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Feminist Legal Activism against family values in Egypt
Abstract
Following the brief moment of political rupture that accompanied the Arab Spring, new power-holders in Egypt embarked on a ‘masculinist restoration’ process (Kandiyoti 2016) to restore the stability of the gender order. Typically, maintaining gender stability amid contention involves violence and aggression as well as other technologies like constitutions, laws, and policies. The Egyptian ruling regime resorted to violence and the law to retain said stability. For several years, the Egyptian regime has utilized idioms of patriarchy to rationalize its involvement in re-organizing societal interactions, which typically took the form of excessive criminalization in the law and the reinstatement of police protection. In that context, the claim to maintain ‘the family values’ is operationalized as a political and ideological project to subject women to discrimination. This project creates the category of male and female, and sets the boundaries for what is acceptable women’s behavior and was is a punishable act of transgression. In that context, feminist legal activists engage with the regime masculinist restoration project through litigation. The feminist legal activists have been providing legal aid and filing cases in court to highlight the regime’s discriminatory practices covered under the facade of protecting ‘the family values’ notion. Using litigation, feminist legal activists interrogate the state for its involvement in subjecting women’s life to discriminatory standards; they are not seeking protection against societal discrimination. On the contrary, these feminist activists are getting directly involved in a mutually-constitutive process of re-shaping women’s lived experiences in Egypt. The research builds its findings on contextual and discourse analysis of a wealth of legal documents handed by these feminist activists in court to present their discourses on women’s subjection by the law. The research raises a central question on the ways by which feminist legal activists, in different positions in the webs of power around the law, conduct legal activism to influence the ruling regime’s strategy to matin the stability of the gender order and to restore the masculinist conditions pertained before the Arab Spring. Through a rigorous analysis of the engagement between feminist legal activists and the ‘protecting family values’ legal regime in current Egypt, the research contributes to the literature on the interplay between feminist activism and the law, scholarship on the relationship between gender and the law, and more generally, post-Arab Spring women’s activism.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies