Suchergebnisse

In a series of case studies focusing on the Arab spring revolutions, the contributors to Freedom without Permission reveal the centrality of the intersections between body, gender, and space to the revolutions, showing how a diverse group of women and girls publicly disputed gender and sexual norms

Since the 1980s, an explosion in state, international, and nongovernmental campaigns and programs propose to increase women's rights and protections in Arab countries. Women and women's rights activists often invite and appeal to male-dominated states to regulate, intervene, or change the rules in sexual and family life in order to address a range of problems and challenges, including lack of economic and other resources, political and citizenship exclusions, or intimate violence. What are the implications of relying on states as the main arbiters of rights and protections? This is a longstanding feminist question whose answer hinges on underlying assumptions and theories about states and governance. Reliance on states as the primary sources of protection and support in intimate life has largely worked to rearticulate gendered, economic, and other inequitable power relations, bolster states, reconstitute state authority over intimate domains, and limit possibilities for gendered, sexual, and kin subjectivities and affinities. This dynamic may be metaphorically described as a "devil's bargain" since state-delivered rights and protections in these realms are so often attached to important restrictions and foreclosures. The article conceptually and theoretically expands on my research on family law projects in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2011). Its title is inspired by Deniz Kandiyoti's influential article, "Bargaining with Patriarchy" (Gender & Society, 1988), which I re-engage for analytical purposes.

The researchers and writers of theArab Human Development Report 2005 (AHDR 2005)include activists, social critics, intellectuals, and feminists who aspire forizdihār(flourishing) in the Arab world "based on a peaceful process of negotiation for redistributing power and building good governance." This passage suggests that the aims theAHDR 2005shares with the previous three volumes are to encourage state apparatuses and officials totransform themselvesby changing policies and surrendering some of the power and resources they have fortified vis-à-vis their citizenries. This article argues that rather than encouraging the rise of women or any group interested in political or social transformation, theAHDR 2005works within a U.N. development framework that strengthens states and political elites in relation to their populations by constituting the former as the causes of underdevelopment and thus the primary agents for economic, social, and political improvement.