The question of women's status in Muslim societies has been posed as a moral problem since the colonial era providing much of the impetus for political and social reform as a corrective to the perceived conditions of women's subjugation. This course will consider the ways in which this problem has been defined at the intersections of competing discourses (liberal humanist, nationalist, and religious) to understand how these have shaped gender in Muslim societies in the colonial and post-colonial periods. We will critically engage with a range of textual genres--including histories, ethnographies, biographies, memoirs--relating to gender in Muslim societies in order to explore the contours of these debates in the colonial and postcolonial periods. By considering the theoretical and methodological issues posed by feminist, post-structuralist and post-colonial theorists in the study of gender and `women in the third world', we will examine the ways in which categories such as religious, secular, human, political and social are variously deployed to represent beliefs, practices, conditions and lives of Muslim women. While the course is not geographically specific, it will primarily draw upon historical and anthropological literatures of the Middle East and South Asia. A familiarity with gender and Islam is recommended though not considered necessary to take this course.