kawrage:

Just finished re-reading Lila Abu-Lughod’s (essential) essay, ‘Dialects of Women’s Empowerment : The International Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report’. Abu-Lughod posed 3 main questions about the report:

• Does it lend itself to appropriation?
• How does the paper’s “cosmopolitan or urban middle-class perspective on women’s lives, aspirations, and everyday conditions” affects its overall tone?
• Could its reliance on the international language on women’s rights distort its representation of the societies in question?

Abu-Lughod also problematized the report’s key recommendations for Arab women’s empowerment: education, employment and individual rights

Education:

From my own fieldwork over the past fifteen years or so in an Upper Egyptian village, it is clear that it is not lack of access to education but the poor quality of public education that is so problematic for girls, just as it is for boys. This poor quality and the burdensome expenses associated with it are the results of economic policies that devalue state provision of social welfare and services, not of gender discrimination.

Infusing many parts of the report are prejudices common to a fragment of the Arab intelligentsia who came of age in the eras of modernization and developmentalism. They view education as the answer to overcoming backwardness and consider women’s education a key to emancipation and individualism.

Employment:

The fantasy about the magical value of work for women is a middle-class one—it presumes that jobs are well paid and fulfilling (as they may be, for the most part, for professionals, despite the nearly universal double burden women carry, with housework and child care remaining largely their responsibility). However, one must ask if work that is badly paid, back breaking, exploitative, or boring liberates women. If employers or families do not provide childcare, is it economically viable for women to work? If the wages are low, are the cost of transport, the absence of women’s labor in maintaining the household, and vulnerability to harassment worth it?

Individual Rights:

This section of the report fails to appreciate the strong positive sentiments people in most communities in the Arab world (and perhaps elsewhere) have toward their families, even when belonging to families places constraints on them. It also ignores the economic necessity of joint family enterprises and the realities of household economies where many contribute toward the sustenance of the family. Moreover, it is blind to the possibility that families might be, for good and ill, the very structures within which individuals conceive of themselves and realize themselves as individuals. 

In conclusion:

Finally, the report’s liberal framework and language, borrowed from the world of international human rights, transnational feminism, and human development, may lead to its marginalization within the Arab world. By completely sidelining the vibrant contemporary alternative language of political economy and imperialism and by giving little space to social movements or collective resistance and struggles over power, the report eschews radical solutions. By slighting a religious language, the report forfeits the wide popularity that attaches to an Islamic vision today. From a more serious standpoint, this framework limits the kinds of solutions offered, with moderate and gradual reform seen as the only option.

Lila Abu-Lughod

Also read “A Broken Record on Muslim Women’s Salvation” by Sana Saeed

(via kawrage)

(Source: asiasociety.org, via kawrage)

mllanders:

‘The picture of Lynndie England, dubbed “Lynndie the Leasher,” leading a naked Iraqi on a leash (also being referred to as “pussy whipping”) has now become a surface on which fundamentalism and modernization, apparently dialectically opposed, can wage war. One could argue that this image is about both the victories of liberal feminists, who claim that women should have equal opportunities within the military, and the failures of liberal feminists to adequately theorize power and gender beyond male-female dichotomies that situate women as less prone toward violence and as morally superior to men. Writes Zillah Eisenstein: “When I first saw the pictures of the torture at Abu Ghraib I felt destroyed. Simply heart-broken. I thought ‘we’ are the fanatics, the extremists; not them. By the next day as I continued to think about Abu Ghraib I wondered how there could be so many women involved in the atrocities?” Why is this kind of affective response to the failures of Euro-American feminisms, feminisms neither able to theorize gender and violence nor able to account for racism within their ranks, appropriate to vent at this particular moment, especially when it works to center the Euro-American feminist as victim, her feminism having fallen apart? Another example: brimming with disappointment, [Barbara] Ehrenreich pontificates: “Secretly, I hoped that the presence of women would over time change the military, making it more respectful of other people and cultures, more capable of genuine peacekeeping … A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib.” Similarly, Patrick Moore articulates the death of a parallel yearning, as if gay male sexuality had never chanced on its own misogyny: “The idea that female soldiers are as capable as men of such atrocities is disorienting for gay men who tend to think of women as natural allies.” Nostalgically mourning the loss of the liberal feminist subject, this emotive convergence of white liberal feminists and white gay men unwittingly reorganizes the Abu Ghraib tragedy around their desires.’

From “On Torture: Abu Ghraib,” Jasbir Puar, Radical History Review, no. 93, Fall 2005.

Politics at the Tip of the Clitoris: Why, in Fact, Do They Hate Us? via Jadaliyya

Sara Mourad begins her piece with a relevant point:

What baffles me most about Mona Eltahawy’sForeign Policy article is that it does not accomplish the task it sets out for itself; it does not, in fact, answer its foundational question: Why do they hate us?

Read more

(via sharquaouia)

(via sharquaouia-deactivated20121015)

(Source: amiraashraf, via hiyah-beijing)

kawlture:

By Mozn

Mona’s article was published in a time where, I have been in a process of critique to the different visions and approaches different feminists groups adopted since the revolution of the 25th of January. I argue that there are four main traps most of the feminists groups felled in as follows:

Gender vs. sex

One of the most dangerous traps opinion maker’s fell in when trying to promote women’s issues is generalization. Assuming that all women have the same needs and consequently will act and follow the same approaches in life. This is one main reasons for why some of feminist approaches fail to relate to daily women’s aspirations, challenges, and sufferings.

For many years, feminist schools did not tackle “masculinities” within feminist theory because of the assumption that feminism is only about women and not about deconstructing gender power and relationships. Considering “patriarchal” concepts as the main obstacle of achieving freedom, dignity and happiness for women without understanding their contexts and realities in their societies.

Love/hate relationship

The love/hate relationship is another trap within approaching women/men relationships. Promoters of this argument are trapped in taking the private to the public, falling into the dichotomy of do they love us or do they hate us?

Taking the Love/hate question from the private to the public ignores other crucial factors affecting women’s status in their societies, such as race, socioeconomics, accessibility to resources, and visibility. These factors are important in determining the nature of relationship between women and Men in the public sphere. The power relationships have no place in the love\hate relationship analysis. Love/hate relationships are for personal relationships and generalization for it for all gender.

Who represents women?

Feminists fell in is their attempt to use personal stories to support their argument. The challenge in this approach that the recipients does not particularly and shall not relate to these stories the same way as the feminists wants. Where others can also bring collective stories and claim that this also represents women’s utopian life they desire, this clearly happens when middle class women in Egypt tries to enforce their aspirations and visions as representative of all women.

People have the right to relate to their own personal experience and live in dignity. Our lessons learnt are that no one is representative to all Egyptian women.

Militarization of the state vs. Islamization of the state?

The last trap that feminists fell in since the revolution was answering the question: Who is our main enemy “Militarization of the state” or “islamization of the state”?

This dichotomy has been monopolizing feminist’s discourse and approaches. Promoters of that Militarization of the state believed that Islamization is the first enemy, while militarization could act as a protector of the civil state and women’s rights.

I would argue that for feminists to promote their believes they have to believe in a third road. For me as a feminist activist, referring to the so called “Islamic laws ” and using them to scare the public does not particularly help feminism. But rather deprived them more from the street.

Once the so called “Islamic Law” is codified  as law. For us as feminist activists we have the tools to change these laws and it is different than having a military rule, trying to engendering  women roles and closing the door for their existence in the public space as citizens aspiring freedom and dignity.

I would like to end my intervention by reminding all feminists women have the multiple identities and are multilayered. And for activists to succeed in changing their societies to the netter they have to relate to the women aspirations and needs. And agai I want to remind all of us that feminism is about choice! 

I meant to quote an excerpt, but the entire piece is quotable!

(Source: kawrage)

sharquaouia:

It all started this morning when Kawlture suggested we feature the Foreign Policy issue cover on our blog, the Mainstream Media and the Orient. I was on my phone and could not see the cover clearly. At first, I thought it was blackface, but upon zooming in and reading the the featured article title by Mona Eltahawy, my eyes weren’t fooling me. It really was a woman covered in a black body-painted niqab. 

They tell you don’t judge a book by its cover. But I, as an Arab-American Muslim woman, could not get that image out of my head long enough to even begin reading Mona’s article. I kept thinking about how the image degraded and insulted every woman I know that wears or has ever worn the niqab. The face veil is rooted in pre-Islamic history, and I’m not going to delve into it. If you want a more comprehensive read, I recommend Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam. 

Today, those who are fixated on the niqab believe that focusing on what a Muslim woman wears is what defines her thought, her intellect, her capabilities, her sexuality, her gender, her very existence. It’s a narrative that’s been framed by the West and fed by the likes of Qasim Amin and even Hoda Sha’rawi. FP’s decision to choose this photograph of a naked woman with a body-painted niqab embodies this problematic narrative in more ways than one:

1. This inherent sexualization of the niqab through the pose and exposure of the female form revives the classic harem literature and art, presenting the Arab and/or Muslim woman as “exotic” and “mysterious,” but still an object. An object lacking the agency to define herself, thus defined by others.
2. All of the women close to me who wear the niqab do so for different reasons. One friend only wears the niqab when she goes protesting because she feels comfortable in it. Another friend has worn the niqab, against the will of her family, since she was 14 out of her own free will. The representation of the niqab as splattered body paint on a naked woman degrades the decision of women who wear the niqab as a choice.
3. The feature of an Arab woman’s article on the front cover does not justify the editorial choice to use the image. Mona Eltahawy was notoriously owned during a debate over the niqab ban in France, where she took the position in favor of the ban. Her stance on the niqab is convenient to the narrative being perpetuated by the problematic image.

But I digress. On to Mona’s article, titled “Why Do They Hate Us.” As a writer, I’m aware that editors sometimes propose titles, but they usually inform writers of that change. At least, that was my experience with Foreign Policy (it was a piece they never published). However, immediately, the title sets off an alarm: the use of the first-person-plural. The first-person-plural can be appropriately used when the speaker has been elected to speak on behalf of the group they are speaking on behalf of. In this case, the “They” being Arab societies and “Us” being Arab women. Mona’s self-appointed representation of Arab women is neither professional nor accurate. While I sincerely value the freedom of self-expression and have not one problem with her expressing her views, but to do so on the behalf of all Arab women is enraging.

Her article presents a summary and background of the treatment of women in the region, paired with statistics and specific examples of cases from countries throughout the region, fluffed with emotional rhetoric, ending with a call for fighting against injustices. Every now and then, a different image of the nude woman with the body-painted niqab interrupts the commentary, fueling the rage all over again. 

She includes bits like:

“I’ll never forget hearing that if a baby boy urinated on you, you could go ahead and pray in the same clothes, yet if a baby girl peed on you, you had to change. What on Earth in the girl’s urine made you impure? I wondered. Hatred of women.”

And,

“The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region — now more than ever.”

Also,

“But at least Yemeni women can drive. It surely hasn’t ended their litany of problems, but it symbolizes freedom.”

Concluding with,

“We are more than our headscarves and our hymens. Listen to those of us fighting. Amplify the voices of the region and poke the hatred in its eye.”

The entire article is framed in a way that portrays Arab women as helpless, and in need of rescue and protection. It’s a convenient narrative for FP’s mostly Western-based readership. No mention of Tawakul Karman, Zainab and Maryam al-Khawaja, etc.—women who rose through the revolutions and were present in the public sphere during protests and demonstrations, standing alongside their compatriots demanding change and an end to injustices of all kinds. These women stood up as individuals and not as self-proclaimed representatives of Arab women.

Mona points to “hate” as the source and cause of the injustices committed against Arab women. She scapegoats the rise of the Islamists, but Maya Mikdashi debunked that argument a couple months ago:

“Gender equality and justice should be a focus of progressive politics no matter who is in power. A selective fear of Islamists when it comes to women’s and LGBTQ rights has more to do with Islamophobia than a genuine concern with gender justice. Unfortunately, Islamists do not have an exclusive license to practice patriarchy and gender discrimination/oppression in the region. The secular state has been doing it fairly adequately for the last half a century.”

Yet, she entirely neglects the socioeconomic roots of gender inequality, the rise of authoritarian regimes in a post-colonialist context, the remnants of dehumanization and oppression from colonialism, the systematic exclusion of women from the political system or those who are used as convenient tools for the regime. There is more to gender inequality than just “hate.”

The true fight should be against the monolithic representation of women in the region, illustrated by an over-sexualized image of splattered black paint over a nude body. This does nothing to rectify the position of women in ANY society. 

(via sharquaouia-deactivated20121015)

This might be a reblog, but so be it. The discussion is important.

battle-studies:

One: Gender is not the study of what is evident, it is an analysis of how what is evident came to be.

Two: Before resolving to write about gender, sexuality, or any other practice or aspect of subjectivity in the Middle East, one must first define what exactly the object of study is. Be specific. What country, region, and time period forms the background picture of your study? Furthermore, the terms “Middle East,” “the Islamic World” and the “Arab world” do not refer to the same place, peoples, or histories, but the linkages between them are crucial. Moreover, the “state” is a relatively new phenomenon in the Middle East. In order to study gendered political economy in Syria, for example, one must be aware of the Ottoman and regional history that has produced this gendered political economy in the area that we now call “Syria.”

Three: A study of gender must take into account sexuality. Likewise studies of sexuality cannot be disarticulated from gender analysis. To do so would be akin to studying the politics and history of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) without reference to the role of idealogy or the socio-economic policies of the Iraqi state.

Four: Gender is one aspect of individual and group subjectivity. It is also just one technology of governmentality—the production and regulation of ties between the individual body, populations, and structures of power and quantification. Moreover, studies of politics, history, and law must take into account gender and sex, just as such studies must be attentive to class, race, political economy and-crucially- how all of these factors interact.

Five: The ungendered body does not exist, just as the unclassed body does not exist. Such disarticulation reproduces the false tropes of the ungendered body and of ungendered politics and the unclassed body and unclassed politics. These in turn reaffirm the positioning of normative male political practices as somehow “unmarked” and universal. Such an equation hides that gender is not something one can be outside of. It is not an analytic lens that can be withheld and deployed according to genitalia and/or sexual practices of the people being studied. When an attention to gender  is limited to female and/or LGBTQ people in the Middle East, it reproduces the study of gender as the study of how (other) men treat “their” women and gays.

Six: Avoid tokenism and broad generalizations. Sometimes a hijab is just a hijab, and sometimes it is not.

Seven: Do not assume that gender politics or feminist concerns come in neat and familiar packages. Instead, allow your research to expand your view of what a “feminist politics” may be. It could be, for example, that protests against neoliberal market restructuring in Egypt are understood within a broad political framework that includes notions of gender justice. As Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu Lughod have taught us, liberal feminism’s assumptions as to what constitute “feminist politics” or “feminist causes” are at best flawed. At worst they are exercises in epistemological hegemony and the violent remaking of the world according to secular and neoliberal rights frameworks. Furthermore, do not assume that what we call the “feminist canon” is exhaustive or that it is not constituted through a series of exclusions, hierarchies, and imperial histories. After all Simone de Beauvoir, who taught us all that a woman is not born but made, also wrote in terms we now recognize as “Islamophobic” about women “under” Islam in Algeria at the time when Algeria was a French settler colony. This does not mean we should dismiss de Beauvoir, just as it would be too easy to condemn Hegel or Marx for their “views” on Africa. Rather, it is crucial to critically inhabit and navigate the reality that the western canon was, and is constituted through producing a series of “selves” and “others.”

Eight: I know this is hard to believe, but Islam may not be the most important factor, or even a particularly important factor, when studying gender in Muslim majority countries or communities. For example, I have studied the Lebanese legal system, focusing on personal status, criminal and civil law, for years now. Despite the intricate ways that these interconnected bodies of law produce citizenship in Lebanon, whenever I discuss my work my interlocutors invariably want to know more about shar‘ia and its assumed “oppression” of women. These questions always come after I have carefully explained that in Lebanon certain Christian and Jewish personal status laws are much more stringent in their production and regulation of normative gender roles than codified Islamic personal status laws (which are not the same as shar‘ia, historically speaking). In addition, civil laws have more wide reaching “gender effects” than any religious personal status law. More broadly, Islam is not the only religion in the region, although it often seems to be in mainstream media coverage. When an action such as the hitting of women by men for not conforming to “proper” gender roles in ultra orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem or in conservative neighborhoods of Riyadh is scripted in radically different terms the reader should pause. At these moments you are not reading about Islam, you are reading within a discourse about Islam.

Nine: Questions of gender rights and gender justice are not new to the Middle East, and neither are struggles that we now read under the sign of “feminism.” In fact, a large portion of the laws that are often regarded as oppressive to women and LGBTQ Arabs and/or Muslims are relatively new. They were introduced to the region via the Napoleonic code and the codification and the severe hollowing out of the shar‘ia in modern history. For example abortion, long considered a question of women’s rights in the Western world due its twinned history with Catholicism and Christianity more broadly, was not illegal across the Arab world until the rise of the nation state. Some traditions of fiqh continue take a position on abortion that American feminists might wish could be extended to the United States today. In addition, jurists have and do struggle to understand and promote “progressive” notions of male and female relations and to make room for nonconforming gender persons in the region. In fact, scholars such as Paula Sanders have shown us that several centuries ago Islamic jurists were developing a system of accommodation for hermaphrodites and nonbinary gendered peoples in Islamic communities.

Ten: Do not assume that you know the actors and factors affecting gender in the Middle East, or the productive role your scholarship might play in this dynamic. Institutions such as the IMF and Human Rights Watch have long been engaged in the production of normative heterosexuality and heterosexual families, for example. The Israeli settlement of historical Palestine also intervenes into the gendered and sexual fabric of indigenous Palestinians, as pinkwatcing activists have recently reminded us. Similarly, the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan function in part through the construction of interventionist platforms in the name of women’s and LGBTQ rights. Other factors affecting the practice of gender and sexuality in the Middle East include technological innovations such as in vitiro fertilization, viagra, and reconstructive hymen surgery in addition to pop culture, the rapid tranformation of the global economy, and the international circulation of people, discourses and goods.

(Source: jadaliyya.com, via onedirectionfacingmecca)