Maha El Said - Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World

More Praise for Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance

Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance challenges dominant periodizations of revolutions in the region, mapping a new and persuasive historiography of deeply feminist concerns. An important and original contribution to transnational, postcolonial feminist scholarship.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, distinguished professor of women's and gender studies, Syracuse University

If you are interested in Palestinian resistance of Israeli sexual interrogation techniques and/or the post-revolutionary politics of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia and how they have placed the body and sexuality at centre stage, this book offers fresh discussions of new approaches, debates and constructions that will help you appreciate the study of old and new forms of power and their complex relations.

Mervat F. Hatem, Howard University

About the Editors

Maha El Said is a professor at the English Department, Cairo University. She has more than years of experience teaching at Egyptian universities with a special interest in American studies. She was the first to write a book-length dissertation on Arab-American poetry, in 1997 . She has published on Arab-American writings, creative writing, popular culture and the impact of new technologies on literature. In 20032004 she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she researched the development of the spoken word as political expression.

Lena Meari is an assistant professor at the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department and the Institute of Womens Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her teaching, research interests and writing focus on settler colonialism in Palestine and formations of revolutionary movements, subjectivities, gender relations and development.

Nicola Pratt is reader in the international politics of the Middle East at University of Warwick. She has been researching and writing about Middle East politics since the end of the 1990 s and is particularly interested in feminist approaches as well as politics from below. Her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Third World Quarterly, Review of International Studies and Review of International Political Economy, amongst others. She is author of Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World, co-author (with Nadje Al-Ali) of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq and co-editor (with Sophie Richter-Devroe) of Gender, Governance and International Security and (with Nadje Al-Ali) Women and War in the Middle East. Between 2010 and 2013 , she was co-director of the Reconceptualising Gender: Transnational Perspectives research network with Birzeit University, Palestine.

Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance

Lessons from the Arab World

Edited by Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt

Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World was first published in 2015 by Zed Books Ltd, Unit 2.8, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London, SE11 5RR, UK

www.zedbooks.co.uk

Editorial copyright Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt 2015
Copyright in this collection Zed Books 2015

The rights of Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt to be identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Typeset in Joanna by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Index: Kerry Taylor
Cover designed by Kika Sroka-Miller

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78360-285-8

Contents

Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt

Shereen Abouelnaga

Lena Meari

Hala G. Sami

Maha El Said

Abeer Al-Najjar and Anoud Abusalim

Sahar Mediha Alnaas and Nicola Pratt

Omaima Abou-Bakr

Aitemad Muhanna

Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt

Acknowledgements

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who made this book possible. We begin by thanking the British Academy, as well as the Department of Politics and International Studies and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, both at the University of Warwick, for their funding of a workshop in July 2013 entitled Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World. The workshop came at the end of a three-year research partnership, funded by the British Academy, between the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender and Birzeit Universitys Institute of Womens Studies. The workshop enabled us to invite a number of scholars from the Middle East, North America, Europe and the UK to discuss womens agency, gender politics and the gender dimensions of socio-political transformations in the region. While we were unable to include all workshop participants in this volume, we would like to express our appreciation to everyone for their contributions, papers and stimulating discussions over the course of the workshop, in particular Shereen Abouelnaga, Anoud Abusalim, Sahar Mediha Alnaas, Abeer Al-Najjar, Alessia Belli, Erika Biagini, Frances Hasso, Nadia El Kholy, Solava Ibrahim, Merve Kutuk, Nof Nasser Eddin, Hala G. Sami, Mounira Soliman and Dina Wahba for their presentations; Nadje Al-Ali, Ruth Pearson, Sophie Richter-Devroe and Khursheed Wadia for chairing; and Lana Tatour for assistance.

We are very grateful to all the contributors to this book, who trusted us to compile this volume and who patiently and graciously worked on revisions to their chapters. Finally, we thank our commissioning editor, Kim Walker, for her support, guidance and patience throughout this project.

Nicola would like to give a special thanks to Professor Ruth Pearson, emeritus professor of development studies at Leeds University, for encouraging her to produce an edited volume based on the workshop, and to her co-editors, Lena Meari and Maha El Said, for their hard work and dedication to seeing this project through. It has been a great pleasure working together.

Lena would like to thank the members of the Institute of Womens Studies at Birzeit University for encouraging her to participate in the project and co-edit this volume. Further, she expresses her deep appreciation to the women whose life experiences, struggles and aspirations for liberation and justice have constituted the subject and material of this volume.

Maha would like to thank her colleagues at the Department of English Language and Literature, Cairo University, who have provided continuous support throughout the process. A special thanks goes to her co-editors, Nicola Pratt and Lena Meari, whose insights and perceptions sustained the intellectual stimulation amongst the editors and the authors until the final production.

INTRODUCTION

Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance in the Arab World

Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt

The aim of this volume is to go beyond the dichotomy of the discourses that have emerged since 2011, which either celebrate womens participation in the uprisings and mass protests that occurred across the Arab region or highlight that womens rights are being threatened by newly empowered conservative forces. Such narratives are predicated upon assumptions, rooted in Eurocentric/Orientalist epistemologies, about the essential and fixed patriarchal nature of Arab/Muslim culture and religion and its role in determining the position of women in Arab/Muslim countries. In this way, other factors shaping womens experiences, such as political economies or imperialist geopolitics, are ignored, whilst religion is posited as necessarily oppressive for women, as opposed to secularism, which supposedly guarantees their rights. Within such a framework of assumptions, there is a tendency to treat womens agency in the Arab world as an indication and reflection of liberal/feminist desires.