The proposed paper analyses how Tunisian gender politics developed over the course of the Tunisian democratization process (2011-2014). It uses Bourdieu’s concept of the “political field” to understand the actions and framings of actors in gender politics in interrelation with their position in the overall power structure and the dominant rules and values in the field. Since Tunisia’s struggle for independence, the country’s political dynamics were shaped by a conflict between the modernist regime and its conservative challengers. The conflict was carried out in a direct competition during the transitional process and finally mitigated in 2014 with all major political actors accepting each other as legitimate participators in the political field. Gender politics served as a major battlefield of this conflict and women’s rights are intertwined with claims of a modernist Tunisian identity on one side, or claims of an “authentic” Arab-Islamic Tunisian identity, on the other. Modernism remained the hegemonic discourse and transitional gender policies are best described as in continuity with former regime policies. Modernism provided liberal and leftist feminists’ demands with legitimacy and strength. At the same time, however, it also limited what feminists could demand as women’s empowerment was not seen as a struggle against male domination, but as a struggle of modernisers against backward habits. A feminist critique of modernist policies and actors could hardly be voiced or articulated. Only in 2014 when the conflict between conservative and modernists lost importance, women across the political spectrum started to identify more strongly with each other than with their modernist or conservative “camp”. The mitigation of the main conflict in the field thus opened up possibilities for new alliances and alternative discourses and demands. Tunisian transitional gender politics differ from other cases in feminist transitional studies in that women’s empowerment is usually seen as deflecting from the greater goals of a revolution and a legacy of so-called ‘state feminism’ usually leads to a backlash against women empowerment after the revolution. My research thus contributes a unique case study to feminist transitology and advances an original theoretical approach by using Bourdieu’s political field to analyse policy fields. The analysis is based on a qualitative content analysis of interviews with activists, NGO members and politicians conducted during three three-month long research stays in Tunisia 2012-2014 and complemented with minutes and draft laws of the decision making bodies.