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LSE: Public lectures and events
New Trends of Women's Activism after the Arab Uprisings: Redefining Women's Leadership
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- [00:00]
A
Thanks everyone for coming to the talk this afternoon. My name is Lori Allen. I'm an anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at soaz. My work is primarily on Palestine. I'm very happy to be here chairing the talk with Ahmed this afternoon. I just want to give you a couple of words about how the afternoon will run. Ertemad will speak for about 30 minutes and then obviously we'll have lots of time for Q and A afterwards. I want to ask you at this minute, make sure that you've turned off your phone and all beeping, ringing, flashing devices, please. Thanks. And also if you're interested in tweeting about this event, you're welcome to do so. The hashtag is lsemohanna. That's the last name of the speaker. So Etemed Mohana is a research fellow at the Middle east center and she's currently conducting research on Salafist youth in Tunisia and processes of subjectification. Her PhD thesis was published in a book, Agency and Gender in Masculinity, Femininity and family, during the second intifado that came out with Ashgate Press in October 2013. So so welcome Etemad. You've got 30 minutes. I will cut you off at the appropriate time. Poor Etemad is ill, so if you don't hear her, put up your hand and she'll give another effort.
- [01:43]
B
Thank you very much Lori for your introduction and thank you for everyone coming to attend or to listen to my presentation. I wish I would manage to do all my presentation without coughing if I'm lucky. So, as you notice, maybe in the title, my presentation is about new trends of mass women's activism in post uprising countries and focusing on redefining women's leadership based on their experiences during the Arab uprising and after. As you all know, Arab women have actively engaged in the changing politics of their countries. Yet women's activists, their voices, their networks remain fragile and divided due to a superficially Islamic feminist identity division that was basically during the field research Things too much changing since then since 2013, both Islamists, women and feminist activists, particularly the elite, enhance the binary between Islamic culture and feminism. They assume there is no way to reconcile universal feminist principles based on international laws with local religious and cultural values and practices that have historically been distorted and disinterpreted by dominant male religious and political authorities. However, the Arab uprising. Show a fact that the fragmented political context has been associated with the emergence of a new trend of women's activism, which is the subject of my research presentation. The aim of my research is to understand how the process of women's political participation during and after the Arab uprising create opportunities for the emergence of new forms of women's leaders. Second, how women learn and experience their gendered self differently. Third, how do those women through their involvement in the process of social and political change for different intersectional factors religious, inter sectorial, territorial, socioeconomic how they learn and develop their maneuvering and leadership performance to be critical of the actuality of their gender and gender relations and finally, to redefine women's leadership reflecting on the actual experiences of women's activism in the five studied countries. About My Research Methodology the research analysis and findings are based on empirical research in five Arab countries or Arab rising countries Tunis, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco and the occupied Palestinian territories. Morocco and the occupied Palestinian territories are not Arab uprising countries, but we use them as case studies to see the effect of the Arab uprising on women's activism in these two countries. Of course, you know, my research adopted qualitative research. I basically use individual interviews and focus groups with women from different socioeconomy backgrounds, educated, uneducated, poor, middle class, working in different sectors and also women from rural and urban neighborhoods. The original cross national reports, the detailed one discusses and analyzes several forms of women activism, including the old well established feminist organization or feminist activism. But in my presentation I will only focus on three forms of emerging women's activism during and after the Arab uprising that specifically serve my analysis and argumentation. The first form of women's activism revealed in our research is in new Young women's leaders have emerged from leaderless ordinary women's activism. So leaderless ordinary women are defined in the research as women who had no knowledge or institutional experience of feminism and had also not been involved in politics prior to the Arab uprisings. Ordinary women are also those who work in the informal sector and other citizens across generations and employment sectors who had suffered daily from their state in neoliberal economic policies and oppressive police and security sectors. Those ordinary women during the Arab uprising were all brought together demanding the overthrow of the old regimes with their dominant features of clientele, patronage and corruption. Example of this form of women's activism or leadership in Yemen as traditional tribal society One of the biggest surprise of the peaceful protest that Swept Yemen in 2011 has been the visibility of women's participation. Ordinary women's participation in the calls for change. Warda Al Hashdi, she's a woman from Yemen, she's in her early 30s, is a very strong example of how the Yemeni uprising has come up with new women's leaders. Al Hashdi is from a tribal family and participated in the uprising by providing first aid to bleeding and injured people, she said. I was a housewife before, but I had to go out and help injured youth because it is safer for me as a woman to do so in the Yemeni culture during the period of the research and hopefully she's still doing the same. Al Hashidi is one of the leaders of Raqib organization. Raqib means watching for human rights and her life has completely changed during the Yemeni uprising. Another reflection of the new model of women's activism and leadership was illustrated in Hajja Governorate near Sanaa. It's a rural area for the first time in Yemen and this is how it's presented by women themselves in Yemen. For the first time in Yemen's history, a group of rural uneducated women decided to block the main road to protest against frequent fighting and the widespread availability of guns amongst Houthis and Islam groups, the leading Islamist parties in Yemen or the main conflicting Islamist parties in Yemen. Another example is from Egypt. In Egypt, ordinary women, day to day involvement in protest and demonstration, invoked their agency by seeking public institution recognition and valuation of their political voices. Samira Ibrahim is a strong example of how ordinary Egyptian women resisted their victimization by the military dictatorship and acted as publicly recognized leaders without labeling themselves as feminists. Samira Ibrahim raised a court case against the virginity test imposed by the Supreme Court Council of Armed Forces. She advocated against the virginity test not on the name of freedom of sexuality from a Western feminist perspective, but as a rejection to be subjected to the test imposed by dictators and also as a rejection to pursue a test that violates her authentic social norm and tradition, including her religion. In Tunisia, another example from Tunisia, ordinary women, educated and uneducated, asserts that they have become widely engaged in the organized protests and demonstrations led by the General Trade Union, as well as being involved in organizing and mobilizing for political and human rights campaigns. Their engagement in the protest allowed them to realize their influential role which invoked their critical gender agency. Again, a woman teacher from Tunis shared that the Tunisian uprising has woken us up to our leadership position within the ugtt. We are the ones who mobilize the workers and do everything on the ground. But when it comes to political decision, we are ignored. In Morocco, the 20 February Movement established in 2011 and the Moroccan Tamarrud Kahartuna Kahartuna means oppressed US Movement established in 17 July 2013 have neither former leaders nor centralized organizations. They were mainly led by young activists, men and women, most of whom claim no political affiliation. When protests started on 20th February 2011, the youth led movement included many female activists. Yet most demands were for more democratic governance and reform, but not for gender demands. This is the first form of women's activism, the second non feminist Women's leadership in political parties and the dynamics of power maneuvering in the different post revolutionary, post uprising Arab countries. The field research shows that both moderate and radical Islamist parties have efficiently facilitated the political participation of their female members, especially in rural and poor communities. Of course, in most cases women were being instrumentalized to mobilize local communities and to generate public constituency and to mobilize voters during elections. Never fails. This instrumental dynamic of women's engagement with political parties has opened an opportunity for some individual women activists to be critical of the conservatism of their political parties. Islamist political parties of course, especially with regard to women's rights. However, women's relative positions of women's relative positions of power within the different Islamist political parties vary. Interviews with Islamist women leaders in Nahda and the pjd, the justice and Development Party in Morocco and to a lesser extent in Hamas revealed that they invested in their political leadership to maneuver for power and to negotiate on gender and non gender issues. A woman leader in PJD said, we avoid conflicts by initiating dialogue and she means dialogue with feminist, organized or liberal feminist organizations in Morocco. We agree on common things, we fight for women's rights and dignity, we call for their equal access, women's equal access to decision making positions and we combat all forms of violence and discrimination against women. So it's similar to the feminist discourse as Yemeni did not have like consolidated women's movement before the Arab uprising. So it differs slightly in terms of women's involvement in Islamist political party or in political parties in general. Women Islah members have prioritized their loyalty to Islam party over any other institution they are involved in. Nabeel Al Saeed, Islam media officer, defends the importance of her party for achieving her political goals. She views her political party as being the only institution within the Yemeni political and tribal context that provides her with Social Security himaya and also encourage her to have access to power dynamics and political leadership. Islamist women's leaders such as Saeed, living in a predominantly tribal and batriarchal society and culture, bargain with not only in Yemen but also in Egypt and in Tunisia, bargain with patriarchal structures to achieve their goal of generating their public constituency and representation and local communities bargaining with patriarchy may be a necessary strategy during the process of women's empowerment in a certain context like Arab uprising or post Arab uprising countries. However, the legitimacy of this strategy is only proven when women leaders, whether secular or Islamist, demonstrate their political willingness and capacity for power maneuvering to dismantle the tribal and patriarchal structures and to act as representatives of the masses of women rather than the political masculinized elites. An example of non feminist women's leaders capacity to dismantle tribal patriarchal structure reveals in Yemen when after the 2011 revolution in Yemen, tribal sheikhs and radical Islamist political leaders contacted douche women Islamist women's leaders and activists to discuss political issues in public places and to mobilize for their political agendas. So yeah, this is the second form of women's activism. The third form of women's activism is the unregistered, politically independently independent youth and women's community initiatives. Unregistered youth and women's groups and initiatives emerged to stand against the widespread political polarization of society institutions in all Arab uprising countries. Those groups and initiatives focus on the actual socioeconomic problems of their local communities. They have attracted many young men and women who stated during the field work that they are fed up with the Islamist secular polarization and Islamic socially fragmenting effects. Young Leadership Entrepreneurs in Tunisia is a good example of youth initiatives. Its youth activists are critical of six segregated forms of women's activism and they asserted during the field work that they prefer working with youth and development organization rather than with separate women's organizations where young men and women have common issues of concern. Young men and women are also critical of the generation gap between older political and women's organizations or feminist organizations and youth and the centralized form of leadership. Ahlam of the Young Leadership Entrepreneurs in Tunisia intimated that old feminist organization do not create a new generation of leaders who may threaten their power. These organizations are led by old feminists who have a strong network with international world, but they still do not know how to give us young men and women a space to learn and to develop our skills of leadership. Another unregistered community initiative led by middle aged women comes from Egypt. Umziad belongs to a group of middle aged religious women activists who initiated a community based project in South Lebanon. It's a poor neighborhood in Cairo. She was motivated by her religiosity to serve the local community. She has suggested collecting an Egyptian bound each day from from small shops for repainting the school walls. Men were responsible for distributing plastic bags to households and gathering cans and plastics for recycling the money generated from the sale of the recycled material was used to rebuild local community infrastructure as sexual harassment of women had become increasingly worrying and disturbing in post uprising Egypt. In the same area of Safta, Lebanon, an initiative was developed by local women to fight against sexual harassment through religious education. Middle aged and young religious women talked to teenagers and educated them about how to use the moral virtues of Islam to confront such disrespectful practices against women. And of course if you go through the detailed across national report, you will find several examples of women's activism in the three forms of women's activism. So based on these empirical findings I come up with number of arguments. First one the Arab uprisings new forms of women's activism challenged the ethnocentric feminist Western observers who presented women in the post uprising Arab countries as the bigger losers because they do. You know, feminist Western observers conflated or conflated women's agency and the Arab uprisings with feminist desires to to be free from cultural religious constraints similar to the model of Western liberalism and for their leadership to be essentially framed within a common united goal of gender equitable transformation. The second argument I'm saying that women's leadership in the specific context of post uprising Arab countries goes beyond the normative ideological framing of feminist leadership because they are large there are large number of women's activists who consciously and freely prefer to practice the leadership beyond the standardized criteria of sensualist feminism that is resisting against patriarchy and gender inequality. Third, the research provides sufficient evidence that internalizing feminism as it is stated by liberal feminists is not necessarily a condition for women exercising their agency and leadership and for building their capacity to make social and political change. However, feminist leadership is possibly achieved as an outcome of non feminist women's activist habituation or performance of non stereotypical gender roles and are situationally encouraged and recognized by the public at certain time, at certain time and in a certain place, as it obviously reveals in the first form of women's activism. Fourth, beside the possibility of reducing feminist activists from non feminist activists or from ordinary women, we also have to accept the fact that other women's leaders may also choose freely, unwillingly to exercise the leadership not to advocate for gender equality the same way as feminists do, but for authentic gender symbolism or norms that are morally defined against Western gender norms or against the standardized understanding of women's freedom. Nevertheless, the research findings show that non feminist Islamist leaders in particular use non normative gender practices, not non stereotypical gender practices to mobilize for an ideology that advocates for normative gender norms of inequality between men and women in the public domain, especially in politics based on the Islamic ideology. Based on this finding, I argue that the contradiction between the actual practice of gender among Islamists women's leaders and their ideological orientation is the starting point for those women to rethink their gender and its Islamist its Islamic patriarchal interpretation. It is true that Islamist women's leaders do not operate within the framework of resistance against patriarchy. They successfully contribute to redefining and these signifying gender norms within the moral framework of Islamic tradition, as you may notice or you remember and the discourse used by the PJD Islamist female leaders leader and in the example of religious women resistance against sexual harassment based on their own understanding of Islam. The fifth argument Based on the empirical findings, I argue that within the specific political, religious, sectarian or territorial division in the post uprising Arab countries, a process centered approach of leadership capacitation would be more effective to strategize for the empowerment of women. In this context, women's leaders freely and willingly shape the goal behind their activism and leadership and discover the gender goal of their political participation and leadership through practicing them, whether they believe in gender equality as the ultimate goal of their exercise of agency or not. So the conclusions that may benefit donors or those who are different development actors. I'm saying that the Arab uprisings have taught us that non feminist women leaders have the potential to transfer their political leadership. Women's practice of power maneuvering within patriarchal tribal society institutions has succeeded to reconstruct new gender norms against the social and political exclusion and marginalization of women. Whether this is called a new wave of feminism or non feminism depends on how women define themselves. And most women who I interview, they act as feminists, but they refuse to call themselves feminists. Again, it depends on their experiences with feminism as theories and practice in their own countries. And of course this requires further empirical and theoretical engagement that goes beyond the scope of this research. So what we learned that by focusing exclusively on feminist leaders and on well experienced feminist organization as most donors do, one risks missing the opportunity of working and building relations with these actually important non feminist women's leaders and potentially fostering better localized meaning of feminist leadership and empowerment. The Arab uprising have also taught us that focusing only on the old form of feminism or feminist activism in Arab countries, which has historically concentrated on gender legislative and policy change and gender quotas at national macro political levels, risk excluding the important new women's leaders and their community organizations and the newly emerged forms of women's activism, albeit they do not advocate for gender equality or for feminist principles. They play a critical role in deconfiguring gender relations in traditional local communities that are purely reached by elitist feminist organizations. What we have also learned from this research is that women's popular constituencies and actual representation in local communities is the major source of legitimacy for women's political participation and empowerment. That still, I'm saying still, donors do not give enough concern to is that or this constituency that gives women actual to political maneuvering with and within state institutions, not only focusing on gender quotas, the other option, or otherwise. Arab women leaders, whether Islamist or liberal feminists, will remain hostage to the masculinized political agendas and be at risk of being instrumentalized to serve the interests of the state political elite. Thank you so much.