Women have been active in political protests in Jordan from the 1890s to the present, including anti-tax protests against the Ottoman Empire. This paper will examine the role of women’s participation in protests across different spaces in the build environment, drawing attention when and how women’s participation in women-only or mixed-gender protests differs from other protests (including other mixed-gender protests), and when it does not. Protesters and activists frequently confront the hyper-masculinity of the various security forces, including the plain-clothed baltajiyya thugs. Women activists in such spaces often adjust their protest repertoires to confront those forces while also seeking to deflate the potential for violence. I will pay particular attention to various spaces and geographies of protest—spaces within Amman’s built environment but also the geographies of protest nationwide of when and where women join protests. The paper will draw on archival data as well as ethnographic material from the dozens of protests that I observed.

Since the onset of the Lebanese October 17th uprising, women have come to play a central role in the urban politics of the revolution. The Lebanese people --as much as the world-- took note as images of women at the frontlines of the uprising circulated around the globe, especially that women have rarely and barely been represented in the Lebanese post civil-war governments. Of course, however, women have long been organizing in Lebanon and what the streets have seen since October 17 has been a result of decades of labor that came to the forefront in aim to shape the public sphere beyond the sectarian patriarchal order. Over the past five months, the Lebanese uprising has been primarily a women-driven revolution. Women have been organizing marches, leading sit-ins, writing feminist chants, standing shoulder to shoulder to prevent violence against male protestors by security forces and anti-protests mobs. Young women led student protests chanting revolutionary songs as they marched outside the gates of the schools to reclaim public spaces. On one night, more than 4000 women took over Martyrs’ and Riad el Solh Squares, banging on kitchenware and holding candles, to announce that “the revolution is female.” And on the second week of the uprising, at eight pm every night, women, children and families stepped out to their balconies banging on kitchenware (pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils) in a breathtaking symphony of dissent and hope from the center throughout the peripheries (a Lebanese form of Cacerolazo, a mode of protest that originated in Chile and Argentina has since spread to other parts of the world), politicizing kitchenware and transforming it into a collective acoustical mobilization that one could hear in rich and poor neighborhoods, in Muslim and Christian ones, and in center and peripheries. In this talk, I will reflect on my experience as a participant-observer in the recent Lebanese uprising, centering my intervention on the roles and practices that women embodied in the Lebanese uprising through shaping a public sphere that made possible for the emergence of new forms of urban politics, which necessitated a feminist re/making of new public urban spaces.

This paper focuses on the idea of andaruni (the “women-only space” in gender segregated courtyard houses in Iran) and how this idea has been idealized and recently revived in spatial practices by state, architects, and planners in public spaces in contemporary Iran. Similar to andaruni, the new gender segregated spaces have confined women within the spatial margins of the public realm. Through a transnational feminist lens and theories of gender and space, this study comparatively examines the gender segregated inward-oriented private courtyard houses (with separate andaruni and biruni spaces) with women-only public spaces in contemporary Iran. Drawing on archival sources, visual, and cultural analysis the paper argues that the revival of gender segregated spaces in contemporary Iran (re)produced the female body as “other” and affected gender norms in public spaces. The paper ultimately illustrates how women utilize and forge tactics to resist marginalization and to negotiate their inclusions and rights in public life.

The Boy Scout movement was founded in England in 1908 based on the principles of courage, discipline, and fair play in sports. By 1918, it had expanded to become a worldwide youth movement that taught patriotism and deference to the established social and political order. As part of colonial education and the youth movement, the Boy Scout movement expanded into Mandate Iraq and colonial Kenya in the 1920s and gained immense popularity in the 1930s. Based on British colonial archives, Iraqi government documents, and the Kenyan Boy Scout Association’s handbook, this paper uses the concept of masculinity to examine the Boy Scout movements in Iraq and Kenya. In its discussion, it examines how these movements tried to impose hegemonic masculinity and how native scouts appropriated the notion of masculinity to resist British colonial rule. I argue that while the Boy Scout movements in Iraq and Kenya instilled normative British masculinity among Iraqi and Kenyan youth, Iraqi and Kenyan scouts applied the movement’s laws and norms to their own political, social and economic advantages. In Iraq, scouts combined the Boy Scouts’ idea of youthful masculinity with militarism to construct their ideals of manhood and patriotism. In Kenya, scouts reinterpreted the Boy Scout Law and appropriated the Boy Scout uniforms to build their prestige and privileged status within their community. In both contexts, the Boy Scout movement provided a training ground for the formation of Arab and African nationalisms which served to destabilize the British form of hegemonic masculinity through anti-colonial movements. This study contributes to the scholarship on gender and empire by demonstrating multiple forms of transnational masculinity through divergent indigenous responses.

Kurdish women have organized themselves in an unprecedented way since war broke out in Syria, from taking up arms against ISIS and building village shelters for women to trying to enact a gender equal system-despite their portrayal as “badass women fighters” in the Western media. While doing this, they have called for women in the world to stand in solidarity with them. This paper looks at transnational solidarity in times of war: is it based on vulnerability and victimhood? How does the condition of statelessness impact Kurdish women’s call for solidarity?  And How do Kurdish women reimagine feminism, statelessness, and solidarity?