Gendering the History of Libya: Transnational and Feminist Approaches

“Centre and Periphery: Variation in Gendered Space among Libyan Jews,” Rachel Simon

“Reimagining Colony and Metropole: Images of Italy and Libya during the Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912,” Jennifer G. Illuzzi

“Embodying Resistance: Gender, Violence, and Identity under Italian Rule in al-Jabal al-Akhdar,” Katrina Yeaw

“L’éducation et ‘l’absence de genre’ dans le désert colonial: Le cas des écoles françaises au Fezzan libyen, 1943-51,” Tommaso Palmieri

“International Oil Companies and the Reshaping of Gender Relations in Post-colonial Libya, 1950s–1970s,” Elisabetta Bini

“A Transnational Community? Memories and Narratives of the Jewish Diaspora from Libya,” Barbara Spadaro

“Dania Ben Sassi: Gender, Performance, and Amazighi Nationalism in the February Revolution,” Leila O. Tayeb

Chair: Amy Kallander

Discussant: Julia Clancy-Smith

This panel at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women represents a milestone—not only for the many histories of Libya but also for those of North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe and for the study of women, gender, and empire globally and comparatively. The panel demonstrated that modern Libya constitutes a zone where five empires clashed from the early twentieth century on—Ottoman, Italian, British, French, and their successors the petroleum conglomerates— and that both the Great Desert and the Mediterranean were places where empires were constructed, defeated, dismantled, and reborn. It included seven papers, covering two centuries and ranging across desert, sea, port cities, oases, and oil towns, about religion, music, education, and many kinds of violence, all of them highly but differentially gendered and mutable because subject to local as well as transregional historical forces and processes.

The papers collectively reflect a “second wave” of historical scholarship on the Italian Empire as young Italian and other researchers overcome earlier reluctance or distaste for the topic, but the major difference from the first wave is the prominence of gender analysis that provocatively draws on new theories, approaches, methodologies, and sources in gender history. Each paper creatively addresses the problem of sources and contributes to enriching the historical fund on modern Libya through school memoirs, literature for Italian youth, family movies, polemics, posters, poetry, oral histories collected by the Libyan Studies Center in Tripoli, boxes of press clippings from the Hamburg Colonial Institute, records of international Jewish associations (such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle), frantic US State Department cables about Marsa el-Brega, and music cassettes smuggled across borders, expanding and contesting the archives as defined by Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry (2010).

Building on her earlier work Change within Tradition among Jewish Women in Libya (1992), which remained virtually the only monograph on women in Libya for years, Rachel Simon offers a close ethnographic investigation of diverse Jewish communities and argues persuasively for the “elasticity of gendered space.” She demonstrates that social groups on the margins of geographic and political “centers” and of lower socioeconomic status enjoyed access to or created more flexible gender spaces whose boundaries blurred in specific circumstances. Simon’s close attention to scarce resources—water and wood—reveals the “hiving out” of domestic space into “unpoliced” physical areas as women and children foraged for life-sustaining commodities. What strikes me in Simon’s work are the degree and intensity of social capital or investment in constructing and maintaining gendered spheres that are often subverted in practice and daily life.

Jennifer G. Illuzzi’s contribution speaks to the Italian aspect of the hypermasculinized Mediterranean identity that came to the fore in French Algeria and elsewhere around the basin around 1900. In her 1998 work Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country Jane Schneider poses the problem of the “many Italies,” as does Illuzzi’s research. Illuzzi argues that not only was imperialism on Italy’s Fourth Shore manipulated as an antidote to emasculating political disunity but “gender analysis deepens and broadens historical understandings of how and why the Libyan invasion came to be.” In addition, she demonstrates both...