Some claim that the Arab Spring started with by the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005. Others say that the 2011 Arab Spring was instead motivated by the Cedar Revolution. Whether started with it or motivated by it, the Cedar Revolution is the only case in the context of the Arab Spring that provides some historical depth for analysis. It helps us answer an important question related to gender politics: Do women benefit from activism for national causes? The paper examines practical political opportunities that became available for women’s rights activists in Lebanon as a result of the Cedar Revolution. By deconstructing the conceptualization of gender and feminism in a Lebanese context, this paper reveals how women’s rights organizations were able to reformulate their demands for women’s rights within the context of activism for democracy, liberty and sovereignty in the private as well as the public sphere. To frame women’s activism in relations to the Cedar Revolution, I construct the historical, religious and political contexts in which the Cedar Revolution and the women’s movement were organized. I then describe the activists who were engaged in these two movements: What were their reasons or motivations? How and why did the movement mobilize? What resources did they possess in challenging the State? What were their toughest challenges? And what kinds of hopes does the future hold for these groups?

Based upon ethnographic research, this paper provides a genealogy of women’s activism within anti-authoritarian movements in Egypt during the decade preceding the Egyptian revolution of 2011. I focus on the significance of this period to the ways gender struggles transpired during and after the revolution of itself. I explore the dynamic whereby women’s activism and grievances related to gender and sexism significantly shaped and inspired anti-authoritarian movements and workers strikes during this period, yet women activists did not explicitly articulate demands for gender justice and/or feminism. This paper provides insight into how gender justice struggles emerged within anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist struggles even though these struggles were not always visible or explicitly articulated. This paper then illustrates the limitations of singular feminist analysis that isolate gender as a category of analysis from broader political movements and material realities and looks for “women’s struggles” in an isolated political sphere. As many Egyptian feminists have been doing all along, I argue for an analysis that can account for the ways everyday life engagements with multiple, co-constituting structures of oppression (such as socio-economic class, gender, and authoritarianism) help explain the conditions, and the grievances, that inspired the participation of many women in political activism of this period. Overall, this paper takes up the following dilemma: Egyptians needed to come together under one unified slogan. This argument, however, can inadvertently reinscribe notions of certain forms of subjectivity as being more “superficial” or less “primary” than others—that is, capable of disappearing or becoming irrelevant when things “really” get serious. Like many gender justice activists, I have felt uneasy about how the women workers’ movements apparently left gender-based demands aside during the strikes of 2005-2007 as well as the ways the dominant narrative among Egyptian revolutionary movements which asserts that women activists “left gender aside” during the 18 days. Yet I have felt similarly frustrated that at other moments, gender is focused upon as a singular, isolated category and is centralized almost too much—as in the dominant U.S. and Egyptian corporate media representations of “sexualized violence against Egyptian women” that ignore the significance of state violence, authoritarianism, corruption, imperialism, and so on in producing sexualized violence. These collective reflections inspire challenges related to both recognizing why women might choose to prioritize other aspects of struggle over gender while simultaneously recognizing that all the intersectional strands are at play.

This narrative, which is based upon my twenty years of teaching at the University of Jordan, is derived not only from my experiences as a professor of literature and feminist theory but also from my on-going activism with respect to movements on women and on social justice that work toward cultural and social transformation. The testimonial poem I have crafted reflects the intellectual development and nourishment of my graduate and undergraduate students, a development which has been like an Arab Spring, or better still, an Arab Renaissance. Feminist classes create a breeding ground for Jordanian students to use their subjective I, to express their opinions, to engage in debate, and to assert their identities. Through their feminist education, these students emerge as active agents in their own learning and develop an authentic voice that bears witness to their lives and minds. Independent, a subject, they rip into feminist texts and speak in their own active voices with certainty, becoming midwife learners delivering their own ideas to the world and engaging in a conversation with other voices-past and present-in the culture. Through dialogue, they cross barriers and bridge private and shared experiences. They not only rise, but they also go beyond.

This project highlights the work of Najia Adib’s Touche Pas a Mes Enfants organization to combat the rising issues of pedophilia and child servitude in Morocco. Following the molestation of her son while in childcare, Adib broke the taboo of silence and turned her anger into a one-woman campaign to raise awareness of and seek tougher penalties for the exploitation of Moroccan children. To this end, Adib has accompanied abuse victims to pursue and achieve the prosecution of sex offenders, including her son’s aggressor, while receiving minimal technical and financial assistance from the Moroccan government. Following interviews with Adib and other key actors in global efforts to protect the rights of children, this project analyzes Adib’s achievements while problematizing the implicit structural, logistic, ideological and sociolinguistic limits to collaboration between grass roots activism and more comprehensive national and international efforts to defend the rights of children.