In cooperation with the University of Baghdad, The American Space at the American University of Iraq-Baghdad (AUIB) organized a seminar on “Cultural Politics on Women: Reflections on Iraqi and English Theater,” featuring guest speaker Dr. Sanaa Al Ghareeb, Assistant Professor at the College of Arts at the University of Baghdad, and Mr. Ali Laith Aziz, Instructor at AUIB.
Through the lens of two plays, Eeman Al-Kubaysi’s “Wa’d A’la Al-Sharee’a” (وأدٌ على الشريعة) and Lilian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour,” the speakers examined the impacts of Cultural Politics (or Identity Politics) on women, from the experiences and perspectives of the latter, as presented by women authors.
The speakers engaged the audience in a discussion on “how culture is used to legitimate conditions of inequality and (alternatively) to contribute to the struggle to transform it,” setting the issue of discrimination against women and stigmatizing them in the broader historical context of social discrimination that all too often reaches the level of “dehumanization” of the “other,” as a prelude to various forms of violence, such as the world witnessed in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, The Iraqi Sectarian War of 2006-2008, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.