Libyan women and revolution: A study of the changes in women's political and social roles during and after the Libyan revolution (original) (raw)

Gendering the Arab Spring

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2012

The article discusses the gendered implications of recent political developments in the region. It argues that women and gender are key to both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and developments and not marginal to them. It explores the signi cance of women's involvement, the historical context of women's political participation and marginalization in political transition. Theoretically, developments in the region point to the centrality of women and gender when it comes to constructing and controlling communities, be they ethnic, religious or political; the signi cance of the state in reproducing, maintaining and challenging prevailing gender regimes, ideologies, discourses and relations; the instrumentalization of women's bodies and sexualities in regulating and controlling citizens and members of communities; the prevalence of genderbased violence; the historically and cross-culturally predominant construction of women as second-class citizens; the relationship between militarization and a militarized masculinity that privileges authoritarianism, social hierarchies and tries to marginalize and control not only women but also non-normative men.

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.

A Gender View of the Arab Uprisings

Arab spring and arab women: challenges and opportunities, Muhamad S. Olimat, London, Routledge, 2014, ISBN 978-1-857-43712-6 Gender, women and the arab spring, Andrea Khalil, London, Routledge, 2015, ISBN 978-1-138-81522-3 Rethinking gender in revolutions and resistance: lessons from the arab world, Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt (Eds) London, Zed, 2015, ISBN 978-1-7836-0282-7

The Arab Revolution in 2011-2012 and Its Impact on Women in the Middle East and North Africa

International journal of education, culture and society, 2020

This study examines the impact of the Arab revolutions on women in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. It highlights the aftermath of the revolutions in the context of the rise of Islamist movements and their influence on the state and women. The study analyzes the role of women during the Arab uprisings and how their voices were subsequently undermined throughout the region by new institutions and governments replacing the old totalitarian regimes. This research uses a qualitative literature review with a theoretical framework based on democracy and human rights in the Arab World and political Islam with regards women. Therefore, it's focused on the period during and after the Arab uprisings and on women's status. The study mainly criticizes the negative impact political Islam had on women in public and the new patterns of the government. It inspects what we mean by democracy, why democracy is important, what kind of democracy suits Middle East and North of Africa (MENA), and the direct relation between democracy, human rights, and women's representation in particular.

Politics of Gender in the Recent Democratic Transitions in the Middle East and North Africa

The weakness of a direct causality between democratic transitions and women-friendly outcomes remains a major finding of research on the gendered impacts of transition processes. In the recent Arab uprisings leading to regime changes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), women’s mobilization was a significant aspect of the regime changes. By contextualizing the gender dynamics and the outcomes of the democratic transitions in Tunusia, Egypt, Morrocco and Libya, this article analyzes and compares Arab women’s transitional politicization. It also inquires into women’s roles, demands and predicaments within the patriarchal structures of the transitional polities. These transitions presented both opportunities as well as challenges for Arab women under new constellations of balance of power in their respective political systems, which led to the rise of a new gender agenda. It is contended here that specific structural and agency-related factors have been intertwined to constrain ...

Toward a comprehensive approach to understanding the construction of Islamic masculinities in the Middle East and North Africa

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society, 2021

The Arab Spring, a wave of pro-democracy protests, began in Tunisia, where 28 days of demonstrations ended 24 years of a dictator’s rule. The protests spread throughout the region to countries including Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Morocco, Libya, and Yemen. These events took many analysts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by surprise (Bayat 2011; Johansson-Nogués 2013). As I show in this chapter, some scholars and analysts of the MENA rely on problematic MENA masculinity theories, which deploy a dangerous racialized narrative of toxic Arab Muslim masculinity to understand the causes of the uprisings and their aftermath. The traditional use of MENA masculinity theories sometimes conflates Arab (the ethnicity) with Muslim (the religion) and simplifies the complexity of gender performance in the region shaped by each country’s history and geopolitical context. This chapter offers a critique of the narratives. However, it also highlights progress being made in improving MENA masculi...

Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of “Men in Crisis,” Industries of Gender in Revolution

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2011

This article examines how everyday theories of masculinity and vernacular discourses of "masculinities in crisis" play crucial roles in misrecognizing, racializing, moralistically-depoliticizing, and class-displacing emergent social forces in the Middle East. Public discourses and hegemonic theories of male trouble render illegible the social realities of twenty-first-century multipolar geopolitics and the changing shapes of racialism, humanitarianism, nationalism, security governance, and social movement. In order to help generate new kinds of critical research on Middle East masculinities, this article creates a larger map of discourses and methods, drawing upon studies of coloniality and gender in and from the global South. This mapping puts masculinity studies into dialogue with critiques of liberalism and security governance and with work in postcolonial queer theory, public health studies, and feminist international relations theory.

Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab world

Gender & Development, 2016

ABSTRACT Ever since the uprisings that swept the Arab world, the role of Arab women in political transformations received unprecedented media attention. The copious commentary, however, has yet to result in any serious study of the gender dynamics of political upheaval. Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance is the first book to analyse the interplay between moments of sociopolitical transformation, emerging subjectivities and the different modes of women’s agency in forging new gender norms in the Arab world. Written by scholars and activists from the countries affected, including Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, this is an important addition to Middle Eastern gender studies