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Article Excerpt
The Twelfth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, which met at the University of Connecticut at Storrs from June 6-9, 2002, included several panels that focused on Middle Eastern women and featured a keynote address by the historian Joan Wallach Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton that condemned Israeli militarism and strongly endorsed Palestinian rights. Scott's keynote address (titled "Feminist Revisions" and forthcoming in differences 13(3), February 2003) opened the conference on the Storrs campus on Friday, June 6. Her lecture was followed over the next two-and-a-half days by six panels with a Middle East focus, including one devoted to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures (EWIC), and a plenary session on which Margot Badran was one of four participants discussing the topic "decentering the West."

Scott, who wrote the very influential article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," spoke on the feminist analytics of power in her address entitled "Feminist Reverberations." In her speech, she linked an understanding of the operations of difference with the workings of power to analyze contemporary events, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Scott pointed out that feminists were correct in arguing that attention to women and to gender would yield analyses of politics beyond the relationships of men and women. She defined feminist methodology as one constructed on the notion that there is neither a self not a collective identity without an other, no inclusiveness without exclusion and no universal without a rejected particular. Power, she concluded, is always an issue in the articulation of these relationships. Scott argued that a feminist methodology should, therefore, make us pause at the binary division of the world into categories such as good and evil, Islam and the West, Jews versus Palestinians. Scott said that the good versus evil opposition in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wipes out the particular conditions of the conflict and masks the...

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