Week 4 here. Week 5 upcoming. Next week is week 6…where has the time gone?!?!

Historical Scholarship of the Modern Middle East, Late Ottoman Empire
Topic: Nineteenth century reform

Fahmy, Khalid. “The Era of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, 1805-1848.” In M. W. Daly, ed., The Cambridge History of Egypt: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 139-179.
Summary: This article examines the ascent, rule, and legacy of the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha in Ottoman Egypt. Based on his legacy, the author concludes by suggesting that Muhammad ‘Ali can be considered the father of modern Egypt.

Ma’oz, Moshe. Ottoman Reform in Syria and Palestine. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.
Summary: This work focuses on the application and effect of the Tanzimat reforms between 1840 and 1861 in the Ottoman Arab provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Sidon, Syria, and Palestine.

Historical Studies of Women and Gender
Topic: Foucault and the history of sexuality

Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. “Dismantling Gender Polarization and Compulsory Heterosexuality: Should We Turn the Volume Down or Up?” The Journal of Sex Research 32, no. 4 (1995): 329-334.
Summary: In this article, Bem reverses her previous thinking on reversing the dichotomization of gender and the primacy of heterosexuality by suggesting that what is instead needed is an explosion and proliferation of categories of sex/gender/desire so that the binaries that currently dominate Western culture can be dismantled and replaced with a spectrum of sex/gender/desire possibilities.

Coffin, Judith G. “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex.” French Politics, Culture & Society 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 18-37.
Summary: The author argues that a re-contextualization of the pairing of the works of Simone deBeauvoir and Alfred Kinsey by their scholarly contemporaries in the late 1940s and early 1950s reveals the tensions inherent to questions of sexuality and sexual politics during that period.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. New York: Vintage Press, 1990: 1-50.
Summary: In this section of his groundbreaking work, Foucault tackles the “repression hypothesis,” the acceptance of sexual repression in the modern era in the Western world as a fact that stems from this hypothesis, and the notion that such repression stems from the development of a capitalist world economy in which sex outside of its reproductive capacity serves no purpose and is thus repressed. In this section, he suggests, instead, that discourse(s) on sexuality(ies) proliferated and became normalized throughout the nineteenth century, allowing for the possibility of a multiplicity of (“acceptable” and “perverse”) sexualities.

Henry, Todd A. “Between Surveillance and Liberation: The Lives of Cross-Dressed Male Sex Workers in Early Postwar Japan.” In Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura, eds., The Transgender Studies Reader, vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2013: 399-413.
Summary: In this article, Henry examines popular and personal perceptions of crossed-dressed male sex workers in post-World War II U.S.-occupied Japan. He suggests that such an analysis reveals the ways in which identities were created in their local context and in response to local pressures and exigencies. It also provides a helpful case study for an examination of developments since the 1990s in an increasingly globalized transgender studies.

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina. “Feminist Theory and Historical Practice: Rereading Elizabeth Blackwell.” History and Theory 31, no. 4 (Dec 1992): 51-69.
Summary: In this article, Morantz-Sancez re-examines the works of Elizabeth Blackwell, an American mid-nineteenth-century female physician, through the lens of social constructivist theories of science. Through such an analysis, it becomes evident that not only did Blackwell criticize the increasingly masculine domain of objective science, but that her works foreshadow the discourse of twentieth-century female philosophers and thinkers on science.

Morantz, Regina Markell. “The Scientist as Sex Crusader: Alfred C. Kinsey and American Culture.” American Quarterly 29, no. 5 (Winter 1977): 563-589.
Summary: In this article, the author examines the significance of the study of human sexuality undertaken by Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Morantz suggests that, even though Kinsey himself was not a revolutionary, his work was and continues to be innovative for its treatment of human sexuality and the larger cultural meaning and implications it engenders.

How’s the mid-quarter/early semester/early February going for everyone else?