MESA Banner
The Women's Making of a Lebanese Revolution
Abstract
Since the onset of the Lebanese October 17th uprising, women have come to play a central role in the urban politics of the revolution. The Lebanese people --as much as the world-- took note as images of women at the frontlines of the uprising circulated around the globe, especially that women have rarely and barely been represented in the Lebanese post civil-war governments. Of course, however, women have long been organizing in Lebanon and what the streets have seen since October 17 has been a result of decades of labor that came to the forefront in aim to shape the public sphere beyond the sectarian patriarchal order. Over the past five months, the Lebanese uprising has been primarily a women-driven revolution. Women have been organizing marches, leading sit-ins, writing feminist chants, standing shoulder to shoulder to prevent violence against male protestors by security forces and anti-protests mobs. Young women led student protests chanting revolutionary songs as they marched outside the gates of the schools to reclaim public spaces. On one night, more than 4000 women took over Martyrs’ and Riad el Solh Squares, banging on kitchenware and holding candles, to announce that “the revolution is female.” And on the second week of the uprising, at eight pm every night, women, children and families stepped out to their balconies banging on kitchenware (pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils) in a breathtaking symphony of dissent and hope from the center throughout the peripheries (a Lebanese form of Cacerolazo, a mode of protest that originated in Chile and Argentina has since spread to other parts of the world), politicizing kitchenware and transforming it into a collective acoustical mobilization that one could hear in rich and poor neighborhoods, in Muslim and Christian ones, and in center and peripheries. In this talk, I will reflect on my experience as a participant-observer in the recent Lebanese uprising, centering my intervention on the roles and practices that women embodied in the Lebanese uprising through shaping a public sphere that made possible for the emergence of new forms of urban politics, which necessitated a feminist re/making of new public urban spaces.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Current Events