Abstract
The recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt throw into relief competing notions of freedom and agency in Middle East societies. Social, cultural, and political projects informed by Islamic sensibilities often associate freedom with Western imperialism and cultural/moral decadence. In such paradigms, calls for increased sexual freedom and more equitable gender relations and marriage and divorce laws are frequently associated with Western cultural imperialism and “invasion” of foreign norms. The language of freedom is deployed as freedom from Western cultural and economic imperialism, not freedom of critical thought and association, and certainly not sexual and gender freedom, or more equitable sexual, gender, and marital relations. Capitalist neo-liberal notions of freedom, in contrast, privilege the autonomous, individualistic, consuming subject, not the politically mobilized and motivated subject demanding individual and collective rights and resources. In contrast to these conservative and neo-liberal approaches to freedom, the revolution in Egypt was facilitated by indigenous feminist and human rights organizations, activists, and intellectuals who have for years equally challenged state repression and authoritarianism, class inequality and imperialism, gender-unequal laws and policies, and repression of sexual and social expression by conservative forces. The 1/11 revolution was unusual in the degree to which it crossed the divides of class, generation, gender, and creed in its composition, including people of secular and religious orientations and different classes, and reflecting a range of synthetic slogans that were unified in their calls for dignity and freedom. Participating in the revolution, I argue, produced a “political generation” (Karl Mannheim 1952) whose notion of freedom requires social justice and recognizes individual dignity and freedom. By definition, such a political generation should also be a feminist one, and thus more expansive in its approaches to gender and sexual relations, as well as marriage norms. This paper first examines to what degree the gender and sexual messages, slogans, and practices of the 1/11 revolution were inclusive and feminist. Second, the author will return to Egypt in summer 2011 to re-interview feminist activists, intellectuals, and religious authorities originally interviewed for an already published work to get a sense of the implications and impact of the revolution on sexual and gender relations and norms, as well as marriage and family laws and policies.
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