Seminar | “Where are the women?”: A missing narrative in Javanese Islamic architectural history | Tutin Aryanti

“Where are the women?”: A missing narrative in Javanese Islamic architectural history

Islamic architectural history mostly focuses on mosques with grand architecture built by princely patrons or designed by well-known, typically male architects. The exceptional history of women’s mosques in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, provides an important yet missing narrative of Muslim women’s participation in Islamic public space.

This presentation discusses these mosques and women’s prayer space in Yogyakarta, how and why these mosques have become marginalized in the Islamic architectural history, and how they may be brought back in the story.

Speaker

Tutin Aryanti is an associate professor of Architecture at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (Indonesia). She completed her doctoral degree in Architecture with a minor in gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tutin’s work incorporates architecture with social cultural issues and methodology to reconstruct architectural history from the previously marginalized users’ perspectives. During her fellowship at KITLV from August until October 2023, supported by the Graham Foundation Grant, Tutin works on a book manuscript entitled Women’s prayer space: The politics of sex segregation. This book investigates the way gender relations are spatialized in the mosques of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where exceptional mosques for the use of women were built in the 19th to the early 20th century.

Moderator

David Kloos is a senior researcher at KITLV. He is interested in religion, gender, violence, colonialism, knowledge formation, visual methods, and the social and political aspects of climate change.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV (room 1.68) and online via Zoom, on Thursday 28 September, from 15.30 – 17.00 PM (CET).

Registration

If you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: [email protected].

If you wish to join this webinar online, please register here.

Image

Women’s Islamic learning session at Musalla ‘Aisyiyah Kauman, Yogyakarta. Photo by: Tutin Aryanti.