"What about Women?": The Treatment of Women in Mohja Kahf's the Girl in the Tangerine Scarf
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I will argue that the treatment of women in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf is problematic because (a) polygyny in modern practice is depicted as if it were exclusive to Islam when in fact some Mormons still practice polygyny and (b) some readers could misconstrue the traditional gender role for women as being imposed by Islam when in fact it is imposed by a conservative strand of Sunni Islam. First, this article will define the term polygyny - as opposed to polygamy - in order to justify my use of the phrase “polygyny in modern practice,” examine the novel’s implication that Mormons no longer practice polygyny, and present a rebuttal through examples of recent court cases involving Mormon polygynists to prove that some Mormons still practice polygyny. By doing this, it will show that polygyny in modern practice is not exclusive to Islam. Next, this article will clarify what I mean by “the traditional gender role for women” and by “a conservative strand of Sunni Islam,” discuss how Ebtehaj fulfills the traditional gender role for women, and highlight an underlying cultural dissimilarity between her and Aunt Khadija in view of the fact that both women are Sunni. By doing this, it will show that the traditional gender role for women is imposed by a conservative strand of Sunni Islam rather than by Islam itself. Finally, this article will recap my argument, clarify my problem with the novel’s depiction of polygyny, and explain how some readers could misconstrue the traditional gender role for women as being imposed by Islam.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".