Feminism in the Middle East: Marxism-Feminism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 13:30:32 -0400
>From: Mine Aysen Doyran <mine25.1 at netzero.net>
>To: marxism at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Feminism in the Middle East: Marxism-Feminism
>
>
>Hello  Abu Nasr!
>
>Following your discussion on Arab feminism in Egypt, I have recently
>come across with a book, a collection of essays by Arab, Turkish and
>Jewish feminists, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti, _Gendering the Middle
>East:Emerging Perspectives_. In the book, there is an excellent article
>by Hoda El Sadda, entitled as "Women's Writing in Egypt: Reflections on
>Salwa Bakr'.  I am attaching an excerpt from the article  below.
>
>Western liberal feminists and imperialists are assuming that middle
>eastern women can not be feminist because of Islam and culture.
>Accordingly, they reflect their own cultural puritanism/ male centered
>world view, which they find themselves in, onto other people, by denying
>the possibility of *change* in third world societies. There is no
>evidence to suggest that Arab feminists excuse local patriarchal
>practices as Katha Politt, the liberal Nation magazine writer, had
>suggested. Why does it have to be so,  given that feminism has been an
>oppositional force in the history of the Middle East for a long period
>of time? Sure that these people have no idea about the progressive
>potential existing among Arab feminists. Whenever they see this
>potential, it is always  "women heroes" versus "backward culture",
>mostly seen from a vulgar eurocentric and racist point of view, that
>tend to legitimize imperialist practices. Remember how the Kuwaiti
>women's right to vote was depicted in the imperialist media: The final
>gains of the westernized, unveiled and liberated women, although western
>capitalism has achieved very little to liberate women in the real sense,
>even  HERE! That is why many Arab feminists, including El Sadawi, do not
>want their works to be strategically used and abused by Western liberal
>forces. The below excerpt is from Sadda's article on Bakr. It gives a
>very good sense of how arab women are struggling to change their
>circumstances, and fighting multiple forms of oppression reflected in
>women's lives: class, gender, national...
>
>
>"Al-Qala expresses a common enough sentiment: if women want to gain
>recognition in a man's world they have to assimilate and reproduce the
>dominant discourse. Salwa Bakr manages to go beyond this  limitation. As
>she says in an interview:
>
>"I do not believe that man is responsible for the unhappiness of woman.
>I hold responsible  the structures of relations, the social
>specifications, concepts, values and prevalent norms. I deliberately
>portrayed man with no distinct features as a marginalized figure... I do
>not condemn man as a race or a sex, but I do condemn the overall shape
>of our lives, the preconceived ideas which we accept as natural givens
>though they are not so, and should not be so.I condemn the common, the
>familiar, the taken for granted"
>
>"Salwa Bakr depicts the lives of women the majority of whom belong to
>lower classes, hence bearing the burden of maximum oppression. "Noony
>the loony" is the story of a 13 years old servant girl. She quenches her
>thirst for the education she has never had  by listening in on snatches
>of lessons conducted in a school next door.when her father suddenly
>appears to take her home to  be married with a rich suitor, she escapes.
>The young girl is  not only a victim of paternal authority, she is also,
>at the same time a victim of social injustice that has gradually
>accumulated across years of political and economic blunders.. Nobody who
>stands at the bottom of the social leader not only is she a girl owned
>by her family, but she is also poor, illiterate, lowly servant girl with
>nothing to fall back on save her own resources"
>
>
>Mine
>
>
>
>
>--
>
>Mine Aysen Doyran
>PhD Student
>Department of Political Science
>SUNY at Albany
>Nelson A. Rockefeller College
>135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
>Albany, NY 12222
>
>
>
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