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Beyond the "Woman Question" in the Egyptian Revolution

2011; Feminist Studies; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/fem.2011.0042

2153-3873

Lila Abu‐Lughod, Rabab El‐Mahdi,

Islamic Studies and History

news and views 1 Beyond the "Woman Question" in the Egyptian Revolution Lila Abu-Lughod and Rabab El-Mahdi This is a revised version of a conversation held on September 23, 2011, at "Activism and the Acad emy: Celebrating Forty Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action," a conference held on thefortieth anniversaryof the Barnard Center for Research on Women, New York, September 23-24, 2011. * * * ★ Lila Abu-Lughod (LA): Rabab, you have been a thoughtful activist/scholar in Egypt for some time. You were in Tahrir Square and remain involved in the unfolding of this revolution. I want to begin by asking you to reflect on the way the Western media seem obsessed with the role of women in this revolution. We both think a lot about the way women's activism can't escape the symbolic significance of the "Middle Eastern/Muslim woman" question. Both of us have been asked constantly to comment on "women in the Egyptian revolution." Both of us have been annoyed by this ques tion. I'd like to know how you think about the relationship between Egyp tian women's actual forms of participation and the media obsession with what the uprisings mean for women. How do you handle the questions you get? What do you think lies behind these questions? Can you offer us a better way to think concretely about women's participation? Feminist Studies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 683 684 Lila Abu-Luflhoaand Rabab El-Mahdi Rabab El-Mahdi (RM): I find this question of "women's role in the revolu tion," which has now changed to "women's rights and their status after the revolution," deeply troubling on a number of levels. First, it assumes that women were somehow dormant or passive—we want to know how they suddenly became active in the revolution. It dismisses the role that female workers have played in the wave of labor mobilization since 2006, the role of female activists in the prodemocracy and antiwar movements since 2003, and their constant presence in the student movement, just to name a few. Second, it assumes a level of gender-specificity that I am uncomfortable with; it is expecting that "women" are a homogenous group that would have a specific role in the revolution, disregarding the fact that different groups of women might participate differently depending on their locations (both geographic and class-based). It assumes that there is a bulk called "Egyptian women." We would never talk about "US women," without disaggregating them by class or race or political affiliations. Finally, the new version of the question about "women's rights post-January 25" reveals a very limited—white, liberal—understanding of feminism. The media requests that I receive are basically looking for a specific profile of "feminists" and asking about the struggle for specific kinds of rights. I even had a journalist ask me "Who are the Gloria Steinems of Egypt?" As if we could not have women's participa tion that might fit a different profile and activists who engage in a different form of struggle. Moreover, this interest is coming from the mainstream media, which have not covered "feminism" and/or women's involvement in the United States or Europe for decades. So I cannot interpret it except as based on an Orientalist understanding of "Arab/Muslim women," as I've written about in the e-zineJadaliyya.' The dismissive reactions I get when I explain that multiple groups of Egyptian women are participating in different struggles that are not necessarily "feminist" (in the reductionist definition they have of the term as they look for a specific form of involvement that resembles the European or US feminist movement in the 1970s) confirms my reading. Lila Abu-Lughodand Rabab El-Mahdi 685 LA: So what are various groups of women actually doing politically? I've argued, as you know, that in Egypt over the past two decades there has been an "NGO-ization" of women's rights work boosted by significant foreign funding, a strong governmentalization of women's rights work as in the takeover of resources by Suzanne Mubarak and her Council on Women, and also a kind...