The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Centre for Gender Studies

Gender, Race, and Religion in the Spectacle of Citizenship

This lecture will elaborate on the significance of visual images and their circulation in the formation and transformation of citizenship in a transnational and postcolonial context. By focusing on the example of Iran and the Iranian diaspora, Dr Moallem interrogates new forms of governmentality that have emerged in mass mediated spaces linking notions of political citizenship and cultural citizenship. Dr Moallem argues that the circulation of visual images in, what she calls, the spectacle of citizenship, has not only played an important role in the formation of modern citizen-subjects in Iran, but also continues to be an important site of cultural and political negotiations, pushing notions of nation, identity, religion, secularism, belonging, and citizenship beyond their limits. The Iranian example further illustrates the expansion of the public sphere to the transnational realm through the extension of nationalism beyond its territorial boundaries, opening up space for an interrogation of regional negotiations, national transgressions and transnational transactions.

Bio

Minoo Moallem is Professor and Chair of Gender & Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Montreal and completed her postdoctoral studies at University of California Berkeley. She is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (UC Press). She is also the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation. Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and The State (Duke University Press, 1999), and the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East on "Iranian Immigrants, Exiles and Refugees." She has recently ventured in digital media. Her on line project "Nation-on-the Move"(design by Eric Loyer) was recently published in Vectors. Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (Special issue on Difference, Fall 2007). Professor Moallem's areas of research include women in modern and contemporary Iran, transnational approaches to Muslims, fundamentalisms, and feminism. Her current work on immigrants, exiles and refugees from Iran focuses on the question of belonging and citizenship for Muslim women in the contemporary west as well as in Iran. Much of this work is interested in transnational conceptions of citizenship and global neoliberal forms of governmentality. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the commodification of the nation through consumptive production and circulation of such commodity as the Persian carpet and a project on Iran-Iraq war movies and masculinity.

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