Abstract
When Egyptian scholar, activist, and philosopher Nawal El Saadawi passed away in early 2021, sources across the globe lamented losing “the Simone de Baeuvoir of the Arab World.” Her death resulted in widespread mourning. Yet, the equivalence of a French existentialist with Nawal El Saadawi should be unsettling. Nawal El Saadawi was Nawal El Saadawi. To mourn her as “the someone-else” feels, at its best, reductive.
The comparison is not shocking. Neither were the resulting cries that Arab women are not simply “local versions of people from elsewhere” (Elthahaway, 2021). This call for distinctive recognition is well worn. Women writing from the Middle East and North Africa routinely demand that they be known in their own right and scholarship often fails to fully reciprocate. Academia is never separate from geopolitics. This is distressingly true around work on the Arab Spring. As many authors have noted, women’s voices from these revolutions risk being absorbed into imperialist aims or funneled through broader categories of third world feminisms. New methods are needed to ensure that women appear as their own actors, with their own resistance, and their own goals.
It is in this context that Rita Stephan and Mourina M. Charrad have assembled their edited volume, Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring (2020). Armed with the task of unsettling preconceptions, the collection digs into women’s activism around the Arab Spring. In doing so, it questions the idea that there are specific spaces for revolutions, linear ways they should progress, and certain markers that indicate success.
Women Rising is divided into five sections, each containing a collection of disjointed chapters. This work opens with a discussion of what women fight for, moves through what different activists believe, and looks to modes of agency, spatialization, and organization. Totaling 40 chapters, Women Rising can feel a bit overwhelming. Yet, the contributions tend to be both concise and detailed. Focused on a vast swath of countries and diasporic communities stretching from Morocco to Iraq, the authors pinpoint women pushing against communities, states, statuses, and each other. The result insists that mobilization takes a myriad of forms.
The text’s density should not be surprising to anyone familiar with both editors’ rich scholarship. Charrad’s fundamental understanding of state and kinship combines beautifully with Stephan’s career spanning state-level agencies and academia. The blending of their perspectives leads Women Rising to embrace the diversity of women’s activism, insisting that we do not need to pretend there is a universal woman’s struggle to grasp the strength of movements.
The volume shines for Stephan and Charrad’s curation of writers with diverse commitments. Chapters are informed by fieldwork, lifelong activism, daily life, and expansive archival research. They speak of participation ranging from teaching to organizing, from publishing selfies to running for political office. In true feminist fashion, the editors’ arrangement challenges us to think about what counts: as agency, activism, protest, or success. The writers’ perspectives coalesce to demonstrate Arab women as complex and historically established actors, distinguished from western, transnational, and third world feminist narratives.
Key within this contribution is a focus on situating women’s activism historically. Common understandings of the Arab Spring imply the movements ignited suddenly and burned out as quickly. Fighting this misrecognition, the volume includes many pieces that contextualize women’s involvement in the years leading up through 2011. For instance, those looking to understand women’s unique battles might consult Ginger Feather’s piece on pedophilia in Morocco or Theresa Hunt’s work on online collaborations mapping harassment in Egypt. In addition, inclusions such as Manal A Jamal’s recollection of rallying in the first Infitada drive home the personal stakes women wield in these struggles. These works highlight that while the Arab Spring may not have sprung directly out of a single women’s movement, it was not completely detached from previous efforts.
Stephan and Charrad’s focus on context is perhaps most valuable in the volume’s discussion of results. Many voices have lamented the failure of women to cement change post-2011. Rather than ignore this common refrain, the volume troubles ideas of what success itself looks like. Is success a change in the wording of a country’s constitution? Is it a cross-gender collaboration to prevent domestic violence? Or the creation of new university courses? Seeing revolution as “longue durée” (Badran, 2020: 232) can help us understand how women’s activism creates movement even as structural oppression persists. When Dina Wahba (2020: 320) writes, “I might be deeply disillusioned, but, for purely selfish reasons, I don’t regret it,” we are prompted to think again about what success looks like and who gets to assess its worth.
In addition to tracing the lives of women’s resistance, Women Rising challenges the idea of what participation or agency looks like. Exploring street-art, dress, poetry, meal preparation, vlogging, and education as forms of protest highlights ways to “move beyond,” as Mohja Kahf (2020: 64) suggests, frameworks of militarization. Acts of agency can be embodied. But they are equally persistent when spray painted onto infrastructure, written in pamphlets, or distributed through websites. Sudden, quotidian collaboration can engender women’s activism, as with marches organized over meals in Palestine or covertly signaled within markets in Syria. Yet, agency can also surface in the refusal of normalcy. Divorce can be a call for something different. So too can a woman’s voice chanting the call to prayer. These vignettes muddy ideas of what resistance looks, exposing us to a greater view of women’s work.
The collection spends a good amount of time problematizing the place of Middle Eastern and North African women in feminist discourse and activism. The need for this work is complex. Humanitarian and international solidarity movements often teeter between supporting and co-opting women’s activism. International activism and oppression become hypervisible when they can be leveraged, as with military intervention by foreign governments. This instrumentalizing exacerbates the localized (and transnational) criticism that women’s affiliations, language, and education draw.
Navigating the needs of varying audiences and spaces is a decidedly crucial part of this scholarship. Nadje Al-Ali (2020: 98) reiterates in her piece that her “own emphasis shifts depending on my audience, either stressing Iraqi women’s agency or stressing the lack thereof.” This problem haunts work, especially feminist writers, on women in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The language of academics is weighted with political connotations. Terms such as feminist, or queer as Nisrine Chaer notes in Beirut, are always already loaded with significance even as they are adapted, adopted, or refused on the ground. How do we learn, teach, and write in ways that “document on terms dictated by . . . women themselves” as Badham and Foss (2020: 281) put it? What does it mean to “create the opportunity to dare or to brave into unconventional forms of doing research?” (Quawas, 2020: 27). Stephan and Charrad’s collection gives us a small glimpse.
Commitment to these details of women’s activism structure the book’s layout. To problematize what struggle looks like, reworked academic articles are sandwiched between program summaries, manifestos, and personal reflections. Chapters cut between first person accounts and archival work, from the decades leading up to 2011, into the decade that followed. The pool of authors is heavily connected to US academies, a distribution that is always worth noting, and the lack of anything on armed resistance may feel a bit frustrating. However, the editors are clear in their desire to give marginalized voices space while exploring alternative activism. The selection of authors does this well. Combined with the geographical reach of the collection, this variation gives a refreshing breath of perspectives on women working around the Arab Spring.
Women Rising’s short chapter format is a key difference from other recently released readers. It is precisely this format that conveys complex ideas concisely. However, with only a few pages per chapter readers should expect to leave with some homework regardless of their scholastic backgrounds. More importantly, they should be prepared to citation chase outside. Each article offers enough of a small taste to drive a desire to read more. While it can feel a bit unsettling to flip in and out of decades or between countries, the individual pieces are full enough to stand on their own even as they prick questions. The result is a text that could easily serve as a course reader with selected sections augmented by outside pieces, or as broad reading for a scholar focused on themes in women’s activism.