This article contributes to the growing interest in affect and emotions in sociological research, with a specific focus on ‘mood’, developing the concept ‘mood of commitment’. It approaches political commitment as a mood, an affective lens, a dedication to a greater cause, asking how political commitments might be a low intensity affective relationship, and also a heightening, high intensity rhythm at the same time. I conceptualise ‘mood of commitment’ as an object of analysis that can be engaged to critically understand a wide range of political commitments. This article focuses on the case of Ottoman Muslim women’s movements in the early 20th century, amid the turmoil of nationalist movements and ‘modernisation’ processes. It firstly analyses objects of desires that are circulated to be persuasive in the political movements, and attunement of women’s movements with already existing nationalist movements. It secondly unpacks the kind of work involved in claiming to be in the ‘right’ mood of commitment, emphasising the production of hegemonic positions.
Number of Pages: 299 pp. ISBN: 9781472442857 (hardback), 9781315584225 (ebook) Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence is an uncomfortable book to read, and I mean this in a very positive way. Questioning the 'given' is sometimes exciting, but it is unsettling; one needs to be open to the discomfort of critical thinking. This edited book invites the audience to question what is taken for granted in several fields including war studies, memory research and gender studies. In my view, affect studies can be added to the list as well. For me, the book shows the complexities and contradictions of silencing, it discusses the links between subjectivities and silence, unpacks several layers of silencing (and unsilencing), provides feminist self-reflections on silence, and questions the ways in which remembering, reminding and retheorising silences manifests. Currently, much of non-feminist research produced in social sciences can recognise that 'gender is significant', but they generally cannot go further and provide a complex feminist analysis. Feminist perspectives have been intervening in such understandings and Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories is a great example of such an intervention. To illustrate, war studies does recognise that women are affected by war conditions, genocide studies does cover what happens to girls and women during genocide, and research on political violence does include some gendered forms of violence. However, this book does not only bring war, genocide and political violence studies together, but it does so by providing a complex feminist analysis from the intersections of these fields. In addition to presenting a set of nuanced feminist analyses to the analysis of war, genocide and political violence; the book includes a wide range of geo-political cases written through deploying feminist curiosity. Thus, it fits very well with 'The Feminist Imagination: Europe and Beyond' series and expands horizons for imagining a feminist past, present and future. In this sense, this book goes beyond recognising that gender (or commonly only 'women') is significant in analysing war, genocide and political violence, rather it shows how gender should be central from intersectional perspectives. The book is about war, genocide and political violence; however, it is fair to claim that it is not simply a collection of book chapters on these topics, only focusing on different contexts and cases-a common trap for edited books. The chapters feel as if they talk to each other, especially through the theme of a 'politics of silence', a central problematisation of the book, investigated from feminist perspectives. The contributors of the book are well aware that the politics of silence is not limited to 'uncovering' the silence or only 'giving voice to those who
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.