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Dear colleagues,
for a panel proposal to the World Conference for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES, 18-22 August 2014 at METU, Ankara, Turkey, www.wocmes2014.org) I am looking for researchers, who would like to participate in a panel on Aesthetic Body Modifications and Gender in the Contemporary Middle East. Please find the panel abstract below. According to the conference organisers, paper abstracts should not exceed 2000 words and should be submitted before 20 November 2013. Please do not include references or bibliographical notes in the abstract text.
For more information, please contact [log in to unmask]
Best wishes,
Claudia Liebelt
Claudia Liebelt, Dr. phil.
Lehrstuhl für Sozialanthropologie
Universität Bayreuth (GW II)
95440 Bayreuth
fon: +49 (0)921 554226
fax: +49 (0)921 554118
Panel Proposal Abstract for the the World Conference for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES), 18-22 August 2014, METU Ankara (Turkey)
Aesthetic Body Modifications and Gender in the Contemporary Middle East
Cosmetic surgery and more generally aesthetic body modifications are spreading fast in the contemporary Middle East. Cities like Beirut, Tehran and Istanbul have become regional and perhaps even global hubs of an ever-growing beauty sector, which includes beauty clinics, fitness centres, cosmetic surgery, (Muslim) fashion designers as well as hair and nail studios. Turkish TV series and the large billboards of Anatolian fashion designers transport specific imaginations of modernity and beauty into the Arab world and elsewhere. Arab entrepreneurs promote halal cosmetics throughout the Muslim world and medical tourists from all over the region travel to Tehran or Istanbul, whose cosmetic surgeons have now gained international fame. Not least, the growing sector of beauty services in the contemporary Middle East caters to an increasingly varied clientele, including the urban poor and an emerging pious middle class. Theological debates take place on whether cosmetic surgery is to be condemned as a futile luxury, or whether it is answering to real physical and psychological needs. And anxious patients seek advise from Islamic scholars as well as a ‘community of practice’ in chat rooms and newly established online forums.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together empirical studies on aesthetic body modifications, beauty practices and gender in the contemporary Middle East. Hereby, it investigates the cultural, theological and economic meanings and embeddedness of beauty ideals and practices in a complex region. While a vast literature exists on the relation between gender, sexuality, veiling and the body in Islam, empirical studies on contemporary aesthetic body modifications and beauty practices in the Middle East are still rare. This is in spite of the fact that beauty salons, for example, offer an excellent field to study imaginations of beauty and modernity, as well as changing forms of gender and kinship, morality and subjectivity.
Questions we will seek to address include whether beauty practices and ideals are informed by increasingly standardised and/or Westernised norms and images, or whether they draw from specific cultural sources, perhaps even de-centering established beauty geographies? Do the increasing investments in female appearance and beauty point to a shifting of gendered power relations, or are they part of a patriarchal repression, as often argued by Western feminism? And in what way are these phenomena related to changes in consumption, urbanism, notions of intimacy and the presence of men and women in the public space?
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