This article will examine the activism of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, or the “nude Egyptian blogger,” to reflect on the pause that naked bodies insert into civic life and to evaluate nudity as means of protest in Egyptian as well as transnational feminist politics. By “making visible what had no business being seen,” to quote Jacques Rancière, Elmahdy’s nude body reconfigures the body politic and reimagines the theater of the political. Her activism incorporates two distinct phases. Elmahdy initially launched her nude body into the blogosphere to mark the Arab revolutions as a highly sexualized topography. By elevating gender and sexuality to the forefront of local and global geopolitical conversations, Elmahdy brought sex to Tahrir Square, or underscored its primacy there. Her more recent alliance with the global feminist organization Femen reveals points of tension with her virtual revisioning of the body politic, given her affiliation with an arguably Islamophobic, neocolonial feminist agenda on the streets. Yet both phases of Elmahdy’s activism enlist her body where least expected in order to challenge the patriarchal cartography of Tahrir Square and the gendering of national space more broadly, as well as to re-member the global feminist public square.
During the Arab Spring, Moroccan men and women first took to the streets on February 20, 2011 to demand governmental reforms. Their movement became known as the Mouvement du 20-Février. In a series of protests, Moroccans called for democratic change, lower food prices, freedom for Islamist prisoners, and rights for the Berber people. Initially, King Mohammad VI attempted to suppress the movement. When this approach did not succeed, in a televised speech, the King agreed to reform the government. In June 2011, the constitutional committee proposed changes that would reduce the King’s absolute powers, implement democratic reforms, and create a system in which the Prime Minister would be the majority party leader in Parliament. On July 1, 2011, the new constitution was passed by popular vote. In November 2011, Morocco experienced its first elections under the new constitution. Until now, Arab Spring publications have focused on the revolutions without taking into account the feminist perspective. In this Article, the author examines how the feminist perspective impacted the Arab Spring in Morocco based on her interviews with women who participated in the Mouvement du 20-Février. Further, this Article analyzes the feminist perspective’s impact on how women conceptualize their status within the Mouvement du 20-Février and the future democratic society. Part II provides a background on the Mouvement du 20-Février and the demands for constitutional reforms. To understand the Feminist Spring Movement, Part III examines the gap between de jure and de facto women’s rights in Morocco. Part IV examines the applicability of democratic and feminist theory to how Moroccan women view democracy as a mechanism for change in their individual lives and as a collective society. This Article posits that many Mouvement du 20-Février activists fear that changes in Morocco will be slow, merely perfunctory, and will not lead to fundamental transformation for the most vulnerable members of Moroccan society.
In this paper, I would like to examine the status of women in Saudi Arabia and how patriarchy, double moral standards, tribal mentality and social hypocrisy violate their basic human rights as represented in Rajaa Alsanea‘s Girls of Riyadh. The researcher also argues that Alsanea‘s Girls of Riyadh can be seen as an awakening call for enhancing and improving women‘s rights in Saudi Arabia and visionary in its scope in the light of the Arab Spring which is raging through the Arab world. Feminist, analytical and textual methodology has been used in this paper.
This paper documents the evolution of feminist works and struggle in the dual spheres of Islam and the Middle East, focusing on Morocco and Egypt. Foundational support for women’s advancement in Islam can be traced to Islam’s inception in the 7th century AD. Conservatism, first rejected by Islam, also evolved to become an instrument of social change. In post colonial contexts, conservatism opposed the import of foreign and culturally dissonant notions of gender relations, the presence of which subverted domestic feminist constructions. This paper will explore ideological constructions of far ends of the Islamic interpretive spectrum, the puritanical Wahhabists on one end and progressive and mainstream Muslim social scientists and leaders on the other. Throughout Islam’s history, scholars and lay people have sought to deconstruct misogynous interpretations and divide cultural interpretation from the tenets of the faith. Today’s debate on women’s roles and livelihood in the Middle East North Africa region take place in a globalized and decolonized context, in which the image of women results from a composite constructed narrative. These empirical definitions impact current women’s rights in the region, specifically through laws on marriage and family. These laws offer both a danger and an opportunity for feminist advancement, in the context of the Arab Spring.