My proposed contribution will aim to challenge the U.S centrism of critiques of area studies and the discussion about the tensions between Middle Eastern Studies and gender and sexuality studies. Neither Middle East Studies as an ‘area’ of study nor feminist and queer studies have solely developed within North American academia. Even within the specific field of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, there exist significantly different trajectories and tensions linked to specific political and discursive contexts. My paper will reflect on the specific tensions emerging out of different European contexts, focusing on German and British academia. Here I will illustrate how specific academic traditions, political relationships with the Middle East and its diasporas, in addition to specific histories of feminist activism shape the discursive spaces we as feminist/Middle East scholars inhabit. Secondly, my paper will attempt to challenge the idea that conservative gender and sexuality discourses emerge mainly in the global south, including the Middle East. Underlying many of the debates and critiques of universalizing human rights discourses, has been the assumption of a purportedly immutable hegemonic liberal order. Yet, whatever its limitations, the assumed liberalism of ‘the West’ is being put to the test by the wave of illiberal right wing populisms sweeping North America and Europe. Re-instating rigid gender (and racial) hierarchies as well as heteronormative ideas about sexuality lies at the heart of these right wing conservatisms. In many countries in both the global south and in Europe, right wing movements have been up in arms against so-called “gender ideology” and have targeted gender studies programs and scholars. My paper will reflect on the question of how can we talk creatively about these new universal and universalizing conservative and right wing ‘anti-gender’ trends without falling into the trap of previous articulations of universal liberalism nor lose track of historical and empirical specificities?

Contemporary theories of social media publics use the network as a universal symbol of social connection across heterogeneous cultural contexts. Units of networking are defined by digital infrastructure, which prescribes categories such as private Facebook groups and public YouTube channels, giving users transnationally a set of network components with which to improvise. This paper draws on research in digital performances from the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, to consider how Arab women’s networks use social media affordances to build publics across contentious social divides. In contrast to ideological polarization in the birthplace of social media, these networks use the category of “woman” to cross over religious/secular divides, offering universalist alternative publics to national media publics where women symbolized cultural essentialisms. Corporations in the Arab world use the strategically essentialist category of “female” to market consumer goods and media to women and girls. The digital entrepreneurs in my study addressed these very markets as lifestyle influencers, playing roles ranging from hijab evangelist to makeup maven. However, they used the affordances of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, to cut across some entrenched class and cultural divisions within the category of women. As these influencers focused on specific interests, they folded consumer networks and cultural ones into heterogeneous networks. I examine how these differed from both national definitions of women’s publics, and the networks of consumer capitalism critiqued by scholars of Western digital media for women. Using the lens of performance, I argue that these networks staged strategically universalist embodiments of Arab womanhood.

In the context of the tension between universalism and cultural relativism, this presentation will examine how the intersectionality theory can inform new grounds for feminists and sexuality scholarship in the Middle East. The current feminist and sexuality theoretical approach within the western constructed discipline of middle eastern studies is dominated by the anti-imperialist framework emerging from the historical context of the post 9/11 wars and the rise of islamophobia. While this framework has strengthened our understanding of the genealogy of human rights and the dangers of forcing a westernized right based approach to feminist activism, it failed to recognize the challenges of the post Arab Spring era. The anti-imperialist discourse has been relentlessly attacking women rights movements for enforcing a western imperial agenda on their communities. This reductionist view has been confined for decades within the universalism vs culture relativism binary and forgot about the reality of women’s lives in the middle east. The 2011 uprisings demand a reconsideration of the hegemonic understanding of the middle east constructed by several social scientists working within western academia. The idea that the middle east is a static place where traditions are not interacting with time, nor political economy or geopolitics, and where change is an external concept alien to the culture was drastically challenged by the Arab Spring uprising. Therefore, a new generation of middle eastern social researchers invoked the concept of the traveling theory discussed by Edward Said. The traveling theory concept have left many middle eastern scholars and activists wondering if the anti-imperialist theory, intended as a liberation tool, can become a tool for oppression in different geopolitical setting. Looking at the post 2011 feminist activism in Egypt, we can see a new intersectional understanding of gender and sexuality emerging from the social movements and feminist organizations struggle for democracy, social justice and gender equality. While some western academics accuse them of following an imperial agenda, the feminist movements in Egypt are demolishing the imperial vs local culture binary and introducing new grounds of intersectional frameworks and praxis. My presentation will examine theses tensions while drawing on inspiration from recent Egyptian feminist activism efforts.