Academic literature on the topic 'Women and Insularity'

The aim of this book is to shed new light on the connections between the islands of the Odyssey, setting aside the common perspectives which fully contrast Ithaka to the isles of Odysseus’s travels. Indeed, on a close reading, the idea of ‘otherness’ frequently associated to these isles can be perceived as the result of shared traits. The book first offers an introductory survey on the studies about islands and insularity (not only) in the Odyssey. Then, it analyses how and in which terms the Odyssean representations of the islands are elaborated by means of references to the characters’ sense

This chapter argues that women have contributed extensively to the promotion of gender cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia. It showcases hijab activists as well as female intellectuals and their interrogation of the excesses of Western feminism. These women have questioned the insularity of a segment of the Southeast Asian community and have courageously campaigned for their inclusion in workplaces that are prejudiced against women who wear headscarves. In campaigning for the hijab and presenting the modesty of Muslim women in innovative ways and styles, these women have revolutionised the concept of modesty in modern societies while reformulating commonplace understandings of gender justice in Muslim Southeast Asia.

In her 2004 novel ‘Ali and ‘Aisha: an Iraqi Symphony of Love, Islamic novelist ‘Alyā’ al-Anṣārī depicts a fictive Sunni–Shia love story to represent the potential for peaceful religious coexistence in a unified Iraqi nation emerging from the trauma of authoritarianism and occupation. Inter-sect marriage is a well-established phenomenon in Iraq, and is hardly unprecedented. However, al-Ansārī’s text draws on a literary trope that bears the hallmark of didactic nationalist writings, which is that a Shia man and a Sunni woman are brought together, rather than the opposite. This specific gender configuration signals the unease with which ethnic and religious collectivities ‘give away’ their women to the ‘Other’, whereas the idea of subsuming a Sunni woman within a Shia family where the children of the union will remain Shia, seems less radical and thus more comfortable. Moreover, the narrative’s tragic, pessimistic ending and failed alliance almost seems to be an extension of unconsummated marriages in state-sponsored texts, where national harmony is desirable metaphorically but ultimately unrealistic. That being said, in the context of the Islamic novel this expansive nationalist perspective beyond pan-Shiism or the insularity of the Iraqi Shia community in ...