 Hi, first of all, I'd like to thank David and Chloe for organizing the session of her, well, thank you for accepting me and inviting me here. I already presented something on gender as David has said last year, but this time it's more of a theoretical framework, right? So, okay, my main two questions here are should we approach an archaeology of gender and gender in Islamic societies, given that it's a very political issue nowadays? And if we should, how can we do it? How can we do it in a way that's de-orientalizing and avoids the political issues that are now all across the Western world regarding Islamic women? So, first of all, I would like to introduce a bit of how Muslim women have been long a topic of discussion in the West, and the narrative of Oriental or Eastern women being already subjected to a patriarchy before the colonial invasion was already paired with the civilizing mission of the West in colonial times, both from a colonial perspective and later from the optics of Western feminism, as I will now explain. So, this means that a large part of this manuscript relied on images of these other women understriked in an oppressed society. These were epitomizing images of the harem, the veil, and later the latter being a hot topic in current political discussions. And as Mahmood al-Hassan put it, the demeaning representation of women was put forward in a three-fold image, being Oriental, being women, and being Muslim. So, even after the political decolonization of the Arab world, this image has persisted. Particularly, the image was not censored by me unless, no, it was like that on Google. So, particularly from the last decade of the 20th century up to today, a criticism of Islam as a religion has come from the West, and the new colonialist discourses have often used women and Western feminism as weapons. So, as Spivak or Chandat al-Bade Mohanti analyzed, Western feminism was transformed into a neo-colonial device, by which to homogenize the categories of analysis and further universal ideas of gender, of what a woman is and what a woman seeks. Meanwhile, on the other end, Muslims called us such as Margot Badran as Mabarlah Sorkisha Ali, have argued for an Islamic feminism, one that empowers women while not negating their religious experiences, and one which uses the Quranic precedent, and in some cases also the Hadith, as guiding principles. In it, there have been different schools of thought and very fruitful debates, often from the fields of law, literature, and religious studies that I cannot fully go into because of time constraints. However, I would like to highlight the position of Fatima Sedat, who argues not for an Islamic feminism, but for the feminism of an Islam taken for granted. He says that, while the feminism of an Islamic feminism must inevitably locate feminism in a Western intellectual paradigm, the feminism of an Islam taken for granted allows for feminism to be located in an alternate history of recent. He may argue for history to be located in Muslim gender consciousness or in understanding Muslim past. So, in this mindset, there is the possibility of recognizing different ways of being and different applications for feminist methods, while ensuring the value of difference and allowing it for it to endure. So, in fact, this mindset is I consider vital because studies of gender and past Islamic aid societies have been somewhat abundant, yet frequently taken interpretation of Islam as a trans-historical phenomenon, or have been looking for past Muslim women. Our first share of studies of history of gender and Islamic aid societies have also fixated on the harem, the eunuchs, or the veil, and these ground narratives. And on the other hand, historical studies of gender and Islamic aid societies are somewhat frequent, but archaeological and material approaches to gender are not so much. As has been explained, the topic of gender and Islamic aid societies is politically loaded. We must consider how can we actually explore gender practices in norms and Islamic societies, and if it's possible to decolonize the image of the gender and of gender and Islamic aid societies. So, for this, first of all, we should consider, following the words of Seda, the archaeology of taking Islam for granted. That is to resist the definition of what Islam or Muslim is, and consider that Islamic stations take place over and over, which I don't think it's news for everyone here, but I think it's worth highlighting nonetheless. So, second, we must also learn to read gender in everything. As a structure that informs and is informed by practices, performances and understandings of groups, social, and economic status, sexual behavior, and yes, religion, it is important that we consider the very varied material manifestations that gender may have. So, that is, we must go beyond looking for women, although, given their general absence in the archaeological discourse, they must be looked for, but we must understand how these systems were configured. For these, we must go beyond the veil, beyond the great narratives, the harems of the Quranic and heavy precepts of privacy and intimacy, and try to see what is actually there. Within Islamic aid societies, women are often regarded as both agents and disruptors of the Islamic orthodoxy. As they are often displaced from public religious ads, and in this case, for example, I'm going to later talk about Al-Andalus, but in case of some instances of some Muslim country, sorry, they are discouraged to attend the Friday prayers in the mosque, namely, they develop different practices of piety, more linked to customary tradition that incurs the creation of regional Islamic aid identities. This is to say that they have a key role in the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and gender. I am weaving together the un-Islamic or pre-Islamic, if you want to say, with Islamic expressions of piety and identity, women exert a type of resistance that affect entire groups in the expression of both their religion and their gender. So, for instance, Leila Bulugol studied female mourning in Bedouin groups in Egypt, a practice that has a pre-Islamic origin and is considered by men a weakness of their faith, but at the same time is an exertion of the Muslim piety, so they do not dare to question it. They just use it on their own way to, and this gender discourses around death, to actually produce and reproduce a hierarchical social order regarding gender, which affect also how the members of themselves. So, how can actually practices of masculinities and femininity's impasses Islamic? How can we see them? Studies of skeletal remains can give insight into sexed bodies and what kinds of activities, traumas, and illnesses they went through. In Europe, we have, I guess, the women remains are more easily accessible than countries that are currently Muslim, or Muslim majority. We can also study domestic spaces, of course. They can also be approached from the optics of gender, particularly as it was understood. We can see that in patriarchal societies it's generally understood as the meaning of the woman, but it can be used to understand influxes of mass in space, feminine space, and how privacy or domestic labor were understood. Material culture in general, I think, can also be read on the optics of gender, even when the association between the material culture and the person behind it are not so evident. And last but not least, we should also look into maintenance activities, which are vital for the creation of the identification of the group, but at the same time are not well understood, are not naturally approached. So as an example, I would like to focus more on my study, which is Al-Andalus. I'm going to present first some examples on how gender can be interpreted through these different fields. So first, in Al-Andalus, as Josef has already said, there was a migration, and there was a migration of whole family groups, which meant that women from North Africa also came to the peninsula early on, which means that a series of customs and traditions and practices that are normally carried out by one gender were also transmitted. So, for example, in the Magbara-Pamplona, which was studied by Virginia, I don't know how to translate it. They both carried osteological analysis, and they found out a dozen individuals that had a finding of the teeth, which is a practice that is actually forbidden by some tradition, because it was used to enhance the beauty, and that's considered that it should not happen. It's a dozen individuals, most of them female, there were some male, but it's understood as a female practice even in African populations. And the fact is that this practice appears in the peninsula, and the study of haplogroups showed that it also was carried out in some local individuals, but it appeared in Pamplona early on, but later on it faded out. And we see other later examples in the 13th century in Porta Alvira, but it seems that it's a practice that is carried out, attached to ethnicity, but it does not survive, at least not in a great extent. We'll see more results, I guess. I would also like to focus, as an example of gender and material culture, on a particular piece of kitchenware and the spaces it's associated with, the Anafre or Anafre. The Anafre is a type of portable stove that appears in the Arabian Peninsula after the conquest, although not as an immediate development, it had a chamber at its base where the charcoal would be placed, and an upper compartment where the cooking would be taken place. So some of these pieces have handles for better transportation, and in the urban center of Bayana, during the 10th century, this type appears on the second level, and it seems to be frequent in urban households from then onwards. And this appearance also kind of questions the appearance of the identification of a particular spot as a kitchen, right? So even in the suburban expansion of Cordoba during the Caliphate, no room and the ones that were uncovered seems to actually operate as just the kitchen, but there seems to be a dialectic of the masculine versus the feminine influxes of what a space can be used as. So I understand this that this involves a greater dialogue between, yeah, the masculine and feminine influxes in the family group because one of the main core maintenance activities, that is preparing food, would be able to take place in different areas around the house. We see this continuing in other sites, and we'll have an episode of Toledo. But later on, in later examples with the arrival of the Amohads and the greater influx of North African traditions in the Peninsula, the Anaphis seems to change into a complementary element to a fixed structure as indicated in one cooking treaty of the 13th century. So its function would be to keep already elaborated dishes warm or to prepare certain sauces. And we see this in Tierra or in Siasa. I took these two houses more because I think this map of Nara Balakorn is very good, but it doesn't show well. So supposedly he made a structure, a division of the houses by importance and size. And even the smaller houses, instead of having a main hall in the lower ground, they have a kitchen. So it seems that this along with the smaller, with the smaller Anaphis that we have then, some of them glaze and everything, we see that the Anaphis is transformed from a piece of kitchenware or cookingware to a piece of tableware. This means that the practices of cooking and feeding the family are transformed and are actually now fixated to a particular room. Actually in Siasa, we see some Anaphitas in the larger households in the kitchen. But even in the smaller households, we see a fixed structure that would actually scaritize the understanding of space within the household. This goes along with tendencies in the Almohad period, for a greater definition of spaces. And in this redefinition, this would, this implicates that female practices, although still important, might be scaritizing fixated to a less visible area of the household. So the Anaphis also, I must say, did survive into the modern era and it is attested until at least the 16th century with some 17th century examples. No, particularly not. So this is Velazquez painting of an old lady with frying eggs and this is an Anaphis, as you can see. So it went beyond an ethnic or religious use, of course. But a long-term standard religious tradition, however, how it was used and the implications that this had on gender performances did change, probably associated to social ethnic transformations with the changes brought by greater influences of North African populations. This is more to pause the question actually. So in conclusion, opening our eyes to reading gender in everything is a key aspect of understanding how ethnicity and social economic position inform gender as much as religion does. By taking Islam for granted and reading it as historically contingent, historically and geographically contingent, we may speak about how men and women in Islamic State societies operate through the transversal optics of gender, social economic status, of course, or sexual position. My aim here was to introduce how this is not only important, but I think also it can be done, and it's necessary for the orientalizing this image of gender in Islam. I also must say, I said we must go beyond looking for women and I taught Tony about women, but it's only as an introduction because generally they have not been looked for. So yeah, that's my conclusion. Thanks for listening.