The Arab Spring for Women? Representations of Women in Middle East Politics in 2011

Abstract

This article explores the complex, liminal, and difficult space in which stories of women in “the Arab Spring” were wielded as parts of political narratives of gender, race, class, religion, democracy, and Westernization in Western media as the Arab Spring unfolded. It examines those stories by using the tools of postcolonial feminism. After briefly describing what is meant by (gender and) the Arab Spring, the article outlines a method for evaluating the significations of the media narratives surrounding it. We find two dissonant narratives (of gender as emancipatory and of gender as problematic) and ask what assumptions about gender (and sex and race and culture) have to be made to produce these particular representations. We argue that the dissonant narratives have in common using the situation of women as a barometer for the success of Westernization, liberalization, and democratization. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these findings.

KEYWORDS:

• gender
• race
• the Arab Spring
• democratization
• women’s rights

Notes

1. Not meaning to either entrench or essentialize the “Western,” but to use it as an identifier for the consumption of the narratives talked about in this article. We mean the word “Western” to refer to a particular gaze (and its attendant politics) toward the Arab world that it has constructed and constituted as Other.

2. In recent years, feminist work has talked about the salience of saving Afghan women from Afghan men in United States (and even global) discourses about the invasion of and then military stabilization of Afghanistan (e.g., Cooke 2002; Nayak 2006; Shepherd 2006), critiquing work that uses that narrative (e.g., Elshtain 2003). Feminist research has also revealed the crucial role that saving Jessica Lynch played in the American military operation in Iraq (Lobasz 2008; Sjoberg 2007).

3. Some interesting feminist work has been done on the instrumentalization of gender within explicitly feminist revolutionary organizations (Alison 2009; Sjoberg and Gentry 2011). The Arab Spring movements, though, are neither unitary or explicitly feminist, and this analysis is interested in looking not at the movements’ gender behaviors but at the gendered consumption of the movements in Western media.

4. In the vein of Cynthia Enloe’s (1990) inspiration that feminist research start by asking the question “where are the women?”

5. Concerning martyrdom, see Newslook (2011); blogging, see Flock (2012); public office candidacy, see Montemurri (2012).

6. In fact, a number of “conservative” women have expressed concern that a gender rights liberalization that might happen as a result of or concurrent with democratization is a problem, arguing that “being granted ‘too many’ rights contravene religion and social norms.” These women, arguing that “work cannot interfere with women’s mission, which is first to raise children and take care of the home,” object to gender-liberal policies and celebrate some of the returns to traditionalism that have come with some of the postrevolutionary governments in the Arab world (Agence France Presse 2012). See discussion in Farag (2012, 233) about the many powerful women who initially opposed Mubarak’s gender laws and played a role in post-Mubarak repeal of many of them.

7. A “Google News” search for “women” and “the Arab Spring” (permuted) filtering out where either word appeared only in an advertisement or other headlines and/or where the article was not actually about the relationship between women and “the Arab Spring,” December 1, 2010, to March 31, 2012. We limited the publications to the United States and Western Europe’s major newspapers and newsmagazines in English, limited to the top 20 in each place based on circulation data as reported by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation). There are 109 total articles in the dataset, which is available from the authors.

8. This narrative analysis is both a scholarly tool and a political one, “intended as an intervention that challenges the politics of security and the meanings for security legitimized in existing practices” (Wibben 2011).

9. They produce signs, which some organize into text (medium), story (presentation), and fabula (content) (Baudrillard 1993; Derrida 1980; Foucault 1982; Geertz 1973; Morris 1964). For more detailed discussion of text, media, and fabula, see Wibben (2011).

10. A claim that many Middle East specialists have pointed out to me could not be further from the truth (e.g., Brand 1998).

11. It is worth noting that Fukuyama in part abandoned the progressivist narrative in The End of History because he recognized the continuing tensions between the Western and Arab worlds.

12. Note that this coverage implies that women are not NGO workers, campaigners, lawyers, academics, or politicians.

13. See critique in Sjoberg and Gentry (2007).