caravia/feminism

Excellent gathering of Islam scholars discussing Feminism in the Islam.

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Islamic feminism is a Koran-centred reform movement by Muslim women with the linguistic and theological knowledge to challenge patriarchal interpretations and offer alternative readings in pursuit of women's advancement and in refutation of Western stereotypes and Islamist orthodoxy alike. Islamic feminists are critical of women's legal status and social positions and agree that women are placed in subordinate positions -by law and by custom- in the family, the economy, and the polity. In particular, they are critical of the content of Muslim family laws and the ways that these laws restrict women's human rights and privilege men. And yet they vigorously disagree that Islam is implicated in this state of affairs. Their alternative argument is that Islam has been interpreted in patriarchal and often misogynistic ways over the centuries (and especially in recent decades), that Sharia law has been misunderstood and misapplied, and that both the spirit and the letter of the Koran have been distorted. Their insistence that what appears as God's law is in fact human interpretation is an audacious challenge to contemporary orthodoxy. (...) Islamic feminism is part of what has been variously called Islamic modernism, liberalism, and reformism -a transnational effort to marginalize patriarchal, orthodox, and aggressive forms of Islamic observance and emphasize the norms of justice, peace, and equality."

Interesting book about how is to be a woman, mother, wife, sister, aunt, grandmother. Lisa Ling is a good writer, her own site is lisaling.com/home [lisaling.com/home]

Pity I am not in LA!! My favorite artists, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman, take over the city and show posters, walls and films. Feministic Art as it's best!

From the Virgin Mary, to Marilyn Monroe, to Madonna, a select group of women have been canonized, mythologized and elevated to the status of icon.

Whether idolized or vilified, they reveal something about the social underpinnings of the feminine in all its clichés, perversities and conventions.

Through workshops, streaming lectures and online data collecting, this project explores what makes a woman an icon.

The Brasilian writer born in Ukrania Clarice Lispector lived a short life, born 1920, she died 1977. But her work as a writer and journalist makes her one of the major voices of this century. Helene Cixous, Juliet Flower MacCanell and other Lacanian icons acknowledge her pivotal influence in the forging of a feminine language, in the path of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beuvoir. Lispector wrote in Portuguese but read English and French, she loved Colette, Carson MacCullers, Lou Marie Salomé, Jane Austen.
She wrote novels and short stories about women, about marriages, families. She was able to see the epic struggles of the quotidien life, the process to "being a woman, to became a woman".
"Lispector achieved international fame with works that depict a highly personal, almost existentialist view of the human dilemma and are written in a prose style characterized by a simple vocabulary and elliptical sentence structure. In contrast to the regional or national social concerns expressed by many of her Brazilian contemporaries, her artistic vision transcends time and place; her characters, in elemental situations of crisis, are frequently female and only incidentally modern or Brazilian."