Feminist Activism in the Contemporary Middle East: Transnationalism, performances and repertoires of contention

Feminist solidarity transcends borders. Yet, there is a tension arising from an entrenched view of feminism as inherently “Western.” Challenging such a dichotomized worldview and exploring the transnational within Arab feminist activism is at the heart of this project. The study deals with two overarching research questions. The first question is how the transnational politics of feminist activism are shaped and takes place in the Middle Eastern context, focusing on contemporary cases from Egypt, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. The second overarching question relates to the uses of local, regional and global histories of feminism, in the performance of feminist activism today. In other words, this study explores the role played by feminist histories from different regional contexts in shaping today’s feminists and their activities. This study takes a closer look at when and how tools and repertoires for feminist change-making travel beyond one particular context and how they are received and used in another; how are strategies shared and passed on between feminists of different generations, and across borders? How does one learn to be a feminist activist, and the tools to use? How does contemporary feminists relate to and make use of histories from other contexts and countries? The goal of this project is to further explore expressions of transnationalism and uses of history in the performance of contemporary feminist activism in the Middle East, using Egypt, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia as the “field.” As such, I do not view this as a “three-case study,” but rather a study of feminist activism as it is practiced in and in-between the three included countries, using contemporary cases from these contexts in order to study the “travelling” of feminist repertoires.