In this paper I present a gendered analysis of post-revolution Sudan. In my various writings on the new global insurrections and women’s participation in them, I have been relying on ideas from Bauman, Ernst Bloch, Freire, Castells, Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, and Berlant, as well as on other feminist theories and my own extensive fieldwork in Sudan. Although I have learned from a number of 20th/21st centuries’ uprisings-- the Zapatista insurrection of 1994; the 1999 Seattle anarchist revolt against the IMF and World Bank; the Occupy Movement(s) in the U.S. and Europe; the “Arab Spring” uprisings; and Turkey’s Taksim Square/Gezi Park revolt-- I have gained a great deal more from women’s activism in Sudan’s Revolution and post-Revolution. To greater and lesser degrees, all of these recent revolts have been characterized by a high percentage of youth and women and are, significantly, anti-statist, anti-authoritarian, and non-hierarchal, which some would categorize as anarchic. Including Sudan’s, these insurrections are incomplete and are engaged either consciously or unconsciously in the search for the “not-yet,” and for the whole human. Although I use ideas from these other insurrections, I emphasize Sudan’s post-revolutionary period because of some of the women activists’ creativity. Very new configurations and ideas emerged from this semi-“consummated” uprising. All signs are pointing to a continued organizing and raising of consciousness, even though we might note that activist women have been negatively impacted by the perhaps predictable divisions among the revolutionary citizens; by the old political parties edging themselves into place; by old, patriarchal leaders vying for power behind the scenes; by the Islamists at home and abroad taking notice and intervening or mobilizing to intervene; and by the military becoming impatient and acting with violence. Women’s groups among themselves are experiencing problems: some may have hived off from larger organizations; struggled with each other; and disagreed about what should be the central issues for women to address and the timing of these within the larger struggle. Women’s stances are often not aligned with the goals of the insurrection. The women who have stepped forward are from various women-dominated self-help groups and other grassroots and neighborhood committees, community advancement programs--a few of which now self-identify as feminist--and NGOs. I name the post-revolution configurations and ask what these might mean for Sudanese women and their calls for justice and freedom. Furthermore, what do they mean for feminist theory and practice?

This paper will explore Feminist Activism in the 2019 Lebanese Uprising. While many observers were impressed and perhaps surprised by the leading role that women and feminist activists have played in the uprising, I will argue that in fact women-led and feminist activism has played a leading and inspiring role in political activism and reform campaigns for at least a decade in Lebanon –and that this work has not been circumscribed to Lebanese women. The practical knowledge created in this decade includes strategies related to the security state and its policing of women’s bodies and sexualities, to the use of offline and online organizing tactics, to the building of alliances with alternative medical and legal providers. The October Uprising, rather than serving as a platform for the emergence of female and feminist leadership, instead served as a platform for the display and amplification of years of organizing work, coalition building, disagreement, and knowledge production and circulation. This paper will attempt to draw a distinction between women led and feminist activism, as well as between different articulations of feminist activism they relate to the Uprising. What are the practical, theoretical, and conceptual stakes of these distinctions? What might centering the Lebanese uprising in our analysis of transnational feminist politics teach us about intersectionality, solidarity, and an era of mass protests/politics? How might feminist theorizing help us rethink the concept of a national uprising from a locale where one third of the residents are non-citizens living under different regimes of structural inequality? What does the temporality of “uprising” do to our analysis of the long durée of political struggle and activism in the Modern Middle East? These are some of the questions we will explore.

This paper looks at the socio-political trajectories of former Kurdish female fighters who have left the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) and live as refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan or the European diaspora. By analysing the life stories of former fighters, this paper highlights patterns of militancy, migration, and political activism, as well as issues around body politics. In recent years, the female fighters of PKK and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ, Yekîneyên Parastina Jin) in North-eastern Syria (Rojava), have attracted much media and scholarly attention due to their fight against the co-called Islamic State. However, these publications in the wake of the Rojava Revolution (2012-) have often been essentialising and objectifying. While women are truly at the forefront of many of the armed and political struggles in the Kurdish Middle East, the idealising and sensationalising of female fighters brushes over much more complex histories and everyday experiences of violence and resistance. Based on ethnographic research with former fighters, this paper traces the individual trajectories of women who went from being revolutionaries, to ‘traitors’ to the cause, to refugees. Conceptually, this paper speaks to debates in transnational and postcolonial feminist thought, which show that post-conflict societies usually experience a shift towards more conservative gender norms, and that spaces carved out by women during a period of revolutionary struggle often close again post-conflict (Cockburn 2013, Enloe 2014; Hale 2001; White 2007). This paper zooms into a context where the revolution is not over but where militants leave because they are disillusioned, battle-fatigued, wounded or want to start a family. I ask how revolutionary ideologies and practices, such as the PKK’s commitment to gender equality, has played out in the lives of my respondents, during and post-revolution. I will share preliminary findings of my new postdoc project, which shows that women’s activism moves on a continuum, from armed resistance to political activism in the diaspora, but that there are also those who are so traumatised by their experiences in the PKK that they abstain from activism all together. I argue that while the PKK is committed to gender equality in its ranks and the societies it seeks to revolutionise, many former fighters upon their return to civilian life reproduce conservative gender norms. This, however, is highly dependent on their class and degree of education before joining the PKK, what happened to them in the party and where they seek refuge upon leaving.

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).