WUNRN
The
Journal of North African Studies
Volume
19, Issue 2, 2014
Women
, Gender & The Arab Spring
Editor: Andrea
Khalil
GENDER PARADOXES OF THE ARAB SPRING - EDITOR’S PREFACE
The idea for this collected volume came out of an urgent need to focus on how women are impacting and being impacted by the on-going transformations in the Arab Spring geography. The events in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Algeria and across the region have been permeated by struggles related to women's rights: gender politics (legislation, constitutional articles and transitional justice) and gender-based violence. However, serious discussions about gender equity have been sidelined by louder and on-going complications of transitional democracy, constitution drafting, elections and protracted questions of transitional justice. All of these aspects of democratic transition in North Africa have gender-related dimensions, yet these dimensions have been marginalised or recuperated by political agendas. As most of the contributors in this volume point out in their essays, gender-sensitive legislations (quotas, personal status codes, justice for female victims of state violence, etc.) have been discussed in ideological ways through the ‘state feminist’ discourses of the previous regimes as well as the governments that rose to power after the Arab Spring. The aim of the volume is to propose new lenses for thinking about gender, given the contemporary context, to provide a theoretical understanding of events that have occurred to women, and to make sense of the gender-political debates since the Arab Spring. The authors of this volume have tracked, measured and theorised women's involvement in protest, debates about citizenship, constitution-writing and electoralism throughout the historic events of 2011–13 across North Africa.
There
are common themes that emerge from the essays and there is underlying consensus
among its authors. Broadly speaking, the authors acknowledge that female
activism has shifted sharply away from a situation in which state-sanctioned
women's associations were authorised to deal with the ‘woman question’ in North
Africa and which were necessarily entangled with authoritarian governments. The
authors of this volume agree that the state-serving ‘feminism’ of the
nationalist, post-independence regimes lacked a real feminist agenda and
exacerbated the difficult conditions of rural and poor women. The shift since
the 14 January Tunisian revolution towards non-institutional activism on the
streets and through cyber-space on Facebook, Twitter and blogging has de-centralised
gender activism. In the context of the Arab Spring, popular pressures have been
applied to the new governments by a wide range of groups of women whose
opinions are redefining how constitutional and legal language treats gender in
newly debated definitions of national identity. This shift in the women's
rights question from state-defined action to atomised forms of cyber activism
and street action is characteristic of the broader shifts in North African
popular politics that culminated in the Arab Spring. Politics is no longer
controlled by a single party, set of state actors or a by a single man. Rather,
it has increasingly taken the form of popular ‘activisms’, rejecting
state-imposed binaries such as state/society in favour of non-institutional
forms of political intervention and contestation. The calls for gender dignity
and justice, in this new period, echoes the style, media and dynamics of Arab
Spring politics more broadly.
The
contributors to this volume concur about those basic assertions. However, there
is diversity in the contributors' approaches to the question of gender
politics. Some are academics and teachers, namely Sherine Hafez, Mounira
Charrad, Amina Zarrough, Loubna Hanna Skalli and Samia Errazzouki. Others,
however, are researchers who devote their professional lives to the politics of
gender activism. Two of these gender activists have worked within the state
institutions; Boutheina Cheriet and Lilia Labidi are both former Ministers of
Women's Affairs (Algeria and Tunisia, respectively) in addition to being
academics. Two other gender activists have worked for gender equity in
non-governmental organisations. Maya Morsy, holder of an advanced academic
degree, is a non-governmental gender activist, serving as the Gender Practice
Team Leader of the United Nations Development Program in Cairo. Zahraʾ
Langhi is the co-founder of the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace (LWPP) and
led the LWPP's lobbying for the ‘zipper list’ (alternation of men and women in
political parties) to be instituted in Libyan electoral law. She also
coordinated the first post-revolution national security meetings that engaged
senior leaders of militias, intelligence officials, women and youth activists
in Libya. These ‘governmental’ and non-governmental gender activists have been
included in this volume as a result of the clear impact (if not unqualified
success) of gender activism on the struggles for gender equality. In her
Foreword to this volume, Valentine Moghadam notes the ‘legal and policy reforms
that have been achieved over the years as a result of women's rights activism’.
Indeed, a critical part of how theory needs to be recalibrated in the wake of
the Arab Spring is the consistency with which we integrate gender activists'
work and their empirical findings into a ‘scholarly’ discussion. The work of
North African gender activists is not a raw material to be used to produce
discursive frameworks constructed elsewhere, in geo-politically dominant zones,
but as inherently significant contributions. The interactions in the real world
between intellectual work and gender activism are reproduced in this volume via
the textual interactions between scholarly and activist discourses. The scope
of the contributions ranges from theoretical considerations on how the female
body has been a site of governmental and state power to more empirical case
studies of the struggles for gender-sensitive legislation waged in the
transitional period. The interaction between theory and empirical studies in
this collection is reflective of the way in which the struggle for gender
equality has been moving forward. Indeed, within each article there is an
alternating focus between the theoretical approach to the study of gender in
Muslim-dominant societies and the need to pinpoint particular cases of women
who have triggered widespread social movements, and been targets of state,
gender-based violence. Theoretical considerations are dependent on the fleshing
out of empirical changes and events. This volume reflects that dialectic.
There
is a history of writing about women's rights and gender in the Middle East and
North Africa. The authors of this collection are well versed in this body of
literature and bring that knowledge to bear on the contemporary North African
situation. Contributors are responding to the literature of the female body as
a nexus of state power and political brokering. Sherine Hafez's essay, in
particular, draws on feminist theory of women's bodies in the Middle East and
North Africa, and describes the subversive potential of women's bodies in the
context of the Egyptian uprisings. She brings feminist theory into the context
of Tahrir Square and the violence asserted on the female body on the streets of
Cairo and institutionally through Egyptian politics. She discusses this power
dynamic via three examples: ‘the legal case of Samira Ibrahim against the
military apparatus's virginity tests … the circumstances
surrounding the brutal attack on a female protester dubbed “the girl in the
blue bra” by the media, and … Aliaa Al Mahdy's “nude activism”.’
She describes how subversive representations of women's bodies act as a
‘counter discursive narrative directly undermining hegemonic discourse and thus
reworking the female body into a strategy of dissent.’
This
type of theorisation of women's bodies in the power nexus of contemporary
politics is critical for an understanding of gender activism in Libya, where
women were so long repressed by Libyan political life. Zahraʾ Langhi's
paper on gender equity in post-Qaddafi Libya provides a detailed and first-hand
account of the gender struggles occurring in Libya, showing that Libya is not a
lost cause for women's rights but rather an on-going and vibrant terrain of
resistance and action. In her paper, Langhi argues that women's role should not
be limited to defending women's rights issues or just their formal numerical
representation in decision-making bodies. Rather they should struggle to become
influential shapers of a new discourse of politics of inclusion which rests
upon inclusive state-building, gender-equitable institutional reform, inclusive
social transformation, demilitarization and peace building.
This
paper provides a unique view into the struggles for gender inclusive
state-building practices that are occurring in Libya by Libyan gender activists
and scholars.
This
new wave of women's rights activism has seen young, poor and previously
voiceless individuals triggering social change. The authors in this volume all
show how ordinary women have pushed women's rights to the fore in new ways and
at unprecedented levels. The ‘self-immolation of single mother Fadoua Laroui
and the suicide of Amina Filali, a young rape victim forced into a marriage
with her rapist’ (Errazzouki) are two examples of how young, previously silenced
individuals have become important prompts for sweeping social mobilisation and
political change. Samia Errazzouki focuses on the double marginalisation of
working-class women in Morocco and captures how the Moroccan regime has
maintained power through neoliberal reform at the expense of working class
women.
The
state ‘feminism’ that it introduced as an ideological buttress to its policies
of economic liberalisation, served as a smokescreen of ‘feminism’ while
actually exacerbated an already struggling poor class of Moroccan women. The
neo-liberal economic policies of Mohammed VI have been disadvantageous to women
and the disenfranchisement of working class women has grown even more evident
following their active participation in the February 20 Movement, which was
Morocco's version of the uprisings in the region.
Errazzouki's
paper shines light on the critical problem of class-based economic violence
within the gender discussion.
This
era has seen the proliferation of non-institutional women's movements,
displacing the old-guard women's associations, applying pressure on the
governments during the transitional period in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. In
their article, ‘Equal or complimentary’ Mounira Charrad and Amina Zarrugh show
how grass roots mobilisation in Tunisia has allowed for the emergence of a new
public sphere, using the pressure of public opinion to impact the outcome of
constitutional debates around gender as an example of that shift.
They
argue that the shift has been facilitated by the emergence of a new public
sphere and engaged civil society following the fall of the Zine El Abidine Ben
Ali regime in 2011 (and) focus on the promulgation of a new constitution and
the debate surrounding Article 28, which has been contested by some Tunisians
as reducing women's status to ‘complementary’. The impact on women of Tunisia's
expanded public sphere is further developed in Lilia Labidi's article on women
artists since the 14 January revolution. Labidi's article shows how freedoms
gained since the Tunisian revolution have led to a new wave of Tunisian women's
artistic expression. She traces what she calls a shift from the old model of
‘politico-esthetic’ expression of women's art from the 1940s to the Arab
Spring's new ‘ethical and collectivist languages’ of artistic expression.
Labidi writes of the post-14 January period as the beginning of a movement from
an art defined by the politico-aesthetics of the 1940s to an aesthetics post-14
January, which rejects both state feminism and a Wahhabi project, and strives
to construct a humanist and feminist art that unites personal experience,
spirituality, and transcultural values.
Labidi
succeeds in highlighting the ways in which post-revolution freedom of
expression has also been marked by repression, incarceration, and abuse of
certain (female) artists for their artistic production. Labidi's paper is at
once hopeful about the new language of liberty for Tunisian women artists, but
also critical of how the newly empowered governmental and social forces have
inflicted violence on women who express their views. The other authors share
this ironic position; while women's voices are heard at a new level across the
revolutionary geography there are intense levels of public violence against
women being committed under the eyes of the governments and society. Therein
lies one of the several gender paradoxes that typify the events of the Arab
Spring.
Boutheina
Cheriet pinpoints another one of these gender paradoxes. Cheriet traces the
Algerian state's fundamental ambiguity with regard to notions of citizenship
thereby producing a gender paradox. The ambiguity of the post-Independence,
revolutionary Algerian regime, she argues, resides in its subscription to a modern,
universalist notion of citizenship while at the same time reserving as its
foundation the patriarchal, ‘original’ and authenticating cultural values of
Islamist culture, based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of Shariʿa law.
‘Despite a frank declaration in favour of a modernist state and nation building
after national independence in 1962’, Cheriet writes, the elites in power have
shown clear hesitations at cutting ties with the patriarchal order of
traditional society, both in the public arena of an open unconditional
democracy, and the private arena of the family structure, where gender roles
have been approached along a mythical interpretation of scriptural Islamic laws
marred with traditionalist mores regarding gender equality. The end result is
the perpetuation of an ambiguous authoritarian political system whereby
citizenship rights and the practice of open democracy are far from being
universal. In the Algerian example, Cheriet shows, the underlying patriarchy of
the nationalist regime, despite its adherence to the concept of universal
citizenship, merges with Islamist notions of disenfranchisement of women. She
proposes that the Algerian example of an ambivalent notion of citizenship and
its impact on women's rights provides a useful lesson for what is happening
with the post-Arab Spring Islamist regimes.
Indeed,
the debates about citizenship and national identity strike new tension with
notions of citizenship and ‘feminism’ as defined by the nationalist regimes.
The youth generation of Arab Spring female activists maintains an uncomfortable
relationship with ‘feminist’ groups, which were allowed to function under Ben
Ali and Hosni Mubarak. Loubna Hanna Skalli's article on sexual harassment in
North Africa tracks the generational pivot made by the young generation of
North African women, and men, who fight for gender equality; their struggle is
more inscribed in human rights discourse rather than feminism. The new
generation also distinguishes itself by its diversity of class belonging, rejecting
the elite, institutional and state-sanctioned nature of previous feminist
groups. Fighting sexual harassment against women, Skalli argues, is done
through the Internet and cyber activism and seeks more than ever to undo
state-sanctioned patriarchy that buttresses the so-called ‘feminism’ of the
past generation.
The
struggles between the pre-revolutionary brand of state feminism (under Anwar
Sadat and Mubarak) and the rising tide of Islamist rule in Egypt are the
subject of Maya Morsy's paper. Morsy wrote her paper during the period of the
military coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi, the former Egyptian president. Her
account provides detailed information about how the Freedom and Justice Party
(the party of the Muslim Brotherhood) resisted the introduction of gender
equity legislation in the post-Mubarak era. Yet she problematises the tendency
to interpret the debate entirely within the Islamist/secularist divide. She
writes that: ‘To begin with, simply permitting the national dialogue over
women's rights in Egypt to be cast as one of political Islam versus Mubarak-era
policies may prove, in and of itself, a politically strategic error.’ She
treats the competition between secular and Islamist discourses with critical
distance, recognising the gains achieved under Mubarak and the folly of
rejecting those in the name of ridding the country of all-things-Mubarak.
Despite the main thrust of the Freedom and Justice Party's resistance and
obstruction to women's rights and women's political participation, she does not
fail to include the economic benefits instituted by the Brotherhood party,
assistance which helped seven million female heads of household. This reaching
out to the poorest of Egyptian women is recognised in her analysis.
Despite
the divergences in focus of the contributions, some of whom are presenting more
empirical findings while others are focusing more on their theoretical aspects,
there is consensus about the importance of gender equity and justice for a
successful transition to democracy. The contributors not only signal the
importance of women's political participation, but also of gender-sensitive
transitional justice and legislation, economic justice with gender
considerations, and freedom from gender-based violence for the success of
democracy in the post-Arab Spring era. Even more significant than female
participation (representation in government and parliament) is the gender
equity that must be built into the institutions and laws of the post-Arab
Spring governments as a prerequisite to democratisation in North Africa.
Valentine Moghadam, in her Foreword, succinctly states that point of consensus
when she asserts: ‘Those countries that have seen advances in women's
participation and rights are the ones most likely to experience a successful democratic
transition and consolidation.’ The observations formulated by the contributors
to this volume all converge on the necessity of gender equity for a move
towards democratisation in North Africa.
When
I proposed this special issue on women, gender and the Arab Spring, I had been
in North Africa for most of 2011, 2012 and 2013. During those years I met many
women activists from the region, mostly from Tunisia where I was based, but
also from Libya and Algeria. I conducted interviews with some of them, and I
heard many stories of their activism and injuries, both physical and moral. In
my contribution to this volume I detail the positions of Tunisian women who
participated in the revolution and the first transitional period. I discuss the
similarities between the nationalist era's ‘gender paradox’ and the situation
post-14 January 2011. Although the revolution marked the foundation of an
entirely new era, it is also a reiteration or restoration of nationalist gender
dynamics. The revolution restores both original principles of justice (whether
Islamist or secularist in intent) and prior paradoxes of gender inequality
within a discourse of freedom and dignity.
The
situation of women during and prior to the democratic transitions in North
Africa, is worthy of on-going focus and attention. The authors in this volume,
some of whom wrote under radically unstable conditions, especially my Egyptian
and Libyan colleagues who were drafting their articles during the military coup
that ousted Mohamed Morsi and the on-going violence in Libya, have made this
endeavour a success. Their voices from and about Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt,
Algeria and Libya have contributed to the long-term project of theorising and
practising gender-sensitive approaches to democratic transition in this time of
a profound regional pivot. I thank these contributors for their thoughtful and
diligent work and it has been an honour to work with them.