ScienceCampus Recommends: Mélanie Sadozai (Regensburg) | “In Afghanistan, cats have more rights than women”: Feminine Protests and Passive Resistance under the Taliban Regime

Our collegues at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies (UR) are hosting the lecture series Gendered (Non-)Revolutions: On the Political and Cultural Significance of Women's Protests, organized by Juliane Tomann and Natali Stegmann, Equal Opportunity and Diversity Representatives at the GS OSES (UR). The first lecture will take place on 7 May at 16:15 in room 017, AlFi, Landshuterstr. 4. Mélanie Sadozai will present on the topic: “In Afghanistan, cats have more rights than women”: Feminine Protests and Passive Resistance under the Taliban Regime".

Talk overview:

In today's Afghanistan, women are not allowed to walk alone, to wear perfume, to be seen (even from their house windows), to go to university, to take a driving test...to name but a few prohibitions.
The Taliban have made the withdrawal of women's rights more than a priority, an obsession, which led observers to label their policy a "gender apartheid".
Yet, while being denied nearly the right to exist, many of them manage to contest these rules targeting their very condition of being from the "wrong" gender, and silently fight.
Using James C. Scott concept of "passive resistance" as a starting point, this talk will present how Afghan women have managed to contest the tyranny of the Taliban for the past 3 and a half years.

More information on the lecture series:

Gendered (Non-)Revolutions: On the Political and Cultural Significance of Women's Protests
Gender: Is it just a provocation against good male rule, or what is it about? Why does female protest emerge so often in regimes at the political dead end, acting violently and cynical against their populations? Are gender roles a signifier for the danger and / or the need for political and cultural change? In our series of talks we would like to pose these questions by looking at different case studies from Eastern Europe and Middle East. Without essentializing neither the regions, nor gender relations, we will analyse the forms and agendas of female protest, asking what they are about, how they spread and for what kind of change women are risking their lives in different parts of the world.