Speakers on “Panel 1: Gender and Feminism in the MENA Region” will be presenting their work from 11:00-12:40pm in Allard 122.
McNeal Mann (WWU) | “Orature, Feminism and Film within the Senegalese Context”
The purpose of this paper is to investigate and theorize the useful connections between Sahelian Orature, Contemporary Senegalese Film and feminisms within the African and Islamic context. This is an inductive essay in that it posits a question with which an ongoing investigation can take place. How does orature, film and feminism collide within the Senegalese context? This paper analyzes films from Senegalese directors, authors and feminists to create a theoretical ecology that makes the ambient, salient.
Orature in the Sahel is a deeply complicated concept that relates back to ancient Egyptian concepts of the spoken word and the ritual practices of the Nyamakala. The Western conception of the spoken word or Orature, comes from the Greek Socratic comprehension of language and metaphysics. For this reason the Euro-American notion of the spoken word differs greatly from the deeply complicated Sahel. Islamic feminisms are oppressed and mutated by the gaze of Western Secular Feminisms. Orature as a tool of the Islamic feminist in film is something that this paper is deeply curious about. This paper aims to platform the inventive work accomplished by Islamic feminist in an effort to see how it functions in useful and progressive ways. Orature as a gendered participant in Sahelian publics is a powerful tool for disrupting the ongoing colonial and patriarchal structures and in being so places much at stake for its success and progression.
Sude Guvendik (SFU) | “African Muslim Stiwanism in Hausa literature”
Many women, particularly African and Muslim women, tend to distance themselves from the term feminism by choosing another way of expressing their fight for gender equality. For instance, African feminism has several strains of its own that differ from ‘Western’ feminism, including Stiwanism, Motherism, Femalism and womanism. Hence, womanists express their African womanhood in a self-proclaimed manner because they cannot identify or relate to mainstream feminist ideology, which is permeated with a stereotyped image of the African woman. However, while African theorists promote Africa’s plurality, they tend to excoriate Islam’s influence on the African Muslim woman and call Islam ‘religious colonialism.’ Consequently, the failure to represent Muslim women fairly, it has been suggested, has encouraged the exclusion of Muslim women from ‘Western’ feminist ideology. This failure has also resulted in campaigns that are tainted by neo-imperialism and ‘Western’-centrism.
The thesis will draw upon Hausa literature by Nigerian Muslim writers, which is treated as a blueprint for the imaginative depiction of West African Muslim women. The research will further draw on a comparative analysis between the Hausa author Zaynab Alkali and Igbo writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s non-fictional feminist works to portray how the two perspectives of feminism find common ground in their fight for women’s rights. The reality often inspires Hausa literature that Muslim women inhabit, offering a suitable medium for answering the research question and for investigating what a nuanced image of African Muslim women might look like.
Sarah Milligan (UNBC) | “‘The Wickedest Town in the World’: Space, Anxiety, and Illicit Sex Work in Egypt, 1834-1949”
Between 1834-1949, Egypt wrestled with the legal framing of prostitution, which culminated in a total ban. During this period, Egypt’s urban centres and ports, like Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said experimented with regulating and formalizing the economies of prostitution. In these settings, policies ranged from containment and temporary bans to complete criminalization. The growing scholarship on Egypt’s experimentation with the legal framing of prostitution underpinned the colonial legacies that shaped the continuities and ruptures of regulation or criminalization. Spatial factors are equally important in revealing the link of power relations that combined social, political, and economic implications of regulation or criminalization.
This paper explores the anxieties regarding prostitution emerging in Egypt’s urban spaces as perpetuated by colonial military presence, alarmist medical discourse, and reactive legal framing of deviant sexuality. In doing so, this paper emphasises that Egypt’s experimentation with the legal framing of prostitution shares similar economic, social, and political factors in other colonial spaces. Poignantly, this paper presents the Egyptian chapter of an otherwise global history of prostitution-based anxieties. Emphasizing the inherent relationship between space, sexuality, and orientalism. Medical journals, travel documents and memoirs, as well as newspapers constitute some of the building blocks of what follows. Ultimately, Egypt’s experimentation with the regulation, containment, and criminalization of prostitution secures biopolitical discourse that defined and redefined Egyptian urban settings.
Salma Amer (SFU) | “Gender Equality in Egypt: Online mobilization and Meditated representations on Transnational streaming services”
Feminist activism in Egypt has a long-standing history of mobilization since its embodiment in the late 19th century playing an effective role in the right to education and against colonization. Building on the movement’s history in Egypt covering state sponsored and civil society feminism; we must pay close attention to the contemporary progressive changes in feminist consciousness led by youth in Egypt’s feminist movement.
Following the 2011 to 2013 uprisings in Egypt, women’s relationships to the public sphere have been greatly altered, leading to consistent advocacy for women’s agency over their self-image, livelihood, and bodies in the face of a firmly rooted patriarchal narrative.
This paper will highlight two of the main realms behind the movement in Egypt as it stands today; (1) online activism led by Egyptian youth on Instagram in 2020 inspired by the global #MeToo movement building on feminist discourse against sexual violence and (2) a selection of on-screen representations of women in leading roles featured on transnational VOD platforms between 2020 and 2022 namely: “Leh La’?! (Why Not) directed by Mariam Abou-Ouf, “Bitlou’ Al Rouh (The Soul Leaves the Body) directed by Kamla Abu Zekri, “Faten Amal Harby directed by Mohamed El Adl and “Finding Ola directed by Mohamed Diab.
While the road to a collective shift in perspective of women’s placement in society remains long, there are significant legal amendments and debates taking place challenging social codes on issues pertaining to gender-based violence, bodily autonomy, and women’s rights in family law.