States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco
... This institutionalization has been at the heart of political rule since the coming of Islam to North Africa. With the birth of the nation-state in the region in the middle of the twentieth century, legal Islam has been used to maintain patriarchal authority through the control of family laws (Charrad 2001), which are today the only ones still based on traditional fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). With the coming of independence and the gradual spread of literacy, generations of women challenged the monopoly of legal Islam from various standpoints, hence producing women's movements whose main demand has been reform of the family laws. ...
... The objective of these laws was first and foremost to uphold the centuries-old legal Islam, a way of reassuring the patriarchal tribes (and the patriarchal urban nationalists) who fought for independence that the Islamic way of life was to be maintained (the structure and influence of the tribal system differed from country to country, but across the region the tribal system is by definition patriarchal as each tribe is supposed to have a common male ancestor. For a good analysis of the interaction between state-building, the tribal system, and women's rights, see Charrad 2001). ...
... This skeptical view of the research agenda of feminist scholars and the study of gender politics is a function of the autocratic character of the regimes in the region as well as of mixed historical legacies and current political bargains. Studies highlight the different ways in which the agenda of women's rights and gender equality have played edificatory roles in projects of colonialism, modernization, nationalism, Islamization, and later imperialism across the Middle East and North Africa (Abu-Lughod 1990;Ahmed 2011;Charrad 2001;El Guindi 1999;Lazreg 1990;Macleod 1991;Zuhur 1992). Postcolonial feminist scholars show how orientalist colonial discourses have presented the status of women in the wake of colonialism as a signifier of the inferiority of Muslim societies. ...
What challenges do researchers encounter in authentically engaging with the field site and academia when certain aspects of their true identities diverge from the established norms within those domains? Using the case of female political scientists who conduct research on gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa, I highlight the ethical, logistical, and epistemological challenges of carrying out research in a politically and socially closed context. Few studies have investigated how the research process and the knowledge it produces are affected by the intertwinement of authoritarianism and patriarchy, and by the researcher’s positionality within this context. This study fills this gap by drawing upon interviews with feminist political scientists who were born and raised in the region but are based in Western academic institutions to examine the impact of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the researchers’ insider/outsider positionality on the research process. The analysis shows three key findings. First, researching gender politics is a contentious topic that places researchers on the radar of the state. For scholars who are originally from the region, the issue is compounded by the fact that they are sometimes viewed as traitors by the regime in their country of origin, which accuses them of tarnishing the image of the government and scrutinizing its gender policies. Second, within the wider society, the politics of representation also impose certain limitations and expectations on female scholars. Such limitations include gendered restrictions on their access and mobility in the field. Finally, feminist researchers share how the knowledge they produce, which centers social justice demands, is not always valued in the discipline of political science. The article contributes to this discipline by expanding our understanding of the interplay between identity politics, fieldwork practices, and knowledge production in complex political and social settings.
... In tandem with actions from above, societal pressures from below, through women's and human rights associations, have been part and parcel of broader political struggles to equalize women's and men's civil, political and economic rights. These pressures have expanded citizenship-based rule in the MENA region (Al-Mughni, 2001;Butenschøn & Meijer, 2018;Charrad, 2001;Joseph, 2000aJoseph, , 2000bMoghadam, 2007;Parolin, 2009;Sonbol, 2012;Thompson, 2000Thompson, , 2013. ...
... Resisting and recontextualizing this diminishing rhetoric, author Mounira M. Charrad contributes to gendered analyses of the Maghreb region that bring attention to the oppressive systems that naturalize the devaluing of Muslim women in colonized territories. Charrad (2001) provides a gendered historical analysis of postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco in which she maps out precisely how familial Muslim law and patriarchy operate in identity formation and gender norms. For example, though Safia Azizi was an educated Muslim woman, whereas many of her porteadora coworkers tended to be working-class with little to no education, they all ended up in the same place because of Muslim family law, immigration laws, and the displacement of workers at the Nador/Melilla border. ...
This essay first analyzes the construction of a “Muslim Woman Other” as a particular social reality through the dissemination of academic and media discourses, militarization of the border, and the implementation of immigration policies and practices that allow “for the normalization of exclusionary practices,” which the Nijmegen school calls a process of “B/Ordering as Ordering and Othering.” Second, it positions porteadoras’ deaths and risks to their health within the political and the religious order; Muslim Moroccan women operate within strong religious and cultural spaces that dominate their everyday lives. The concept of “bordering and ordering” through “Othering” helps frame the Nador/Melilla border as the site where the “Muslim Woman Other” is constructed either as a de facto trope of victimhood in need of saving or as a national threat transgressing the management and ordering of the border and in need of violent discipline. The militarization of the Nador/Melilla border and implementation of immigration laws have served as major justifications to covertly exploit and cheapen the labor of Moroccan Muslim working-class women through globalized free market economies that erode welfare policies while supporting the free exchange of consumer goods.
... The Gender Order and the State It seems that the role of the state cannot be ignored -especially its project of nation-building and the centrality of gender in this project (Charrad 2001). Gender, politics, society and Islam are intimately connected not only in the narrative about the creation of the state but also in its everyday functioning. ...
... It was published in N° 1 of her father's Shams Al-Islam 7 Cited by Marzouki by an anonymous writer: Bchira B. Mrad, la femme que les terroristes français voulaient tuer, Réalités, 17/8/84, n° 42. 8 Ibid. 9 Marzouki, 80. 10 Chammam, 56-60. newspaper on 14 March 1937 (Chammam,30;45). ...
Can one understand the present without knowing the past? Isn’t life a continuation of the past and doesn’t the present owe many of its characteristics to the past? Asking these questions helps one to figure out how women who lived in a secluded and closed environment were able to break the walls that separated them from the public sphere. It is thus that we come to realize and understand how Bchira Ben Mrad’s (from now on: BBM) initiative in the early 1930s did not start from nowhere but had its origins in the women’s past of her country.
... The codification of family law in Muslim societies is a social and political undertaking that regulates the lives of citizens from birth to death and carries powerful symbolic meanings (Hallaq, 1984;Charrad, 2001;Buskens 2003). The conception and perception of the 2004 Moroccan Family Law in a space-based patriarchy is fundamental for the purpose of gaining insight to Islam and politics in the public sphere of authority, and to the status of women in and outside the home. ...
En la década de 1960 en Marruecos, coincidiendo con una época de cambio cultural y político, la prensa marroquí vivió un nuevo fenómeno: la aparición de revistas concebidas por, para y sobre mujeres. Este artículo parte de la idea de que el estudio de estas revistas resulta esencial tanto para entender las políticas de género como para trazar la historia intelectual del feminismo en Marruecos. Por ello, propone un recorrido por el desarrollo de la prensa femenina marroquí desde su surgimiento en los años sesenta hasta la actualidad, para analizar la evolución de sus concepciones sobre el papel que debían desempeñar las mujeres en la sociedad marroquí. Desde una perspectiva de género y feminista, el artículo examina el contenido de estas revistas que contribuyeron tanto a perpetuar estereotipos patriarcales sobre las mujeres marroquíes como a plasmar las primeras reivindicaciones feministas en Marruecos.
The chapter examines the importance of population dynamics in community Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) planning. This study’s population data for each village is based on the 2019 village registers. Social demographic data was collected using a comprehensive household survey in which structured questionnaires were administered to 167 community members in the Jariban district. The quantitative demographic data was subjected to descriptive statistics, regression, predictive and trend analysis. The segregation of men’s and women’s numbers is critical in planning services and predicting localised population growth, whereas gradual population growth has worked well for estimating populations at the provincial and national levels, estimating populations at the village level (for the year to come) in fragile contexts should be done using predictive equations. Population growth rates at a national scale may misrepresent that growth is linear when, in fact, many factors, such as disaster-induced migration, result in some villages losing population and others gaining exponentially. We should ascertain how droughts, wars, searching for pastures, water availability and security significantly contribute to population growth in each studied village. Furthermore, more studies should investigate whether village population estimates align with the national population estimates of 3% currently used by the World Population Review.
Extant scholarship suggests that autocrats employ quotas to cultivate an image of democratic governance, yet the mechanisms underlying these effects are underexplored. We conceptualize Gender Diplomacy (GD) as the strategic deployment of women in public diplomacy to enhance foreign perceptions. We conducted a nationally representative survey, randomly exposing 1,241 Americans to vignettes and photos depicting either an all male or a gender balanced Federal National Council in the UAE. Our findings reveal that GD improves perceptions in domains associated with stereotypically female traits, including viewing the UAE positively, but weaker effects in domains associated with male competencies, such as support for security cooperation. We argue that these effects are due to the implicit association between female traits and the UAE. Our research underscores the role of implicit gender biases in public diplomacy and informs debates on the strategic use of women's inclusion.
Is female labour force participation a good proxy for gendered time use? How do geography and the social institutions of caste and religion interact with the gendered distribution of time within Indian households? In this study, we use gender distance metrics, inspired by distance measures between vectors, to measure and document the extent to which time allocation within households is gendered. Importantly, the unconditional relationship between gender distance and labour force participation is not monotonic, and the linear relationship between the two is not statistically strong. Furthermore, we show that caste, religion, and region have distinct relationships with gendered time use metrics and with employment. In contrast to popular hypotheses which suggest North Indian, Muslim, and Upper Caste households are more gender unequal, interestingly, we only find robust confirmation for the hypothesis related to Islam in our regression framework. To further estimate the direct contribution of caste and religion in explaining the gendered time use gap between groups (as distinct from the contribution of differential distribution of covariates between groups), we supplement our regression results with Oaxaca-Blinder (1973) decomposition. These analyses confirm that caste and religion have complex and unexpected heterogeneous effects on the intensity of gendered time use. The results of the decomposition exercise suggest that caste and religious affiliation influence gender distance in distinct ways in the rural and urban sectors.
In this paper, we examine how religious mandates of the holy month of Ramadan affect the gendered distribution of time use within Muslim households in India. Using rich data on time use from a nationally representative time use survey and employing a difference-in-differences methodology, we test if Ramadan accentuates gender differences in time use. We find that, contrary to popular belief, Ramadan moderates the gender disparities in intra-household time use for Muslim households. The moderating influence is stronger in districts with a higher Muslim proportion. We find that the reduction in gender differences is due to declines in gender-specific time use in employment, learning activities, domestic work and self-care. Reduction in domestic work time for women, especially food preparation time, is more pronounced in districts with a high Muslim proportion, suggesting ‘communalisation of domestic work’ due to Ramadan.
This essay engages a broad geographic, demographic, and chronological scope on the topic of colonialism and Islamic reform to avoid the reinforcement of colonial era inventions and gender(ed) myths across education, the law, enslavement, hierarchies of gender, and Islamic reform. This essay argues that understanding women and gender in various colonial contexts is an important avenue for recovering the restorative work that women have done to reject colonial ideologies throughout history. Reflecting upon scholarship situated at the intersection of modern Islamic thought and feminism, new possibilities emerge to reframe the meaning of justice and freedom in this historiography and beyond.
How do citizens understand the drivers of revolutionary mobilization? Studies of revolution and contentious politics often focus on expressed grievances at the moment of protest in order to theorize the causes of mobilization. Yet citizens’ retrospective understandings of their country’s revolution may hold important implications for post-revolutionary politics. We argue that citizens in the aftermath of revolution may well hold divergent views about the main drivers of mass mobilization, and that these divergent views often map on to important social and political cleavages. Using an original nationally representative survey conducted in 2017, we analyze retrospective accounts of the socio-economic grievances underpinning the 2010/2011 Tunisian revolution, focusing on which socio-economic grievances Tunisians perceived as most important in driving revolutionary protests. We find the most significant variation at the regional level. We draw on existing scholarship on regional disparities to contextualize these findings. In interior governorates, where spontaneous anti-regime mobilization began in December 2010, citizens overwhelmingly identified unemployment as the key revolutionary grievance. In the capital and coastal regions, where mass protests emerged later in the revolutionary cycle and included a broader range of formal civil society actors, including powerful labor syndicates, citizens identified a wider array of grievances, including inadequate wages and lack of adequate access to healthcare. Beyond revolutionary contention, this article’s focus on retrospective grievances can serve to illuminate broader dynamics of contentious politics, particularly how important episodes of contentious politics are conceived years after they took place and how those conceptions might differ along politically or geographically salient cleavages in society.
Kadınların toplumlar içerisindeki nüfuslarına kıyasla siyasi temsildeki oranları çok düşük düzeyde kalmaktadır. Kadınların sayısal olarak nüfusları ile orantılı bir şekilde siyasete katıl(a)mamaları, demokrasilerde bir temsiliyet meselesi oluşturmaktadır. Aynı zamanda en temel insan hakları içerisinde yer alan seçme ve seçilme haklarından kadınların tam olarak faydalanamadıkları anlamına gelmektedir. Literatürde kadınların siyasete neden az sayılarda katıldıklarını anlamaya çalışan çalışmaların yanı sıra, neden kadınların daha fazla sayılarla siyasete katılması gerektiğine odaklanan çalışmalar mevcuttur. Birbirinden teorik ve metodolojik yöntemleri bakımından farklılaşan bu çalışmalar kadınların siyasete neden daha fazla sayılarla katılmaları gerektiğine farklı cevaplar sunmaktadır. Bu çalışma ise, farklı demokrasi deneyimleri üzerine yapılan nitel ve nicel çalışmaları bir araya getirmekte ve geniş bir perspektiften değerlendirilmektedir. Mevcut çalışmaların birbirini nasıl tamamladıkları ve bazı durumlarda da nasıl çeliştiklerine dair bir tartışma sunmaktadır.
With the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime in 2011, Tunisia’s artistic landscape has thrived. The Tunisian Revolution made room for a burst of creative energy following Ben Ali’s stifling dictatorship and his centralized manipulation of culture, putting an end to decades of censorship, control, and fear that were closely tied to the state’s security apparatus and a corrosive judicial and governmental establishment. As Khadija Hamdi (2013, p. 24) described it, “[i]t is as if the artists intend on catching up on the 23 years of losses, passivity, and sterility. There is a strong desire for ‘historical revenge’ to enable those involved in the art scene to set up new structures and thereby attempt to create artistic events in order to establish the conditions for the emergence of ‘contemporary art.’” Alongside the political revolution, a cultural transformation took place as artists became more critically engaged with the ongoing unrest, reflecting on and oftentimes questioning the relationship between the state and cultural production in their art, and more importantly imagining new ways that culture could transform society.
In this paper, I examine how public art projects in the Medina of Tunis “stay in the game,” a reference to the (social) media management strategies that projects pursue to attract and keep funding. Following the 2011 “Arab Spring,” revolution, known locally as the thawra, a vibrant public art scene has formed centered in the Medina of Tunis, the highly visible but economically marginalized historic center of the city of Tunis. The formation of this public art scene is due largely to a post‐revolution influx of foreign development funding. The public art scene in the Medina of Tunis, bolstered by social media, has been widely articulated as providing visibility to marginalized communities through participatory methods. I argue that this claim paradoxically obscures the diverse lifestyles and imaginaries of the communities that public art projects aim to benefit. This paradox is rooted in both a history of mediating the historic city as an image of a modern nation, and public art's dependency on foreign funding, which draws it into maintaining foreign neoliberal interests while expressing these interests as essentially local. Meanwhile, improvements in the material conditions for residents of the Medina, expressed in terms of mirtah(comfort), remain elusive.
This chapter considers the history of state feminism as a modernity project across the Middle East and North Africa, connecting it to political economic outcomes for women across a variety of rentier states. It discusses Rentier-State Theory in-depth and unpacks how the social outcomes created by different rentier states can be a blessing as well as a curse for women, depending on the type of rent-dependencies predominant in a given country.KeywordsMiddle East/North AfricaWomenPolitical participationState feminismNeoliberal feminismModernizationDevelopmentRentier-state theoryGendered rentierism
The fourth chapter provides a perspective on more individualized and fungible forms of funding: remittances. This chapter shows how monies sent home by diasporas living abroad incentivize important shifts in gender dynamics in the home, which can translate into the workplace, and ultimately into the political arena. I elaborate on the values directly and indirectly exported through remittances by Arab diasporas living abroad, and using survey data show that, in fact, the attitudes of remittance recipients have become more progressive over time on key women’s rights issues.KeywordsMiddle East/North AfricaWomenRemittancesResource curseWomen’s labor force participationWomen’s legislative representationRents/rentierism
This chapter offers a broad discussion of the impact of financial globalization and neoliberal capitalism on women’s political opportunities across the Middle East and North Africa. It introduces the central lens guiding the book’s analysis: gendered rentierism—a term coined to help map the interdependence between the dominant political economy of Arab states and women’s socio-political choices. The chapter considers how authoritarian upgrading enables gendered rentierism and concludes with an overview of the book.KeywordsMiddle East/North AfricaWomenElectionsGendered rentierismState feminismAuthoritarian upgrading
This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.
The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms.
With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.
This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.
The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms.
With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.
Dr./Mrs. or Chief/Mrs. Nike Okundaye or yet “Mama Nike” is used by most of the people who have come to know her and her work. One will think that with all the above titles that Mama Nike is one of the privileged African educated women, unfortunately, this is not the case.
The 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, was a watershed moment not only for human reproduction, but for feminist anthropology. Over the past forty years, the anthropology of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has flourished, with feminist ethnographers studying the ways in which both reproduction and gender have been transformed. Such feminist ethnographic approaches are particularly important in parts of the world routinely stereotyped as patriarchal. This chapter takes readers to the Muslim Middle East, where Inhorn has “traveled with” ARTs for more than thirty years. She answers six common questions posed by Westerners—questions that reflect the myths, misunderstandings, and unwarranted assumptions about gender in the Middle East, and the reproductive lives of both men and women there.
This chapter provides a broad explanation of the distinctive political, economic, and social dimensions within the MENA region that might or might not affect the levels of corruption in the fifteen countries under study during the years from 1999 to 2010. This time period represents—in most of the countries—the continuation in power of either the same person or a successor sharing his predecessor’s ideology. The Arab Spring countries are at present in a period of unsteady transition towards democracy. The dramatic and continuing changes since 2011 make it difficult to reach outcomes for the current period.
The fourth chapter contains an analysis of terrorism from the perspective of feminist theory. The author treats terrorism as a form of political violence through the prism of the crime–terror paradigm, and points to the indispensability of using feminist terms and concepts in the analysis of this phenomenon. In this chapter she refers to criminology and psychoanalysis in order to highlight the problem of the replication of incomplete and discriminatory views that portray the female criminal as a kind of deviation, a caprice, or an anomaly. She proposes to use feminist theories to study extremism and terrorism. This perspective makes it possible to broaden the scope of analyses and to raise awareness about gender stereotypes, prejudices, and the duplication of discriminatory practices in research.
Tunisia was the first Arab country to reform its family law radically in favor of women’s rights, giving women and men equal rights in divorce. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Ben Ali’s Tunisia, this chapter considers the feminist question of what happens when the state increasingly regulates family life and intervenes in the intimate affairs of its citizens. This chapter draws on different aspects of authority to explore how women and men perceived and experienced these divorce laws. It argues that shifts in authority – in the realms of kinship and citizenship – contributed to tensions that were embodied in the sentiment that the law believed women, at the expense of men. In practice, this meant that in some instances, although women had gained a voice in the divorce court, socially and within marriage, they may remain silent.
North African women in general and Moroccan women in particular are no longer absent from the public sphere. They are activists “claiming equal rights and full citizenship” (Arfaoui 2014). Secular women’s organizations have made demands of their respective governments and put pressure on their parliaments or on the UN Commission on the Status of Women for fundamental changes in gender roles. The most remarkable change consists of women’s different achievements in legal rights and public life. In this respect, Tunisia has taken the lead, owing to its larger middle class, and Morocco is at the head of another substantive development. Using the protest strategies borrowed from human rights organizations, secular feminist activists continue the fight against violence and discrimination against women. Women’s activism has transformed gender roles and has led to a change in their status with regard to socio-political institutions and to their active political participation. Further measures in favor of protecting women’s rights are needed to guarantee their empowerment and contribution to development and democratization in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
Over the past two decades, women’s participation in the public sphere has increased significantly in Sub-Saharan African countries. Nonetheless, women’s participation in public decision-making in conflict settings remains limited. The Somali case is instructive here in that women in this war-torn country have traditionally been excluded from access to or participation in the public sphere. Despite local and international efforts aimed at enhancing women’s participation in public decision-making, especially in peace-building, Somali women are still not adequately involved in formal public decision-making in general and in peace-building in particular. Some studies point to links between the tribal-centred underpinnings of the recent political set-up in Somalia and barriers to Somali women’s participation in the public sphere. Using original micro-level data, this chapter investigates the impacts of patriarchal kin-based Somali traditional values on gender equality in the processes of finding a mechanism of transitional justice that can lead to equal peace. The data presented in this chapter point to strong support for Somali women’s public sphere participation as well as concerns about and strong belief in that the kin-based Somali customary law or xeer, without formal and informal interventions/amendments, would not facilitate women’s public sphere participation.
Cet article s’intéresse à l’évolution des questions et des mobilisations liées aux femmes et au genre en Irak depuis l’instauration du Code du statut personnel en 1959 et explore l’actuelle fragmentation ethno-confessionnelle des droits des femmes. L’auteure propose de comprendre l’évolution des droits des femmes irakiennes et de leurs conditions de vie en insistant sur l’importance d’adopter une approche complexe, intersectionnelle et historique. Elle se situe ainsi en rupture avec une approche qui se limiterait à analyser la situation des femmes irakiennes à travers un islam indifférencié ou une violence genrée supposée ancestrale. Dans cette perspective, l’article montre que les questions de genre sont imbriquées aux questions d’identité ethnique et confessionnelle, de nationalisme, de religion, à la nature des régimes politiques et aux développements sociaux et économiques qui marquent le pays depuis l’établissement de la République irakienne en 1958. L’auteure examine d’abord les débats et les mobilisations autour des droits juridiques des femmes en Irak. Elle propose ensuite une analyse de la violence politique, économique et militaire qui structure la violence genrée et la définition des normes et des relations de genre depuis les années 1980. Enfin, elle analyse la spécificité de la fragmentation ethno-confessionnelle qui influe sur la vie et les mobilisations des femmes irakiennes depuis 2003.
There is a substantial body of literature that analyzes secularism in terms of the way religion is regulated. In this context, while moderate secularism tolerates religious expression in the public sphere, authoritarian secularism limits religion to the private realm. In this study, authoritarian secularism is analyzed by employing insights from the governmentality approach. By studying Turkey and Tunisia in their immediate post-independence periods, it is demonstrated that authoritarian secularism not only privatizes religious beliefs and practices, but it also aims to transform citizens by dictating a particular social imaginary through political intervention.
From the start of the Arab revolutions in late 2010, a connection between the law, state, political economy, gender norms and orientalist ideology has formed the foundation of women’s systematic exclusion from politics. By unmasking processes in Egypt that have created the ideological and material conditions of externalising women’s revolutionary acts, estranging their political involvement, and exposing them to various forms of violence, this article offers a gendered political reading of the concept of alienation. The article suggests that gender-normative ideology’s characterisation of women’s images, roles and acts during and after revolutions, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation. The article identifies the externalisation and subjugation of women, and objectification of their revolutionary acts as modes of alienation. Moreover, it proposes that the implementing of these modes of alienation are necessary for creating conditions that allow for the reconfiguration of power dynamics that restore the authoritarian power of the state. This discussion suggests that the sphere of politics not only relates to political activism and conflict between revolutions and counter-revolutions, but that it is also a battlefield for the (re)production of gender-normative knowledge.
This paper provides an analysis and critique of the legal provisions concerning violence against women, child custody, paternity, early marriage and inheritance in Jordan. It focuses on these specific areas because they were deemed both areas of challenge for women, and ones with wide potential for reform. The paper demonstrates the complex and dynamic relationship between Islam, law and tribal traditions, and how these operate to disempower and curtail women’s rights. The aims are to open a dialogue on the possibility of legal reform through modern and contextualised interpretations of Shari’a, and to offer recommendations to legislators, legal practitioners and non-government organisations on how Islamic norms and jurisprudence may be used to promote structural and normative change.
The present study sheds light upon critical factors that help explain the entrepreneurial success among Muslim women living in a democratic Tunisia, a Muslim-majority country considered by many to be the lone Arab Spring success story. We hypothesized that successful entrepreneurs need social capital, including the capital that comes from marriage and high levels of wasta (the Arabic concept of having personal connections with influential others). Moreover, given the lack of empirical attention paid to the role of the culture, language, and customs associated with Islam on women’s empowerment, we examine whether religiosity is related to entrepreneurial performance among Tunisian women. Data collected with 84 female entrepreneurs participating in entrepreneurship training programs across Tunisia reveal that two forms of social capital, marital status and wasta, are related to training center directors’ ratings of women entrepreneurs’ performance, suggesting that social capital is a critical asset for Muslim women entrepreneurs. Religiosity, on the other hand, had no statistically significant relationship with entrepreneurial performance. Our study contributes to research on entrepreneurship by identifying wasta as a form of social capital that may be necessary for women entrepreneurs to succeed in the Middle East and North Africa and by taking an initial step towards better understanding the empirical (and controversial) relationship between religiosity and career success among Muslim women. We recommend that training organizations supporting entrepreneurs directly assist women in the development of social capital and acknowledge, rather than ignore, that nepotism and wasta are linked to entrepreneurial success in some cultures.
I 2003 lancerede Tunesiens præsident Ben Ali en liberalisering af medielandskabet, der betød at private, tunesiske radio- og tv-stationer for første gang blev lanceret. En nærmere indsigt i disse nye medier viser blandt andet, at de blev lanceret for at sikre regimets magt.
Social theories of gender and sexuality from the Global North do not adequately consider the problematic of modernity. The chapter urges Northern social theory to do so in two ways. The first is to take seriously the postcolonial critique of Northern sociological theory, and to recognize the taken-for-granted modernization theses and epistemological categories that still delimit Northern feminist sociological theory. Secondly, I urge Northern feminist social theory to examine its own modernist “metaphysics,” the first principles that organize sociological theories of gender and sexuality. We ought to recognize how metaphysical categories bequeathed by Simone de Beauvoir, and others, form the backbone of the otherwise loose conglomeration of sociological theories of gender and sexuality. This backbone is the view of a core dialectic between “plastic embodiment” and hardened social order. Northern feminist social theory therefore needs to grapple not only with a global analysis of modernity and racialized regimes of gender and sexuality, but also to recognize, through critical assessment, the metaphysical legacies bequeathed by North-modernist foundational thinkers.
en At a time when Western humanitarian rescue discourses seek to save Muslim women from irrational and violent Islamic masculinities, the Jordanian Islamist charity ‘the Chastity Society’ seeks to train young men to restrain their excessive masculine passions to ensure that Muslim women are spared the fate of the benighted and oppressed Western woman. This article traces parallel emphases on gender essentialism, rationality, cultural pathology, and abjection to argue that a shared language of contention unites both Islamists and those who advocate for Western humanitarian interventions. I explore how several kinds of social control are legitimized through these symmetrical polemics about gender, order, and civilization.
Abstract
fr
La Société de la Chasteté : discipliner les hommes musulmans
Résumé
À l'heure où les humanitaires occidentaux appellent à sauver les femmes musulmanes de l'irrationnelle et violente masculinité islamique, une association islamiste jordanienne, « la Société de la Chasteté », enseigne aux jeunes hommes comment réfréner les débordements de leurs passions masculines, afin d’épargner aux femmes musulmanes le sort des Occidentales opprimées et maintenues dans l'ignorance. Le présent article montre les parallélismes dans l'accent qui est placé sur l'essentialisme de genre, la rationalité, la pathologie culturelle et l'abjection. L'auteur met ainsi en lumière un langage commun de la contention qui réunit aussi bien les islamistes que les partisans des interventions humanitaires occidentales. Il explore la manière dont ces polémiques symétriques sur l’égalité des sexes, l'ordre et la civilisation légitiment plusieurs formes de contrôle social.
Public opinion is patriarchal in the MENA, leading to low women’s workforce participation and political and economic problems. Efforts to explain attitudes focus on Islam and modernization, but miss employment-based mechanisms. Interest- and exposure-based employment theories, drawn from US sociological studies, argue that employed women and their husbands develop feminist views through redefinition of interests and exposure to women’s capabilities. Using data from six Arab countries, I find support for employment-based theories. Husbands of employed wives exhibit greater egalitarianism than single men and husbands of nonworking wives. Female supporters of Shari’a are less accepting of inequality than religious men, suggesting gendered interpretations of Islam. The results complement research on women, Islam, and oil and underscore the importance of supporting women’s employment.
What is empowerment? Is empowerment a static concept, or does it constantly vary and transform across time and different contexts? How can empowerment be studied amid societal and political transformation? Is it time to abandon the long-standing cultural paradigm applied to the study of gender and usher in a new era of feminist studies—one with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of women’s issues across the MENA region? To answer these questions, the analyses presented in this book shed light on some of the most critical issues impeding the advancement of women’s rights, such as patriarchy and Islam, barriers to women’s agency in the legal and socioeconomic realms, women’s access to the decision-making process, citizenship rights, and the impact of conflict on women’s status.
Despite similarities between the Egyptian and Tunisian experiences since the onset of the Arab Spring, the two countries have taken different paths to democracy and to achieving gender parity in the decision-making process. While both countries have recently enshrined women’s political rights in their post-revolutionary constitutions, wide variations still exist regarding women’s substantive gains in the electoral arena. The goal of this chapter is to offer an in-depth examination and analysis of the gender-related articles in both the Egyptian and the Tunisian constitutions—especially those directly addressing women’s political representation. The chapter concludes with a broader discussion of the prospects of women’s political participation in the MENA region.
Why do so many developing countries have gender quota policies? This article argues that foreign aid programmes influence developing countries to adopt policies aimed at fulfilling international norms regarding gender equality. This relationship is driven by two causal mechanisms. On the one hand, countries may use gender quotas as a signal to improve their standing in the international hierarchy, possibly as an end unto itself, but more likely as a means towards ensuring future aid flows. On the other, countries may adopt gender quotas as a result of successful foreign aid interventions specifically designed to promote women’s empowerment. I test these two causal mechanisms using data on foreign aid commitments to 173 non-OECD countries from 1974 to 2012. The results suggest that while programmes targeting women’s empowerment may have some influence on quota adoption, developing countries dependent on United States foreign aid are also likely to use gender quotas as signalling devices rather than as a result of ongoing liberalization efforts.
Die tunesische Revolution bildete den Anfang des so genannten „arabischen Frühlings“. Der Selbstverbrennungsakt des arbeitslosen Studenten Muhammed Bouazizi, von der Polizei gedemütigt und misshandelt, hatte bisher nicht gekannte Möglichkeiten erfolgreicher Mobilisierung verschiedener gesellschaftlicher Klassen zur Folge, die nicht nur die westliche Öffentlichkeit, sondern auch die Nahostforschung überraschten.
The chapter examines women’s attitudes and forms of femininity by scrutinizing how women view themselves within the system of guardianship and the restrictions it imposes. The chapter challenges the general notion that education, class, and secularism are the main factors providing women with the tools to challenge normative femininity. Rather, it proposes to complicate and go beyond this classic understanding to show how women enact and perceive normative femininity in countless ways. The chapter sheds light on three particular ways through which women perceive their femininity: a compliance with normative femininity, a pragmatic view, where the perception of the Self and practices are often at odds, and finally, an exceptional view where femininity is masculinized and seen as an exception from the norm.
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