How the West Undermined Women’s Rights in the Arab World
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/23693/how-the-west-undermined-women%E2%80%99s-rights-in-the-arab
In this article I aimed to problematize two assumptions about women’s activism and women’s rights in the Arab world. First, I have attempted to expand our concept of women’s agency beyond resistance to patriarchy and to demonstrate the ways in which the subversion and resignification of gender norms were also part of a counter-hegemonic movement against the post-1967 socio-political and geopolitical order. In other words, women’s participation in radical movements embodied sociopolitical transformation, including the transformation of gender norms. In this respect, we see parallels in the emergence of mass-based women’s activism as part of revolutionary struggles after 2011.
Second, I have aimed to problematize the notion that the West is an agent of progress and women’s rights in the Arab world. Rather, as a result of their geopolitical interests, they have supported regimes that have clamped down on revolutionary and radical popular movements and suppressed women’s embodiments of radical femininities. Over the long term, the demise of radical, secular movements has led to a decoupling of secular women’s rights agendas from local popular projects, paving the way for their cooption and instrumentalization by authoritarian regimes and international actors and rendering secular women’s rights activists vulnerable to accusations of representing foreign agendas. Women activists face similar dangers today in the context of an ongoing counter-revolution across the Arab world.
