If the image of Tunisia as a model democracy, and an economic miracle was challenged by the 2011 protests against the Ben Ali regime, its reputation as a haven of women’s rights in the Middle East has proved more tenacious. The post-colonial state’s emphasis on liberal understandings of women’s liberation has contributed to polarizing debates about the nature of Tunisian identity even after the downfall of Ben Ali where a secular, Western womanhood is juxtaposed against religiously-inspired interpretations of gender roles and the family. In their focus on legislation as a barometer of women’s rights scholars have been complicit in perpetuating similar tropes, focusing on binaries of resistance versus oppression. The privileging of political economy as opposed to social and cultural approaches has marginalized qualitative methods to the detriment of fieldwork, while rarely studying men as men. This panel deploys feminist and gender analysis to cross-examine representations of women and masculinities in modern Tunisia through an interdisciplinary perspective. It blends an interest in discursive analysis, art and images, with attention to lived experiences.
The panel begins by posing the question of how Bourguiba and Ben Ali crafted and disseminated the official image as liberating women. As opposed to viewing women as merely objects of this marketing, the first paper probes women’s own contributions to the process. The second contribution turns to the decorative arts under Bourguiba, and the works of Safia Farhat in particular. As a state-commissioned artist, the paper considers her representations of gender and labor in relation to the discourse of modernization. Subsequent papers draw from anthropology and literature to de-center the urban, middle-class, secular consumerism so prevalent in Tunisian depictions of modern womanhood while they shift the analytic focus from women to gender. Panelists are particularly interested in what such rhetoric has meant for Tunisian men. Building on innovative methodology among working-class men, panelists consider masculinity in the streets, and in factories. One paper challenges the emphasis on women’s bodies in the binary distinction between secularism and piety with a complex approach to the meanings of hijab/veiling. Another, situated in the export-processing zone of Binzart, asks how hierarchies within the work place intersect with understandings of masculinity. Finally, through an examination of the writings of Amel Mokhtar, the fifth paper explores the relation between political participation and masculinities. How have Tunisian women writers approached the question of political engagement, and how have these expectations been transformed since the beginning of the revolution?
Without espousing a teleological claim to “explain” the Tunisian Revolution, our research offers insightful perspectives on the complexity and dynamism of Tunisian society both before and after January 2011, with particular attention to women, gender, and masculinities. One of our strengths lies in the panelists’ depth of experience, both collective and individual, living and researching in Tunisia.
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Prof. Amy Kallander
In his inaugural speech at the Fourth National Congress of the state-run women’s organization, the National Union of Tunisian Women (NUTW), on “Women and Social Evolution,” President Habib Bourguiba made clear a number of premises of his position on women’s rights. First, the coupling of women with “evolution,” indicated the centrality of women to narratives of post-colonial Tunisian modernity and the linear progress of the nation, it also emphasized that women’s role was “social” as opposed to political or economic. Second, Bourguiba’s patronage of the NUTW embodied the patriarchal framework (if not also its limitations) of Bourguiba’s approach to women, the family, and gender roles. Yet this tells only one part of the story.
If the Tunisian regime manipulated the ‘woman question’ in order to present a secular, modern, and Westernized visage to international audiences, women themselves were crucial to its dissemination. In addition to its participation in international organizations, the circulation of presidential discourses, and the distribution of glossy publications by various state agencies, Tunisian women actively promoted an association between their personal success and the progress of their nation. Though the women who benefited from state patronage are hardly representative of the variety and complexity of women’s lives in post-colonial Tunisia, as they belong primarily to urban, educated, and secular-oriented middle-class, they remain significant. This paper focuses on the nationalist narrative of progress in a way that recognizes women’s agency, leaving room for disparate goals. It examines women's writings alongside official sources to complicate the picture of collaboration versus resistance by examining how women advocated from within the state’s hegemonic institutions.
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Simon Hawkins
The current depiction of Tunisian politics and society as divided between the binary poles of secularism and religion grew easily from the pre-revolutionary state’s dichotomy of modernity vs. traditional religion. While the division was developed by the state, it has also been supported by some anti-state forces for whom it provided a totalizing form of categorization. Women’s bodies played a crucial role in this binary distinction, with a particular fascination with hijab. However, in the realities of daily life in Tunis, the meaning and understanding of hijab has been, and remains more complex. Drawing on ethnographic data prior to and following the 2011 revolution, this presentation examines the way both men’s and women’s practices undermine the clear distinction made by the state between secular and religious identities, particularly with regard to hijab. Hijab has long standing ideological associations with the control of sexuality, and yet young men on the streets of Tunis do not view hijab as an impediment to their desire or as a marker of religious status. For them hijab signified not the religious categories of piety or purity, but interest in acquiring a husband. Women in hijab were acceptable objects of desire and the targets of flirtation. This undermining of the assumed nature of hijab has been carried farther in post-revolutionary Tunisia, with the very category of hijab itself called into question. With the relaxation of clothing standards following the revolution, women may more freely wear clothing that had been associated with hijab. Prior to the revolution there was a shared understanding that hair and body coverage was intended to signal hijab. Now, however headscarves and long gloves may not signal religious conviction as much as sun screen. A woman who might at first glance appear religiously conservative, may create a very different impression when she takes off her head and arm coverings on entering a public building. While this behavior on the streets of Tunis is not overtly political, it calls into question the clear categorization that so many aggressively political groups are pursuing. It rejects the efforts to reduce issues of gender and the body to simplistic partisan politics and religion becomes marked more by internal conviction than external signification.
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Dr. Douja Mamelouk
In the aftermath of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, writing without fearing censorship became possible for Amel Mokhtar, Fethia Hechmi and Messaouda Boubakr. Hence, narrating the politics of post-Revolutionary Tunisia became a theme of these women’s texts. The titles of their works suggest the political nature of their writings: Messaouda Boubakr’s adhal ahki (I Continue to Narrate) and Fethia Hechmis’ al-shaytan ya‘ud min al-manfa (Satan Returns from Exile) appeared in bookstores in 2012 and Amel Mokhtar published dukhan al-qasr (Smoke of the Palace) in 2013.
This paper argues that Mokhtar, Hechmi and Boubakr narrate contested masculinities in their fiction, mirroring their discontent with dictatorship and their anxieties toward the new socio-political debates that have taken place since the Revolution. They contribute to post-Revolutionary socio-political and gender-centered debates.
When state-sponsored feminism ceased to exist after the Revolution, the question of women’s status became pressing for these authors. Rather than gaining more constitutional rights after the Revolution, women’s 1957 rights became subject to social and political debates. In parallel with the appearance of new nationalist discourses evidenced by the existence of 167 different political parties in a country of eleven million people, a variety of feminisms arose. Tunisia witnessed the shifting away from the modernist-secularist-state-sponsored feminism model to an array of newly founded women’s identities. It became imperative for Tunisian women to narrate the Revolution and the post-Revolution era’s discontentment for which they chose a critique of Tunisian masculinities. This paper highlights three women’s narrative responses to what Homi Bhabha perceives as being part of the “justifications of modernity—progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past—that rationalize the authoritarian.” (4) In other words, Mokhtar, Hechmi and Boubakr demonstrate their disillusionment with equating the Revolution to improving women’s condition in Tunisia. Their narratives mirror men’s violence against women, polygamy, the illicitness of women’s bodies and women’s anxieties about the Revolution.
All three works portray masculine representations from a female narrator’s viewpoint within Tunisia’s ‘nation-space’ in an effort to interpret the effects of the Revolution on Tunisian society. Instead of writing to be part of the normative nationalist discourse that existed prior to the Revolution, these women write to contest the inequality between genders in a nation that formerly made a plea to modernity through women’s rights and gender equality mottos. The Revolution has allowed masks to fall and for new narrative spaces to evolve.
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Dr. Jessica Gerschultz
This paper will examine representations of gendered labor in the decorative programs of Safia Farhat and other École de Tunis artists in relation to socioeconomic transformations in postcolonial Tunisia. Between 1950 and 1978 Farhat and her elite colleagues designed dozens of monumental artworks for municipal buildings under the so-called 1% law. Initiated under the French Protectorate by Lucien Paye in 1950 and reinstated by Habib Bourguiba’s government, this law allocated 1% of a civic building’s construction budget towards its decoration with “modern” artwork. In the post-Independence period, Safia Farhat, Abdelaziz Gorgi, Jellal Ben Abdallah, and Zoubeïr Turki received and directed the majority of these commissions, which included the fabrication of tapestries, ceramic tile panels, stone obelisks, and low-relief friezes. While the thematic content of this corpus varies, numerous representations of female and male workers merit inquiry given the contested nature of labor conditions during the early postcolonial period, particularly during the years of “socialist” reform (1962-1970.)
My paper will take as its starting point Safia Farhat’s mural of two male laborers in the main entrance to the offices of the Société Tunisienne de Sucre in Béja. As the sole woman in the École de Tunis and the first Tunisian director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, Farhat occupies a tenuous position in the art historiography, in part due to her marriage to a Bourguibist minister and her entrepreneurial efforts in harnessing state commissions for “decorative” works. My paper will contextualize Farhat’s imagery in relation to figures portrayed by her male colleagues. Specifically, I will interrogate two interrelated facets of these artworks: how the iconography of artwork depicting laborers may be construed as gendered, as well as the significant position of the artwork within such locations as sugar refineries, textile factories, tourist hotels, and the headquarters of the Bourse du travail in Tunis. What might gendered representations of labor signify when installed in state-run sites of service and production, and to which audiences? While local art historiography frequently reduces the content of École de Tunis artworks to modernist/derivative representations of “folklore,” I will argue for a multivalent assessment that probes the broader, gendered polemics of modernization. This paper will be based on extensive photographic and archival documentation conducted in Tunisia between 2009-2010 and 2013-2014.
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Dr. Claire T. Oueslati-Porter
Concerning "women's rights," Tunisia is often described as the Middle East and North Africa's exception, both by international organizations and by its own political officials who continue to be deeply invested in the global impression management of the Tunisian economy. Yet by any stretch of the sociological imagination, Tunisian gender legislation has failed to produce gender equality in Tunisian society. This has much to do with Tunisia’s incorporation into the global economy. Binzart, Tunisia’s export processing zones do more than produce cheap products for the European Union. They produce power, and do so by employing particularly Tunisian configurations of class and gender.
This paper discusses ethnographic evidence gathered in an export processing zone (EPZ) textile factory in Binzart, Tunisia in 2008-9. Of central importance is how this node in the global economy reproduces hegemonic Tunisian masculinity, but also provides opportunities for challenges to hegemonic, class-bound gender. Of primary focus is masculine management and worker resistance. While the manager of the factory exploits women workers through tactics such as destabilizing women's sense of sexual self-mastery, male factory workers experience tension between their alliances with female workers and the privilege they receive with the boss, who actively cultivates a masculine rapport with his male employees. Further, male and female workers play on Tunisian cultural taboos, such as flirtation and counter-hegemonic assertions of fictive kinship. Women workers resist exploitation through self-objectification, and religious piety, rarely posing direct challenges to their exploitation. The figure of the lone female manager on the factory floor is explored as she manages the stigma of her own masculinization and strategically exerts domination over the workers. An emergent Tunisian proletarian femininity reifies, challenges, and provocatively appropriates masculinity.
