Gender in the Middle East North Africa: Contemporary Issues and Challenges (original) (raw)
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Transforming North African Feminisms from Within: New Post-Arab Spring Feminist Voices
Cairo Studies in Rnglish, 2019
This article focuses onthe 2010-2011 uprisings in North Africa as a “revolution” instigated by new actors, and also by the new ambiguities that postcolonial rule in the region created. Women’s rights in North Africa have been institutionally hyper-politicized and have served all sorts of agendas from the colonialist and neo-imperialist to the anti-colonialist and post-colonialist, to the religious extremist. This institutional instrumentalization has been first problematized then contested by generations of feminists and gender experts in the region. The lenses of these contestations were civil society, politics, and academia. My argument in this articlemay be stated as follows: Whereas the institutional instrumentalization of women’s rights in North Africa has not undergone any substantial change, the issues addressed and contestation strategies and practices have dramatically changed in the post-revolution era.This is transforming feminisms and genderstudies from within and in interesting ways, although the actors themselves do not always self-identify as feminists or gender experts. I address this argument conceptually and through facts. Conceptually, I adopt an overarching theoretical framework that I call “the Center” (Sadiqi 2016),an ideological shifting framework at the crossroads of culture, religion, and politicswhere diverse gender-based discourses converse. The fact that this space is gaining in vibrance even after thesubstantial weakening of the revolution means that it answers a real need at the public -discourse level which up to the pre-revolution moment was dominated by the secularist-Islamist frontal antagonism. The Center is yielding a new mind-set which seeks to highlight difference (whether linguistic, ideological, cultural, religious, educational, class-based, or gender-oriented), transgress the state’s authority (in which it lost trust),and find new free ways of expression that are not constrained by (political) alliances. In these emerging dynamics, gender is central, both as a defining marker /discourse and a way of reconfiguring space.To understand these new developments, this articleis divided into four main sections. The first section presents the relevant aspects of the Center; the second one summarizes the salient ways in which the state instrumentalizedwomen’s rights in the pre-revolution era; the third one presents a note on methodology and the new female voices; and the fourth sectionprovides my own readings of the emerging voices. In the conclusion, I revisit the Center framework and show ways in which this framework can help us understand post-Arab Spring development.
The politics of women-focused activism, academia and the state in Middle East and North Africa
Contemporary Levant, 2016
Prof. Zahia Smail-Salhi, Professor of Modern Arabic Studies has researched and taught in the field of Arabic Studies for many years. Her publications 1 show the depth and breadth of her research interests: literature, women's feminist movements, the politics of gender based violence and the dynamics of activism in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region. Zahia has a crucial role in various cross-border academic networks and projects which facilitate new research on the politics of women and gender in MENA. This article is a transcription of a conversation between Zahia Smail-Salhi and me on the emerging trends and developments in women-focused activism. Here, we explore activism inside and outside academia; the politics of feminism in MENA state discourses; the changing terms of reference for gender; the diverse locations and solidarities of women-focused political engagements. Ruth Abou Rached: Thank you very much Professor Zahia Smail-Salhi for taking the time to talk with us at Contemporary Levant today. Drawing on your experience, what important changes, trends and developments in Women and Gender-focused activism and research are taking place in the MENA region at this time? Zahia Smail-Salhi: I'd like to start with two points. The first point concerns the huge diversity of MENA. The MENA region stretches all the way from Morocco to the Gulf. Issues facing women in Morocco are different from issues facing women in Saudi Arabia or in Egypt, etc. But overall I think we're living through interesting times … in fact the biggest challenge for every scholar is to keep up with the changes taking place across the region. The second important point is that the changes and high visibility of women-focused activism did not start post Arab Spring. MENA women have always engaged in politics and research from perspectives of women and gender, since before the last MENA countries got independence from colonial rule in the 1960s. To understand changes taking place in women-focused activism in MENA, we need to understand the recent histories of women-focused activism in the region. After the era of state-sponsored feminisms, women academics and activists have moved into grassroots and localized activism by working with women in need directly. I can refer to the example of Algeria, where shelters, such as the SOS, Femmes en détresse (Women in Distress) for homeless women have been established by local activists. From these local direct interventions, we see now it's the activists who take the lead in localized women-focused changes in different regions and the academics who reach out to the activists to obtain an up-to-date picture of the latest and actual changes in society.
The Arab Popular Uprising from a Gender Perspective”. Zeitschrift für Politik. No.1, 2014.
As uprisings have engulfed their region, Arab women have often lost out. They have repeatedly been marginalized or have directly experienced a backlash during the transitional period and most of the developments in the region. Indeed, women have generally been excluded from the decision-making process; in the few places where they were adequately represented, they have watched members of Islamist parties set the tone, often attacking the gender equality envisioned by the UN's conventions on human rights. Women have also been the targets of systematic violence from both the Arab states and from fundamentalists, and of reactionary religious propaganda and measures that threaten to eliminate the gains they have made over recent decades.
2015. Politics of Critique: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Middle East.
This paper explores the implications of spatial production of academic knowledge on the Middle East, through the critiques of Orientalist discourses on the ''Muslim woman.'' It begins with an examination of the success of postcolonial studies and scholarship on democratization in challenging racist perceptions and politics in the West. Then it reflects on the ways in which this knowledge production travels and is reconfigured in places where power inequalities are different. This requires a consideration of the regional consequences of either an over-emphasis on differences in agencies of ''Muslim women'' or a relative silence on issues of gender inequality. The paper's suggestion is to shift the focus from representation and discourse to the structural circumstances in which ordinary men and women's agencies play out; various political mechanisms which participate in the production of acceptable cultural practices; and patterns of resistance, which may defy arguments about culturally specific definitions of agency. This is a quest for making the ''exotic'' familiar, without exoticizing the familiar.
Gender and Civil Society in the Middle East
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2003
This article explores the aims, activities and challenges of women's movements in the Middle East. It demonstrates the similarities among movements, which are related to both the historical emergence of women's movements, and in particular their close affiliation to nationalist struggles, as well as contemporary circumstances such as ambiguous government policies, repression of civil societies and prevailing authoritarian political cultures. This contribution also looks to the specific factors and conditions that shape women's movements in particular countries differently, thereby highlighting the great degree of heterogeneity among women's organizations in the Middle East. An analysis of the actual goals and activities of women's groups in various countries, such as Jordan, Egypt and Palestine reveals that women activists tend to get mobilized around issues related to modernization and development. Issues such as women's rights to education, work and political participation have traditionally been both the accepted demands of women activists as well as part of the discourses of male modernizers and reformers. However, the more sensitive issues of women's reproductive rights and violence against women, for example, have been taken up by only a few women's organizations in recent years. The relationship of women's organizations to the state is key to the analysis of women's movements in the region. Varying levels of dependence and autonomy can be detected not only in the comparison of one country with another but also within given country contexts.
A chapter in the book, "The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism," edited by T. Oren & A. L. Press. London: Routledge. , 2019
The underlying faulty assumption that there is only one single form of feminism (i.e., Western feminism) that women have to universally emulate is highly problematic due to its ethnocentric underpinnings, which mask the rich diversities of women's lived realities as well as their competing subjectivities and the multiple feminism(s) they embrace and exhibit on many levels and through different manifestations (Moghadam 1994, 2003; Nazir 2005; Inglehart and Norris 2003). Negating the notion that there is a single, uniform, and standard type of feminism that can be universally and uncritically applied to women all over the world regardless of their distinctions and variations, this section sheds light on some of the unique particularities of the complex phenomenon of "Arab feminism(s)." It reveals how this complex phenomenon manifested itself in numerous ways and over several stages, which are reflective of Arab women's authentic culture and beliefs as well as their complex political, social, and cultural realities. It discusses how Arab women suffered from three layers of invisibility and participated in three types of struggles, and how their complex process of evolving "feminism(s)" was shaped over three consecutive phases. By doing so, it sheds light on how Arab women's feminism(s), activism(s) a,nd resistance(s) cross-cut different boundaries, binaries, and dichotomies. Three invisibilities Arab women have been suffering from three layers of invisibility on three different levels. First, there is invisibility on the socioeconomic level, since many of their important roles, including their economic labor and multiple contributions to their societies, are unnoticed, unappreciated,
Reviving Pan-Arabism in Feminist Activism in the Middle East
Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2020
This essay is a preliminary attempt to explore the potential of a feminist, Pan-Arab ideology in relieving some of the tensions in feminist movement building in the Middle East and North Africa region. In its current formulation, regional feminisms suffer from compounded inefficiencies due to fragmentations in grassroots, civil society organizing; an overreliance on the state and state actors including NGOs and discourses of neoliberal development; and a narrow focus on a human rights approach for feminist action. Nonetheless, the present also offers a number of opportunities that are often omitted in our analysis of these disabling tensions. These include women’s growing salience and their increasing presence in public, political spaces of mobilizing, organizing and resistance, which has facilitated communication and negotiation with and within state apparatuses. Opportunities also exist thanks to the enabling and connective nature of the Internet for the purpose of transnational f...