Women have been active participants in a variety of protest movements: the Arab Spring, the Gezi protests in Turkey, and anti-occupation activism in Palestine. In addition, women’s and feminist movements have struggled against authoritarian tendencies – during and after these protests – and sought to reshape political discourse and state policy, as well as predominant cultural assumptions. While the contexts of these protests differ, an analysis of case studies of gender in political transition and contestation also reveals some commonalities. First, women’s visibility during protests, from Tahrir to Gezi, put them in the spotlight as political actors with agency. In addition, women gendered protests in creative ways. In turn, governments sought to deny protestors’ agency, arguing inter alia that women were manipulated or did not know the worth of what the government was doing for them. Governments also spread misinformation and outright lies to drive a wedge between women (along “religious” versus “secularist” lines). Second, the legacy of “state feminism” in many of the region’s countries has meant that reactionary Islamist movements and political parties linked authoritarian regimes and their modernizing/secularizing policies to an erosion of the “authentic” culture and religion. This has left women’s legal rights vulnerable to attack in terms of political discourse and policy. Equally importantly, and operating in more diffuse ways, these attacks are supported by cultural and religious arguments that aim to curtail women’s rights and voices. In this paper, I specify the different levels at which gender shaped political transition and contestation in this decade, and offer a theoretical explanation for the patterns observed across a number of cases. Drawing on case studies of contemporary politics of gender in Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, and Libya, I address the structural conditions that give rise to protest movements, and how the politics of gender reflect and deflect from the crises of neoliberalism and Islamist authoritarianism. Extending Du Bois’ concept of a “public and psychological wage” that accrues to whites regardless of class status, I argue that control over women serves the function of appeasing the powerless multitudes in the age of neoliberalism. I introduce the concept of “offloading powerlessness” as part of a multi-level theoretical synthesis of political economy and cultural perspectives to explain concretely how gender is intrinsic (not incidental or marginal) to the study of politics.