Description
Explores the social and gender relations that define home, particularly within Middle Eastern cultures. Ilcan draws attention to the struggles in our “places” of habitation and the strategies deployed to subvert the habits of settlement. The home is an interesting place to begin. Home is a notion that is mobile and transitory. As it extends through space and moves through time, it delimits inclusions and exclusions, defines gender identities and differences, and is often at the center of nation-building strategies. Home is constantly destabilized by use, that is, by the cultural and political representations that deploy, contrive, or subvert its traditions. Ilcan provides a unique inquiry into the cultural politics of home. She emphasizes the social and gender relations that define home, not only in terms of their disciplinary and regulatory effects, but also in terms of their dynamic consequences for Middle Eastern cultures. She tackles some contemporary and critical issues such as the articulation of private and political spaces, the politics of lived space, modes of longing and belonging, narrativity and the practice of changing places. These issues are explored from a conceptual and methodological strategy for understanding the spaces where many rural women live and work, the kinds of settlements they form, and the manifold ways they resist and change these settled ways. A provocative analysis for scholars, students, and researchers in Sociology and Anthropology, Middle Eastern, Women’s, and Cultural Studies.
