‘Feminist Interventions in Armenian Studies/Armenian Interventions in Feminist Studies’ Conference Takes Place at MIT

Throughout the last couple of decades, Feminist as well as Armenian Studies have developed to become two distinct fields of inquiry. Nevertheless, few efforts have been made to see them in juxtaposition and apply the theoretical insights of the one to the other. Among such attempts was the conference “Feminist Interventions in Armenian Studies/Armenian Interventions in Feminist Studies” organized by Lerna Ekmekcioglu (MIT) and Melissa Bilal (University of Chicago) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on April 7. With the participation of senior and junior scholars, all women, the conference purported to bring together experts in various fields and generate critical and theoretical debates regarding Armenian Studies and the contributions of feminist thought to it.

Confronting Challenges: To Be an Armenian Feminist in Turkey

Hrant Galstyan

 

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She earned her bachelor’s degree at Boğaziçi University in Turkey and master’s and PhD degrees from New York University. Lerna has authored a range of articles about ethnic and religious minorities, genocide, Armenian community in post-genocide Turkey, concentrating on the gendered perspective. In 2006, she co-edited “A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862-1933)” in Turkish, with Melissa Bilal. At the end of this year her second book, “Recovering Armenia: Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey” will be published.

In August, during her stay in Yerevan, Lerna participated in a panel organized by the AUA and presented her work on the Ottoman Turkish policies of transferring women and children from Armenian to Muslim contexts and the post-war Armenian policies in Constantinople towards retrieving the kidnapped women and their children born of rape. Hetq spoke with L. Ekmekcioglu about her work on genocides and feminism.

Women's Inactivity

Srpouhi Dussap

Translated by Jennifer Manoukian

The following is a translation of an article by Srpouhi Dussap, published in August 1882.

Srpouhi Dussap (née Vahanian) was the first Armenian woman novelist and the first Armenian writer—male or female—to address the social struggles particular to Armenian women. Born in 1842 in Constantinople, Dussap came of age during a period of cultural reawakening for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, during which women began to carve out a place for themselves in the public sphere. One of these pioneering women was Dussap’s mother, Nazli Vahan, a staunch advocate for women’s education and the founder of charitable and educational organizations to help Armenian girls.