opendemocracy | The recent waves of citizen-led activism
that swept the globe inspired numerous attempts to identify common drivers [23] across diverse
instances of public disobedience and protest.
Growing numbers of educated, unemployed, alienated youth, the
humiliations of autocracy, the
authority- busting potential of the internet and social media, and the coming of age of Generation Y [24] are among recurrent
leitmotifs. These common denominators – broadly related to the tensions between the global forces of
neoliberalism [25]seeking
to expand the freedom of capital, and the forces of social resistance
struggling to preserve and redefine community and solidarity - provide an overly broad umbrella for
phenomena as diverse as the Arab uprisings, the Occupy [26]
movement, the indignados [27]
of Southern Europe, the student
movement in Chile [28] or the Gezi
protests [29] in Turkey. Could the lure of
the “global” be making us lose sight of more subtle and context specific idioms
of discontent?
In this article, the fourth in a series
of reflections on the Arab uprisings (and beyond), I explore the reasons behind
the apparent anti-patriarchal thrust of struggles against authoritarianism in
some parts of the MENA region, and pose a relatively neglected question: Are
there any lessons to be drawn from youth-led activism for a new politics of
gender?
At first sight, the answer would appear
to be negative. A mobilized citizenry
was, first and foremost, demanding their social and political rights,
clamouring for justice and freedom and an end to state violence and corruption.
If and when gender issues came up - as they did[30] in the context of the Arab
uprisings - they were treated in a
rather truncated manner, mainly to document levels of women’s participation in popular protests, their subsequent
exclusion from formal processes of transition and their exposure to increasing
levels of violence. Feminism and women’s rights activism - considered by some as
“old politics”[31] par excellence -
appeared to elicit ambivalence, if not outright indifference, among members of a
new insurrectionary generation. Yet this distancing was taking place against
the background of widespread popular protests against gender-based violence[32], involving both men and
women, who were plainly engaged in new forms of grass roots activism and social
critique. How can we account for this state of affairs? Is the language of feminism up to the
challenge of capturing the new sensibilities and aspirations animating the
actions and idioms of multitudes of youth, both male and female? Or do the
lenses we train on the politics of gender inadvertently restrict our vision?
