life in Ottoman Syria and Egypt and her writings, in the context of Arabophone debates on gender, modernity and the good society particularly in the 1890s. Fawwaz participated in published exchanges concerning social justice, girls’ education, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the question of ‘Nature’ and Darwinist notions of male/female, and intersections of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and feminism. The book argues that Fawwaz’s feminism, based on an Islamic ethical worldview, was distinct from prevailing ‘modernist’ views in posing a non-essentialist, open-ended notion of gender that did not (for instance) highlight maternalist discourses and that rejected fixed notions of sex-gender identity. The lecture particularly addresses an 1894 ‘debate’ carried out mostly in one periodical that highlights the transnational, entangled quality of gender discourse at the time, to note that Arabophone opponents of a more flexible gender regime drew on European patriarchalist and misogynist writings to make their own local arguments. ‘The West’ was not necessarily a source of progressive thinking.

Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World (Oxford). Her books include Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. (University of California Press, 2001). She has translated 18 full-length works: novels, short stories, and memoirs and in 2019 was the co-winner of the Man Booker International Prize, as translator of Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies.

The Department of English Literature and Creative Writing is grateful to FASS Decolonisation for their support.