Feminist Struggles in Authoritarian Times: Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt and Palestine Today
Panel 090, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 16 at 4:00 pm
Panel Description
In keeping with this year’s theme, and in an attempt to foster dialogue across borders and boundaries, this panel brings together feminist scholar-activists from or doing research on Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt and Palestine together. The panel comprises sociologists, political scientists, historians, and women’s and gender studies scholars who will discuss how the mixed legacy of “state feminisms” – or their lack thereof in the absence of a state, as in Palestine -- play out in contemporary political struggles in these countries. In particular, the panel will focus on a) how women’s and feminist movements today participate in and strive to transform politics in these countries and b) how gender as an analytical category helps us understand authoritarianism and anti-authoritarian (and in the case of Palestine, anti-colonial) struggles.
Many countries in the Middle East are undergoing significant political transformation. The power struggles unfolding in the region reflect some old debates and fissures, and some new ones -- or new articulations of old ones. Key to understanding these power struggles is how political actors who control the state, as well as opposition movements, challenge or reproduce and justify social inequalities based on class, gender, race/ethnicity, and religion.
One of the most significant and visible sources of social inequality in the region is gender. From the early days of state-building and as part of their modernization projects, all three states have strived to shape what it means, and requires to be “modern” Muslim men and women. Gender has always been political in this sense as these states have “granted” some rights and space to women, often in the face of some opposition. Today, the mixed legacy of “state feminism” in Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt – as well as in Palestine -- can help us understand the appeal of conservative Islamist arguments for restricting women’s rights in the region.
More broadly, gender is political in the sense that it is about how the two binary categories and groups should relate to one another, and about denying recognition, rights and respect for those who do not embody ideal wo/manhood or do not “fit” the binary fold.
Despite being the most contested issue in some of the key countries in the region, as an analytical category gender remains marginal to the literatures on authoritarianism, nationalism, and democratization. Highlighting contemporary women’s and feminist struggles in Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt and Palestine in which they are actively engaged, the panelists will fill this gap in the scholarship by discussing how gender as an analytical category helps us study the transformation of social-political relations more broadly.
Many countries in the Middle East, including Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia are undergoing significant political transformation. The power struggles unfolding in the region reflect some old debates and fissures, and some new ones -- or new articulations of old ones. Key to understanding these power struggles is how political actors who control the state, as well as opposition movements, challenge or reproduce and justify social inequalities based on class, gender, race/ethnicity, and religion.
One of the most significant and visible sources of social inequality in the region is gender. From the early days of state-building and as part of their modernization projects, all three states have strived to shape what it means, and requires to be "modern" Muslim men and women. Gender has always been political in this sense as these states have "granted" some rights and space to women, often in the face of some opposition. Today, the mixed legacy of "state feminism" in Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt can help us understand the appeal of conservative Islamist arguments for restricting women's rights in the region.
More broadly, gender is political in the sense that it is about how the two binary categories and groups should relate to one another, and about denying recognition, rights and respect for those who do not embody ideal wo/manhood or do not "fit" the binary fold.
Despite being the most contested issue in some of the key countries in the region, as an analytical category gender remains marginal to the literatures on authoritarianism, nationalism, and democratization. Highlighting contemporary women's and feminist struggles in Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt, in which they are actively engaged, the panelists will fill this gap in the literature by discussing how gender as an analytical category helps us study the transformation of social-political relations more broadly.
Disciplines
Participants
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Prof. Simten Cosar
-- Presenter
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Dr. Nancy L. Stockdale
-- Presenter
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Dr. Laura Bier
-- Presenter
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Dr. Ozlem Altiok
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Dr. Bihter Somersan
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Ozlem Altiok
Women have been active participants in a variety of protest movements: the Arab Spring, the Gezi protests in Turkey, and anti-occupation activism in Palestine. In addition, women’s and feminist movements have struggled against authoritarian tendencies – during and after these protests – and sought to reshape political discourse and state policy, as well as predominant cultural assumptions.
While the contexts of these protests differ, an analysis of case studies of gender in political transition and contestation also reveals some commonalities. First, women’s visibility during protests, from Tahrir to Gezi, put them in the spotlight as political actors with agency. In addition, women gendered protests in creative ways. In turn, governments sought to deny protestors’ agency, arguing inter alia that women were manipulated or did not know the worth of what the government was doing for them. Governments also spread misinformation and outright lies to drive a wedge between women (along “religious” versus “secularist” lines).
Second, the legacy of “state feminism” in many of the region’s countries has meant that reactionary Islamist movements and political parties linked authoritarian regimes and their modernizing/secularizing policies to an erosion of the “authentic” culture and religion. This has left women’s legal rights vulnerable to attack in terms of political discourse and policy. Equally importantly, and operating in more diffuse ways, these attacks are supported by cultural and religious arguments that aim to curtail women’s rights and voices.
In this paper, I specify the different levels at which gender shaped political transition and contestation in this decade, and offer a theoretical explanation for the patterns observed across a number of cases. Drawing on case studies of contemporary politics of gender in Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, and Libya, I address the structural conditions that give rise to protest movements, and how the politics of gender reflect and deflect from the crises of neoliberalism and Islamist authoritarianism.
Extending Du Bois’ concept of a “public and psychological wage” that accrues to whites regardless of class status, I argue that control over women serves the function of appeasing the powerless multitudes in the age of neoliberalism. I introduce the concept of “offloading powerlessness” as part of a multi-level theoretical synthesis of political economy and cultural perspectives to explain concretely how gender is intrinsic (not incidental or marginal) to the study of politics.
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Dr. Bihter Somersan
A Feminist Classroom in Authoritarian Times in “the new Turkey”
The Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey works intentionally and aggressively to Islamize education as part of its broader Islamic-nationalist political project. JDP’s efforts aim
to ensure the reproduction of pro-regime loyalists and the silencing of dissidents, and in effect transforms the whole field of knowledge production. This paper explores discursive strategies and pedagogical practice in a feminist classroom that aims to foster critical thinking and dialogue over gender in society despite this authoritarian regime.
Drawing on critical and emancipatory pedagogy and autoethnographic reflections on my own feminist pedagogy in the classroom, I examine the strategies students and teachers develop to adopt to and survive in an authoritarian political environment. I discuss the merits of the argument that education promotes democratization by considering the current restrictions that are imposed on education in Turkey, and their consequences for classroom dynamics. I argue for a feminist epistemology that stands for embodied education resting on critical reflection and constructive dialogue over shared experiences. Last but not least, I consider also the moments where dialogues collapse, pedagogical practices fail or are simply not applicable.
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Dr. Nancy L. Stockdale
Of Their Own Volition: Situating Palestinian Girl Activists
As the Israeli occupation of the West Bank churned into its six decade, a young Palestinian girl named Ahed Tamimi garnered international media attention for her bold, fearless protests against Zionism and its military suppression of her nation. Headlines sensationalized her dramatic confrontations of the Israeli troops that had assaulted, imprisoned, and harassed her family members and the rest of her village, often spending as much or more time commenting on her “Western” appearance as her civil disobedience. A common thread ran through the coverage, a classic question regarding politically active children: was she acting of her own volition, as a child victim of a violent military occupation, or was she an actor/pawn being manipulated by her parents, in an effort to embarrass Israel and advance the Palestinian cause through an “unfair” machination?
In this paper, I examine a variety of tropes used in international media discussions about Tamimi and other Palestinian girl activists, in an effort to situate the complicated ways that girls figure in popular imaginings of Palestine and the Israeli Occupation. What is often missing from reportage about child activists are presentations of girls’ political engagement and civil disobedience as the result of their own actualized decision-making. Beyond the polarizing knee-jerk reactions that come from people on the extremes of Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, even media that purport “neutrality” will often fall into a variety of dismissive tropes: their analysis will fall back upon Orientalist and sexist stereotypes regarding gender, ethnicity, or religion, they will try to explain away child activism as the result of unwitting parental and societal manipulation, and they will attempt to psychoanalyze girls to rationalize their actions. All of these efforts strip agency away from these girls, who are part of a long line of Palestinian girl activists. How should we situate their activism in our discussions of Palestinian historical and contemporary resistance and nation building? I analyze and historicize contemporary representations of Palestinian girls’ activism against the Israeli occupation in this paper, pushing past the tropes to better understand how scholars may better situate and interpret their important position in the Palestinian national struggle.
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Dr. Laura Bier
Egyptian women were on the frontline of the 2011 revolution. Images of Egyptian women participating actively in revolutionary change across all boundaries of generation, ideology and religious identity help to define Egypt’s revolution as a romance of national unity victorious against tyranny and Tahrir Sq. as symbol of republican virtue. However in the post-revolutionary period, much publicized incidents of the sexual assault of female protestors have underlined the extent to which Egyptian women as a whole have became targets of worsening sexual assault and violence since 2011. Commentators, mostly (but not exclusively) outside of Egypt, have pointed to epidemic levels of sexual harassment of Egyptian women as a symbol of the failures of the Arab Spring writ large. However, such pronouncements may miss important shifts, as the post-revolutionary period has also seen new forms of organizing around sexual harassment (a term which in Egypt can encompass anything from cat calls to violent sexual assault) since the revolution, particularly around the assault of female protesters in Tahrir Square.
This paper examines changing discourses around sexual assault over the last five years and grassroots political responses to it to answer a number of crucial questions: What lessons does the activism around sexual harassment in Egypt have for thinking about the practice of democracy? What can it tell us about the indicators of revolutionary change, and its limits? How do post-revolutionary gender politics serve to constitute the alliances and fissures between the state and ordinary Egyptian citizens? By looking at the emergence of groups like Tahrir Body Guard, the Girls of Egypt are a Red Line and Operation Stop Sexual Harassment I trace the ways in which activism around sexual assault and need to protect female protesters (and, by extension Tahrir as a revolutionary space), have transformed discourses around sexual harassment as a whole, making it not only a topic of political import for the first time but also prompting the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to make combatting sexual harassment a focus of state legal action and concern. I argue that such grassroots and state interventions both hold out promise for Egyptian women and reveal limits of such interventions in the context of authoritarian rule.
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Prof. Simten Cosar
This paper focuses on the last stage of Justice and Development Party's rule (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey. It aims to elaborate on the rising tide of authoritarian practices at governmental level that is accompanied by moralism at the societal level. The main argument of the paper is that the AKP's rule in Turkey since 2002 displays an example of regime transition from secular Republicanism to religion based authoritarian rule with fascistic tunes. In the pursuit of this argument I adopt a feminist reading and thus tie the regime transition to the change in the form of patriarchy. My reading unfolds in three parts. In the first part I offer an outline of the AKP's gender regime in institutional terms. In the second part, I focus on the AKP governments' discourses on feminism and rights-based socio-political opposition. In the third and concluding part I offer a tentative discussion on the extensions and limitations of reading the regime transition in Turkey in feminist terms.
