Women’s Empowerment in the Xi’an Muslim District, China

The Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University presents a talk by Maris Boyd Gilette on women's empowerment among the Chinese Muslims (or Hui) who live in Xi'an's Muslim district.

Maris Boyd Gilette
Haverford College

This workshop explores women’s empowerment among the Chinese Muslims (or Hui) who live in Xi’an’s Muslim district. In the broader ethnographic literature on Muslim women’s empowerment, most analyses focus on social structure or individual agency. Collective sentiment receives rather less attention. This talk will look at the structural, agentive, and affective dimensions of Xi’an Hui women’s empowerment based on nearly two decades of field research in this urban Muslim neighborhood. I will focus on Chinese Muslim women’s empowerment as a site for reflection on the political, cultural, and intellectual implications of “women’s empowerment” as an analytic lens.