Call for papers: MARKETING MUSLIM WOMEN

Oeuvre de Chaïbia

CALL FOR PAPERS: Marketing Muslim Women - International Conference - April 10-11, 2008 - Duke University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Organizers: Miriam Cooke, Banu Gökarýksel, Ellen McLarney, Journal for Middle East Women’s Studies

This conference focuses on Muslim womanhood that has become a transnational signifier of Islam as a whole. We are all acutely aware of the specific signs, symbols, and definitions of Muslim women that have gained international currency through their circulation in the media. This conference aims to examine 1) the market forces that manufacture such images for consumption; and 2) women as producers and consumers. How do these images function as the handmaiden of politics to promote imperial conquest, economic domination, and capitalist expansion? What does it mean when religion, religious ideology, and religious products are marketed? Conversely, what does it mean when secularism and secular products are marketed? We seek to explore women’s engagement in the culture industry, through their own agency, through consumption of goods and services, and through knowledge production.

We invite papers in all disciplines that treat the topic, including, but not limited to:

• Popular Culture: mass media, advertising
• Fashion: the market for modest dress, Islamic headgear, Islam as “fashionable”
• Market Spaces: bazaar, souq, malls, department stores, internet shopping, weddings
• Labor: domestic, slave, wage, sexual
• Sexuality and the Body: as commodity, to sell products, as “capital,” pleasure, desire
• Prostitution and Pornography
• Tourism and Migration

Abstracts not to exceed one page should be submitted by Dec. 1, 2007 to:
marketingmuslimwomen@yahoo.com
.