Transnational feminist activism in the contemporary Middle East: Practices of community, relationality, and history.

Feminist solidarity transcends borders. Yet, there is a tension arising from an entrenched view of feminism as inherently “Western,” originating in Europe and exported to the rest of the world. Building on fieldwork and interviews with Tunisian and Egyptian feminist activists, this paper challenges this perception by looking at how feminist activists relate to their diverging histories, and how feminists in the Arab world engage with global feminist networks and construct local, national, and regional histories of feminism. Using political ethnography, and drawing from performance studies, social movement theory, timing theory, democratic theory, and transnational feminist studies, this study narrows in on the performance of transnationalism and timing-practices within Arab feminist activism since the uprisings of 2011. By examining the provenance of specific practices, we may better understand the role of history within feminist activism, how contemporary Arab feminists construct time and conceptualize the past, both within their specific context and in relation to national, regional and global feminist histories. I argue that overemphasizing European origins of feminism obscures more prominent influences in non-European contexts, and that emphasizing non-European histories of feminism(s) is necessary in order to move beyond debates about the “authenticity” of feminism in the Arab world.