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Thawra ‘ala al-Nafs: Motherhood, Bodies, and Desire in the Syrian Feminist Revolution
Abstract
Refugees and their feminist practices have become increasingly salient to local politics and social theory. Despite the fact that Syrian women and their activism inside Syria and in exile has influenced politics on the ground, mostly through their humanitarian, journalistic, and artistic labor, most accounts of Syria and its revolution “ignore them” (Mustafa Anas 2017). In the documentary film Hunna: Mothers of Revolution, three young filmmakers make Syrian feminist revolution sensible by highlighting the possibilities and limits of what they call the thawra ‘ala al-nafs across radically different yet partially connected worlds: Syria, Lebanon, Europe, and North America. This paper explores the sensible nature of the thawra ‘ala al-nafs by centering Suad Joseph’s (2005) theory of relational desire as a driving force that contributed to and was transformed by the Syrian revolution. I focus on one mother-child dyad from Hunna: Mothers of Revolution, Ola Aljounde and her son, Mohamad. The story begins in March 2011 with the protests Ola Aljounde helped to organize in Salamiyah, the backlash against her, and how she emerged from prison insisting that education was the most effective way to continue to revolution from exile. Her commitment to mothering led to the establishment of the Gharsah Center and Women Now in al-Marj, Lebanon, and Sweden. The second part of the paper focuses on her son, the 2017 International Children’s Peace Prize winner, and the encroachment of European financial capitalism into his young life. I conclude with Mohamad’s speech about climate refugees at the 2020 World Economic Forum, and point to the limits of the revolution in the global purview. Through these stories, I trace the persistence of the thawra ‘ala al-nafs across time and space, conceptualizing mothering itself as a mode of resistance to the alienating and globalizing force of the Syrian regime (Robin Yassin-Kassab 2017) and financial capitalism, what Sylvia Wynter (2003) called Man2, the force of homo economicus, humans themselves pseudo-speciated into kinds (including race, gender, and sexuality). In contrast to these divisions, the woman in the film Hunna speak of a revolution that is experienced as a moment of integration and transformation; a mode of survival that that is fluid in nature, itself becoming the connective tissue of a revolutionary ecology of practices that holds different selves and their desiring bodies together across time and space (Ussama Makdisi 2019, Nadine Naber 2020).
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies