The Transnational Middle East: Women, Gender, and the Global 1960s in Tunisia
Amy Aisen Kallander | 2 April 2025 | 6:00 PM Gulf Standard Time (4:00 PM CET) | The talk will take place on Zoom (Webinar)
This presentation applies insights from gender analysis and feminist theory to politics and culture in Tunisia in the 1960s. It focuses on the importance of women's organizing as a facet of state-building, international diplomacy, and the subversion of post-colonial global hierarchies in women's transnational alliances.
The talk would explore the use of women's press as an object that crossed national borders, forged emotional communities, indicating the importance of fashion and culture to the gendered and generational transformations of the era.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Amy Aisen Kallander is Professor of History, affiliated with the faculty of Women's and Gender Studies at Syracuse University.
A historian of the early modern and modern Middle East and North Africa and the French colonial empire, she is the author of two books, Tunisia's Modern Woman: Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s (2021) and Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia (2013).
She has published articles and contributed to books on postcolonial Tunisia, masculinity, social media, fashion and consumption in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Arab Media & Society, and French Politics, Culture, and Society, among others.