MENA

Non-territorial Autonomy and Gender Equality: The Case of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria – Rojava

Citation:

Rosa, Burç. 2020. "Non-territorial Autonomy and Gender Equality: The Case of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria – Rojava." Filozofija i drustvo 31 (3): 319-339.

Author: Burç Rosa

Abstract:

The Kurdish-led autonomous entity called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) - also known as Rojava - considers women’s liberation an imperative condition for shaping a democratic society. The practice of autonomy in NES shares strong resemblances with Non- Territorial Autonomy (NTA) models; however, it introduces a novelty in the role of women as active agents in building a plurinational democracy. This paper examines (1) the intellectual and political origins of the political role ascribed to women in autonomous administrations and (2) how the practice of autonomy in Rojava has advanced women’s rights by shedding light on both institutional implementation of women’s rights, as well as the creation of (non)-territorial spaces of women’s emancipation within the autonomous model. The argument made is that the conceptual framework of the Rojava model goes beyond the Kurdish question and can be considered an attempt to resolve a democratic deficit of liberal democratic nation-states through bringing together solutions that address the intertwined subordination of minorities and women.

Keywords: women, representation, plurinational democracy, non-territorial autonomy, Kurdish question, Syria, Rojava, minorities

Topics: Armed Conflict, Secessionist Wars, Democracy / Democratization, Governance, Political Participation, Rights, Women's Rights Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Syria

Year: 2020

Kurdish Women as Political Agents: Kurdish Political Movement, Gender Equality, and Women’s Freedom

Citation:

Çağlayan Handan. 2020. "Kurdish Women as Political Agents: Kurdish Political Movement, Gender Equality, and Women’s Freedom." In Women in the Kurdish Movement: Mothers, Comrades, Goddesses. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Author: Handan Çağlayan

Annotation:

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkarên Kurdistan, PKK) was founded in 1978 with the goal to establish an independent socialist Kurdistan state. The party has since changed radically ideologically, politically, programmatically, and organizationally. In this process, one of the most significant axes of continuity during the PKK’s history is the principle of gender equality. The PKK’s approach to this offered opportunity spaces for women’s political participation while being simultaneously transformed through their participation. It had already included women members before becoming a political party, similar to the socialist youth organizations of the 1970s. Women, although in small numbers, participated in the PKK’s founding congress in 1978 and remained involved in its subsequent activities.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Ethnic/Communal Wars, Secessionist Wars, Political Participation Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East

Year: 2020

“In My Eyes He Was a Man”: Poor and Working-Class Boy Soldiers in the Iran-Iraq War

Citation:

Ahmadi, Shaherzad R. 2018. "'In My Eyes He Was a Man': Poor and Working-Class Boy Soldiers in the Iran-Iraq War." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 14 (2): 174-192.

Author: Shaherzad R. Ahmadi

Abstract:

During the Pahlavi period in Iran (1925–79), poor and working-class families were more likely to expect young sons to work to support the household. These boys, in turn, were more autonomous. Middle-class families, on the other hand, protected and controlled boys. Researchers have assumed that religious zealotry was the primary inspiration for boys to enlist in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, ignoring the ways in which class inflected boyhood. While religious fervor may have been a motivation for some of the poor and working-class Iranian boys (between ten and fourteen) who enlisted, the expectation that they work took precedence. Moreover, at least some of these boys were eager to participate in war-front masculine homosociality rather than remain in feminized domestic spaces. This study analyzes biographies, census data, newspaper accounts, and original oral history interviews.

Keywords: Iran-Iraq War, childhood, boy soldiers, Pahlavi Iran, class

Topics: Age, Youth, Armed Conflict, Class, Combatants, Child Soldiers, Male Combatants, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran

Year: 2018

Interrogating the Constructions of Masculinist Protection and Militarism in the Syrian Constitution of 1973

Citation:

Aldoughli, Rahaf. 2019. "Interrogating the Constructions of Masculinist Protection and Militarism in the Syrian Constitution of 1973." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 15 (1): 48-74.

Author: Rahaf Aldoughli

Abstract:

This is a revisionist study of Syrian Baʾathism. At its heart is an examination of ingrained masculinist bias. This article argues that there is a reciprocal relationship between militarism and masculinity, achieved through gratifying protection for both the nation and women. While most feminist scholarship dealing with states formation in the Arab context attributes its gendered nature to dictatorship, patriarchy, and religion, there is no debate about the development of states and their relation to militarism and masculinism. This construction of militarized masculinity in Baʾath ideology ensures the preservation of gendered laws that perceive women as less equal. While teasing out this aspect, this study seeks to explore the status of women in the Syrian Constitution (1973) and laws by investigating the role of the state as a male protector in which women’s rights become challenged by the state’s paternalistic perceptions.

Keywords: militarism, masculinist protection, women, Syria, constitutions

Topics: Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Masculinism, Governance, Constitutions, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Syria

Year: 2019

From Guerrilla Girls to Zainabs: Reassessing the Figure of the “Militant Woman” in the Iranian Revolution

Citation:

Gordan, Arielle. 2021. "From Guerilla Girls to Zainabs: Reassessing the Figure of the "Militant Woman" in the Iranian Revolution." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 17 (1): 64-95.

Author: Arielle Gordon

Abstract:

Scholars have long accounted for representations of women in the Iranian Revolution by categorically classifying them as “devout mothers” or “heroic sisters,” embodied respectively in the Shiʾi archetypes of Fatima and Zainab. However, a closer look at images of militant women finds them residing within the traditions of their time, as part and parcel of an era of liberation movements in which the idiom of the female fighter featured prominently. This article takes a transnational look at tropes of women’s militancy and traces how they filtered into Iranian revolutionary culture. Finally, it contends that only with the consolidation of Khomeini’s power and the start of the Iran-Iraq War is this figure renamed Zainab and sustained as a central icon of the Islamic Republic.

Keywords: visual culture, revolution, transnationalism, representation, 'gender'

Topics: Armed Conflict, National Liberation Wars, Combatants, Female Combatants, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Religion Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iran, Iraq

Year: 2021

Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism

Citation:

Fakier, Khayaat, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel, eds. 2020. Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.

Authors: Khayaat Fakier , Diana Mulinari, Nora Räthzel

Annotation:

Summary:

This vital new collection presents new Marxist-Feminist analyses of Capitalism as a gendered, racialized social formation that shapes and is shaped by specific nature-labour relationships. Leaving behind former overtly structuralist thinking, Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today interweaves strands of ecofeminism and intersectional analyses to develop an understanding of the relations of production and the production of nature through the interdependencies of gender, class, race and colonial relations. With contributions and analyses from scholars and theorists in both the global North and South, this volume offers a truly international lens that reveals the the vitality of contemporary global Marxist-Feminist thinking, as well as its continued relevance to feminist struggles across the globe (Summary from Zed Books).

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, Nora Räthzel

Part I – Conceptualising

1. Standpoint Theory
Cynthia Cockburn

2. Outside in the Funding Machine
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

3. Contradictions in Marxist Feminism
Frigga Haug

4. Ecofeminism as (Marxist) Sociology
Ariel Salleh

5. The ‘Flat Ontology’ of Neoliberal Feminism
Jennifer Cotter

6. The Byzantine Eunuch: Pre-capitalist Gender Category, ‘Tributary’ Modal Contradiction, and a Test for Materialist Feminism
Jules Gleeson

7. Reading Marx against the Grain: Rethinking the Exploitation of Care Work Beyond Profit-Seeking
Tine Haubner

Part II – Production

8. Marx and Social Reproduction Theory: Three Different Historical Strands
Ankica Čakardić

9. The Best Thing I Have Done Is to Give Birth; The Second Is to Strike
Paula Mulinari

10. Women in Small Scale Fishing in South Africa: An Ecofeminist Engagement with the ‘Blue Economy’
Natasha Solari and Khayaat Fakier

11. The ‘Crisis of Care’ and the Neoliberal Restructuring of the Public Sector – a Feminist Polanyian Analysis
Rebecca Selberg

12. Gender Regimes and Women’s Labour: Volvo Factories in Sweden, Mexico, and South Africa
Nora Räthzel, Diana Mulinari, Aina Tollefsen

Part III – Religions and Politics

13. Religious Resistance: A Flower on the Chain or a Tunnel towards Liberation?
Gabriele Dietrich

14. A Marxist-Feminist Perspective: From Former Yugoslavia to Turbo Fascism to Neoliberal Postmodern Fascist Europe
Marina Gržinić

15. Feminism, Antisemitism and the Question of Palestine/Israel
Nira Yuval Davis

Part IV – Solidarities

16. Women in Brazilian's Trade Union Movement
Patricia Vieira Trópia

17. Argentinean Feminist Movements: Debates from Praxis
Ana Isabel González Montes

18. Marxist Feminism for a Global Women’s Movement against Capitalism
Ligaya Lindio McGovern

19. Marxist/Socialist Feminist Theory and Practice in the USA Today
Nancy Holmstrom 

20. Solidarity in Troubled Times: Social Movements in the Face of Climate Change
Kathryn Russell

Topics: Class, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Economies, Care Economies, Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Intersectionality, Race, Religion Regions: Africa, MENA, Southern Africa, Americas, North America, South America, Europe, Balkans, Nordic states Countries: Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Mexico, Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories, South Africa, Sweden, United States of America

Year: 2020

Gender and the Dynamics of Mobility: Reflections on African Migrant Mothers and ‘Transit Migration’ in Morocco

Citation:

Stock, Inka. 2012. “Gender and the Dynamics of Mobility: Reflections on African Migrant Mothers and ‘Transit Migration’ in Morocco.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (9): 1577–95.

Author: Inka Stock

Abstract:

By describing the everyday lives of African migrant mothers and their children in Morocco, this paper highlights how migration and ‘immobility’ in so-called ‘transit countries’ are gendering and gendered experiences. Relying on migrants' narratives, the paper demonstrates how migrants' transitions to motherhood create both specific and gendered spaces for agency and particular and gendered constraints upon agency that shape women migrants' mobility dynamics in space and time.

Keywords: migration, gender, Morocco, transit, African migrants, migrant mothers

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Migration, Gender, Women Regions: Africa, MENA, North Africa Countries: Morocco

Year: 2012

Ways to Come, Ways to Leave: Gender, Mobility, and Il/Legality among Ethiopian Domestic Workers in Yemen

Citation:

De Regt, Marina. 2010. “Ways to Come, Ways to Leave: Gender, Mobility, and Il/Legality among Ethiopian Domestic Workers in Yemen.” Gender & Society 24 (2): 237–60.

 

Author: Marina De Regt

Abstract:

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Yemen, this article examines the relationship between gender, mobility, and il/legality in the lives of Ethiopian domestic workers. Studies about migrant domestic workers in the Middle East often focus on abuse and exploitation, making a plea for the regulation of women’s legal status. Yet legal migration does not automatically mean that women gain more rights and become more mobile; regulation may also entail more control. The relationship between method of entry and legal status is not fixed, and the boundaries between legality and illegality are often blurred, with women moving in and out of il/legality and legal organizations following illegal practices, and vice versa. Gendered state policies and practices also affect women’s space for maneuvering, and attempts at regulation may further restrict rather than increase their mobility.

Keywords: international relations, transnational relations, migration, work, occupation

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Migration, Gender, Women, Rights, Women's Rights Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Yemen

Year: 2010

Re-Negotiating Social Reproduction, Work and Gender Roles in Occupied Palestine

Citation:

Bargawi, Hannah, Randa Alami, and Hurriyah Ziada. 2021. “Re-Negotiating Social Reproduction, Work and Gender Roles in Occupied Palestine.” Review of International Political Economy. doi:10.1080/09692290.2020.1868017.

Authors: Hannah Bargawi, Randa Alami, Hurriyah Ziada

Abstract:

This article uncovers the crisis of social reproduction in Occupied Palestine in the context of severe economic and political turmoil by specifically highlighting the ways in which impacts have been felt differently by men and women. It does so by considering the interactions of production and reproduction. The article confirms that, as a result of economic hardship, women, particularly married women, are increasingly participating in the formal and informal labor market. These women have been forced to renegotiate their domestic and caring responsibilities alongside paid work, within a context of very limited state or private sector provision of care services. While time-use survey findings suggest little change in men and women’s time-use between 1999/2000 and 2012/13 in general, qualitative interviews provide a more nuanced picture. Furthermore, the narrative that responsibility for managing care of children and elderly relatives as well as domestic work lies solely with the wife/mother is near universal. Respondents also did not voice demands for greater investment in child and elder care services by private firms or by the state, suggesting a strong individualization of responsibility for social reproduction in Occupied Palestine today. What remains to be seen is a) how representative these findings are for other groups, particularly poorer, rural families in Palestine and b) what the longer-term consequences of these changes might bring for societal gender norms in Palestine and in other contexts.

Topics: Class, Conflict, Economies, Gender, Gender Roles, Women Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories

Year: 2021

Pages

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