Zina Sawaf

Introduction

The MPK project aims to map the production and circulation of scholarly knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s with a focus on the thematic of socialities. This aim is both integrative and transformative in nature. The mapping of the production of knowledge integrates a broad, interdisciplinary and amorphous field that has changed with the economic, social and political times and according to hegemonic analytical frameworks and trends in funding. Such an integrative mapping foregrounds patterns, continuities and discontinuities across this field of knowledge. At the same time, the mapping of the production of knowledge also generates a nuanced and contextualized perspective that gives rise to transformative knowledge and can be made available to scholars and activists alike for understanding and changing the conditions for the production of knowledge on women and gender systems in the region.

The MPK project particularly seeks to identify social, economic, geopolitical and historical turning points in the production of knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s, and the ways in which topics change over time with regards to their terminology, theoretical approach, methodological approach and the countries, regions and populations under research. It further aims to uncover the positioning of the knowledge producers on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s, including their institutional affiliations, their countries of origin and their PhD training, especially for prolific knowledge producers who have shaped this field of knowledge.

Why the Production of Knowledge?

Knowledge making on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s, is above all political. Research and knowledge production are inherently political since they are mainly funded and carried out by public institutions, and shaped by power relations among states, institutions and expertise. While the share of publicly funded research differs widely across countries, in the Arab region knowledge production is primarily supported and carried out by public institutions. Since the 1980s in the United States and then later in Europe and the rest of the world, neoliberal policies have profoundly altered the institutional and social conditions of research and knowledge production (Raymond, Catusse and Hanafi 2021, 10). Knowledge has become increasingly commodified and organized for private consumption. The university as the chief public institution for the production and dissemination of knowledge is increasingly preoccupied with private interests. Public funding for social science research, including research on women and gender, has correspondingly dwindled.

In the Arab region, public universities have committed only minimum budgets to social science research and research on women and gender, and new private universities that have mushroomed since the 1990s are simply uninterested in the latter fields of knowledge (Raymond, Catusse and Hanafi 2021, 11).  Global calls for the Arab countries to join a knowledge economy have further served to marginalize such fields. At the same time, “massive intervention” by international organizations has fostered the development of an extra-academic expertise, attracting university professors and researchers alike (Raymond, Catusse and Hanafi 2021, 11). This expertise has generated its own parallel knowledge and “grey literature” on social phenomena in the Arab region, not excluding women and gender. One landmark example is the “Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World”, which produced its own normative knowledge on women and gender informed by internationally circulating political discourses on women and empowerment (Abu-Lughod 2009).

In addition to the variable economic and social conditions of knowledge production, the geopolitical landscape has given rise to paradigmatic changes. The recent shift from a Cold War paradigm to the War on Terror has posited Arabs and Muslims as archetypical enemies of the United States and its allies. Gender has come to constitute a kind of geopolitical battle line since September 11, 2001. This has reinvigorated the desire, at least among anthropologists and sociologists, to correct stereotypes about Arab and Muslim women as passive, victimized and powerless (Charrad 2011; Deeb and Winegar 2012). Indeed, and for a long time prior the War on Terror, knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region has tended to overstate and essentialize the influence of its cultures and religions on the position of women (Joseph, Meari and Zaatari 2022). Writing in 1989, Abu-Lughod found that “behind the veil” accounts of Arab women were still preferred and that gender remained undertheorized as “harem theory”. With its roots in orientalist and colonialist knowledge frameworks, the enduring inclination to resort to culturalist explanations or assumptions effectively neglects considerations of the political and the economic in unpacking the situation of gendered lives in the region. This culturalism might be considered a discourse or a way of constituting knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region since its colonization two centuries ago.

In this way, the production of knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s is dynamic and fluid, as it reveals how research topics, terminology, theoretical and methodological approaches not only change, but re-emerge under different guises and according to shifting geopolitical frameworks as well as emergent analytical strategies and critical praxes. Knowledge production is shaped by, and dependent on, public funding and public institutions and their enmeshment with overlapping local and international hierarchies and power relations. In other words, knowledge production does not unfold outside of politics, but is very much a political activity.

A History of Topics, Terms and Knowledge Producers

The mapping blurs binary thinking towards the East/West divide by excavating what topics and theoretical approaches persist as exceptionalizing frameworks, and what topics and theoretical approaches are emerging and constituting real shifts related to committed academic and political engagements. This ultimately serves to free current as well as forthcoming scholarship from exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses. By foregrounding patterns, continuities and discontinuities alike, it emphasizes epistemologies, terminologies, and genealogies that generate more complex and transformative understandings of the conditions of women and gender in the region.

Firstly, the mapping traces what epistemological frameworks and issues still dominate knowledge production. By tracing the topics, terms, theoretical approaches, methodological approaches and disciplines that distinguish this dynamic and fluid field since the 1970s in the three dominant languages, a history of knowledge production on women and gender emerges. This history reveals the degree to which colonizing research epistemologies continue to inform knowledge production by researchers positioned both abroad and within the Arab region itself.

As an example, the exceptionalizing trope of the veil demonstrates how knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region becomes intertwined with historical moments and geopolitical material interests.  A resurgence of scholarship on women and gender is noticeable in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, with a focus on Islam and the veil. Another resurgence is also widely noted in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and the ensuing War on Terror. This last resurgence has been accompanied by renewed ethnographic and engaged attention to Muslim women’s piety. The mapping uncovers precisely what research topics are current during different time periods.

Secondly, the mapping serves to outline and generate proximate genealogies of terminology. It lays out what terms are frequently used and when. The term “women” has been in wide circulation far prior to the 1970s. The focus on women persists despite the more widespread use of a gender analytic (Deeb and Winegar 2012). At least until the 1990s, most production of knowledge on women and gender related to socialities has revolved around kinship and marriage. Research on “men” and “masculinities” do not figure until around the 2000s. This research remains sparse and does not represent the wide range of constructions and experiences of masculinity. The mapping further charts when the terms “women” and “gender” are articulated intersectionally with other terms such as “class”, “race”, “ethnicity” and most crucially, “sexuality”. Terms that emerge out of the many feminist critiques of the gender binary such as “non-binary”, “trans” and “queer” can be found albeit marginally in the knowledge produced over the last 10 years. Thus far, studies of sexuality have proven to be rare and heteronormative (Deeb and Winegar 2012).

The mapping also reckons with what countries, region or populations feature in these later studies. Earlier knowledge production until at least the 1990s focused overwhelmingly on the pastoral or tribal, and relied on rural fieldwork. The urban focus is recent, with an overrepresentation of such urban centers as Beirut and populations as the Palestinians in the context of Israeli pinkwashing. The mapping uncovers what terms fall by the wayside, such as older terms that assume and reproduce a gender binary, and what terms persist and create new and emergent patterns in knowledge production. These genealogies further reveal the extent to which gender is theorized relative to shifts in feminist theory. In other words, they are indicative of emerging areas or new directions away from the binary emphasis on women’s lives, heteronormativity, and segmented approaches towards class, race and gender.

Finally, the mapping considers the positioning of the knowledge producers on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s, including their institutional affiliations, their countries of origin and their PhD training, especially for prolific knowledge producers who have shaped this field of knowledge. The positioning of knowledge producers on women and gender in the Arab region has been a sticking point since the publication of Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society (1988). The contributors to the edited book grappled with the unequal hierarchies and power relations among both their worlds and those of their subjects. They accounted for their own positioning as female insiders studying their own society, contending that this enables a “more nuanced, less gender-biased and less Western-centric take” (Kanafani and Sawaf 2017). Recent collective editions note the centrality of positionality but also consider the overbearing conditions that shape both gendered lives and relations in the region as well as knowledge production about them (Kanafani and Sawaf 2017; Joseph, Meari and Zaatari 2022).

For knowledge producers positioned in the Arab region, the English language plays a decisive role in obtaining higher degrees (Bamyeh 2016). While many social scientists in the Arab region are trained in Arabic at the undergraduate levels, the population using Arabic as a medium of language drops at higher levels of learning. Over one-third of social scientists in the region obtain their PhD degrees in Europe or North America (Bamyeh 2016). Algeria and Egypt, which account for a big chunk of the region’s population, produce their own social science scholars with many earning their graduate degrees locally (roughly 44% of the Master’s degrees and 39% of the PhDs) (Bamyeh 2016). These statistics are not intended to reify binary thinking towards the East/West divide. In fact, around half of social scientists in the region publish their research in more than one language and are engaged with “different knowledge environments” (Bamyeh 2016, 32). Given the absence of direct national or government funding for research in the region, however, international funding plays a vital role for knowledge producers based within the region, as 40% of the latter enjoy a degree of international funding (Bamyeh 2016). This does not fully expose the nature of the relationship between funding and research agendas. At the same time, research trends driven by such funding have been noted including the focus on poverty, violent extremism and gender-based violence as well as Arab youth, among others.

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