In a country with an adult female literacy rate of approximately 35% (overall 48%) when the most recent Moudawana reforms were passed in 2004, it is no surprise that popular culture such as cinema has played a key role in the nation’s political discourse. This can be seen in films of the 1990s, such as Saâd Chraïbi’s 1999 Femmes…et femmes, Hakim Noury’s 1998 Destin des femmes and Farida Benlyazid’s 1999 Ruses des femmes, which helped the country focus on gender issues such as sexual harassment, domestic violence and divorce, adding to conversations otherwise driven primarily by women’s NGOs and CSOs (civil society organizations). The focus of this presentation will be to consider what role popular culture plays in the post-reform period, specifically Zakia Tahri’s comedic film Number One (2008), exploring how this film engages in and contributes to popular and political discourse about changes to the Moudawana. On the surface this film seems to be a simple, even simplistic, battle-of-the-sexes comedy in which the misogynistic director of a company is, through the use of magic obtained by his suffering wife, transformed into an exaggerated and even emasculated feminist. This transformation is identified in the film (by a medical doctor) as the “Moudawana Syndrome” – one which results in the director’s ability to empathize with his female employees and his wife, and also in feelings of happiness. When patriarchal society surrounding him has difficulty accepting his transformation, it is his female employees and other women who come to his rescue, staging a strike in his support. And when given the choice of changing back to his former self, he chooses instead to remain in this “reformed” version, encouraging his friends to do the same, and in the end is named Morocco’s “Man of the Year.” I argue that the film plays an important role in the post-reform period, just as the films above did in the years leading up to the 2004 reforms, interrogating and challenging commonly held gender stereotypes and anxieties, while simultaneously working to increase local knowledge and acceptance of the reforms to the Moudawana or Personal Status Laws. The discussion will draw on Foucault’s conceptualization of the term discourse (a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge/meaning and which simultaneously constructs subjects and the worlds of which they speak), arguing that this female-directed comedy draws on indigenous beliefs and biases to construct new “regimes of truth” for gender relations in Moroccan society.

Women and land Grab in Morocco In March 2009 hundreds of women, sulaliyyat, stood in front of the Parliament in Rabat. They were staging the first nationwide-grassroots mobilization for land rights led by rural women. The sulaliyyat is a newly invented concept through which rural women stress the collective status of land while delineating ethnic belonging and tribal membership as foundations for their right to land. The sulaliyyat mobilization begun in 2007 when women from the Heddada tribe, surrounding the city of Kenitra, questioned their exclusion from the economic transactions taking place on their ‘ancestral’ land. As the process of privatization and land grab intensifies across Morocco, thousands of women have started to ask the same question across the Arabic and Amazigh speaking regions. They express shared concerns about the structures of gender inequalities that shape the liberalization of rural economies, and grapple with the nexus of colonial law and customary practices that put men at the center of economic transactions while excluding women. They point to the exclusive pathways of circulation of money and capital between tribal elites, state agents and investors, and speak about the ‘settler colonial’ nature of big farming and real estate development. I locate the sulaliyyat’s mobilization at the nexus of gendered ethnicities, privatized subjectivities, and postcolonial legal regimes of land tenure. I focus on two main questions: 1) what do we learn about neoliberal transitions of rural communities by exploring the sulaliyyat’s narratives about land, rights, and state? 2) As the sulaliyyat struggle to redefine collective land as a woman’s territory, do they provide alternatives to its disintegration or legitimate the ongoing process of its privatization? I propose that the sulaliyyat’s sustained mobilization and appropriation of the discourse of gender equality and rights are shaking the deep-seated structures of power and authority in the countryside. It has made highly visible the bureaucratic process through which land has become the new locus for political engineering and for generating profit and dispossession. The women’s claims to equal rights with men, has also put gender at the center of the state negotiations of neoliberal transformations with rural communities and elites. However, in this paper I will read this mobilization less than a celebration of women’s agency and power, than an illustration of the changing subjectivities of rural women, as the new subjects of rights, as ownership.

In a 2016 attempt to revive Egypt’s struggling economy in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, Egypt signed a three-year, $12 billion loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On November 3rd, 2016, the Central Bank of Egypt devalued the Egyptian pound (LE) by 48%, causing a steep rise in prices and the value of the USD against the LE. By June 16th, 2018, the government had raised fuel prices for the third time since the devaluation of the currency to meet loan conditions. This paper argues that Egypt’s 2016 IMF loan and its subsequent neoliberal policies have exacerbated the difficulties of women’s mobility in Cairo. It, therefore, has been jeopardizing their personal safety, employment prospects, and possibilities of a better life. I base my theoretical work on Ananya Roy and Silvia Chant’s research regarding women’s mobility and transportation justice in the Global South. This research is qualitative; I do textual analysis of primary sources including news articles in Arabic and English and draw data from institutional reports and surveys. I also draw on primary data from interviews I conducted with Cairene women in 2017. Using a gender lens, this paper asks: has the IMF loan and its ensuing devaluation of the Egyptian pound and hike in fuel prices disproportionately affected Cairene women’s mobility? Mobility in Cairo has always been difficult for most women, as the decrepit state of infrastructure and transportation, and omnipresent harassment hinders their access and rights to public space. This paper finds that the IMF loan and accompanying austerity measures have exacerbated these difficulties and made the state of women’s mobility more precarious. From there, a ripple effect in their lives (and their families’) occurs, affecting everything from their morale to how far they can travel in the city to their prospects of a better life. This pilot study gives insight into an important, yet under-researched, issue in Egypt’s current events. Academics, economists and policy makers must further research this issue and bring it to the spotlight as most Egyptians will continue to experience severe economic conditions for the foreseeable future.

This paper examines the transformation in the lives of pastoral women – subsistence goat herders- in the context of mobile camel and goat herding economies of Oman and the United Arab Emirates. After a brief review of women and gender roles in Western academic and popular literature, the paper explores the impact that the deep isolation of the Trucial Coast and the Sultanate of Oman prior to 1970, has had on the in extraordinarily rapid and extensive modernization in the region. Taking as a case study one of the most isolated social groups in southeast Arabia, the Harasiis tribe, it catalogues the impact of government promoted projects to modernize and develop the society. The paper analyses the transformation in tribal women’s roles in the transnational desert of South East Arabia between 1980 to the present time. It puts forward the hypothesis that unlike other cases of herding societies where modernization has meant settlement, and loss of status (e.g. the Negev Bedouin women) women of the desert tribes of Oman and the UAE have maintained, if not actually strengthen, their socio-economic status and family management roles. The curious twist here is that during the prolonged absences of menfolk for as much as 80% of the year, woman have stepped up to run large extended households and engage with local authority in the sponsorship and management of multiple hired help for the subsistence herds as well as household work.

Islamic knowledge production has admittedly evolved into a male-dominant field since its early days. However, calls for women’s empowerment through Islam, or Islamic feminism, has been gradually contesting this male hegemony and fighting for equal rights for men and women. Islamic feminism is flourishing in the Arabian Peninsula (AP). It boasts plural understandings of the status of women in Islam. In my paper, I argue for a diverse set of Islamic feminisms in the AP that is mindful of shifting gender relations. I examine case studies from the seemingly most conservative AP state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Saudi feminists have held their ground, despite the overriding patriarchy and many restrictions facing women in KSA. I further argue that the highlighted Islamic feminists express and fight for this common aspiration through different methodologies, making the project all the more interesting as each activist presents a unique paradigm for Islamic feminism. Islamic feminism is arguably the clearest religious reform output to come out of the AP. It is focused thanks to a clear objective, well-researched arguments, and diverse methods that provide manifold ways to arrive at the goal of equality between men and women in Islam as a fulfillment of divine intent. I adopt Deniz Kandiyoti’s patriarchal bargain model. Kandiyoti demonstrates women’s rights as negotiated rights: women make choices and succumb to patriarchy in certain areas to gain traction in others. This bargain can take different forms based on the local culture and context. Women’s rights in the AP, including religious rights, are better understood through this paradigm. I tweak this bargaining model to analyze the dialectic between the thoughts and actions of the feminists. My source base includes multiple in-depth interviews with the surveyed feminists. I supplement these personal communications with their largely untapped works. The feminists share a passion for advancing religious reform through the focused prism of women’s rights in Islam. Through these case studies, I demonstrate how the silenced feminists fight for their agency. I also fill a gap in both the Islamic reform and gender literatures that do not readily acknowledge the Arabian Peninsula as a hotbed of a gender-conscious, Islamic feminist intellectual discourse and activity that aims at countering an otherwise prevailing patriarchy.