Finding Women and Gender in the Sources: Toward a Historical Anthropology of Ottoman Tripoli
16/02/2018
The Journal of North African Studies
p. 768-790
23 p.
This article offers an anthropological reading of Ottoman sources on Libya to
shed light on the history of women in Islamic contexts while addressing key
issues of gender, power, and representation in history writing. It features the
potential of a method that, while illuminating the presence of women in a
variety of archival and textual Ottoman sources, questions the gendered
nature of their representations as historical subjects. In so doing, the article
contributes to current debates on history writing and articulates the
perspective of a scholar of Women’s History in the Islamic context. The article
first outlines some of the challenges that have been identified and tackled by
feminist historians over recent decades as for the search for sources in which
women’s lives can be retraced. It then introduces the main sources that were
used in the research – a civic chronicle and a petition – and proposes more
general reflections on method in historical research, in which the possibility of
tracking women’s life journeys in predominantly masculine sources is critically
explored. Finally, a series of female figures emerging from such sources as for
the case of Ottoman Tripoli (North-Africa) is studied, with an effort of
reflection on social typologies and categories in which women were often
reduced to clichéd characters like the Wife, the Widow, the Slave, and the
Prostitute.