Martina Rieker

Feb 20, 2023

The mapping of the production of knowledge on women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s at this moment in time is important  as a resource for activists and scholars navigating global capital, nation, and war.  A thorough engagement and reflection with the constitution of the field and its trajectories over the past fifty years is imperative for the provocations or conversations that are necessary to engage the challenges ahead.

Mapping a field demands an awareness of the power of mapping. Over the course of two years the project critically reflected on the quandary of how to operationalize the mapping project. For instance, what are the implications for working with the categories through which the field has been constructed over the past fifty years without contributing to the re-consolidation, and naturalization, of these categories. We aspire for this act of mapping be generative of critical reengagements of the field and open up new spaces and questions.

The project devoted considerable time reflecting on how to name the spaces that we are seeking to map given their imbrication in the production of the modern, the nation and the colonial and post-colonial stakes in visibilizing spaces and subjects.  The shift of affiliations from religion to language, and then nation, for example, has been a powerful suturing principle of modern spatial arrangements. Invoking the Arab region as the subject of the mapping project is a thoroughly modern criteria, excluding not only Turkey and Iran for instance, but also by default hence engaging the categories of normative subjects and so-called minorities. Cognizant of contemporary scholarly interventions in the production of regional imaginations as regimes of modern power, we recognize that Arab is by no means an unproblematic term. Given our historical range covering the past fifty years, setting up key words  for capturing the older scholarship and giving due recognition of the categorical changes in the contemporary remained an ongoing challenge in the design of the project.

A comparative mapping project of the Arab region also needs to confront the fact that scholarship in the region is rarely comparative but rather grounded in the boundaries of diverse nation states. Comparisons are forced at best through uncritical deployments of categories such as culture and religion. Furthermore the regional library over the past fifty years has been dominated by scholarship on Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and more recently the Gulf is emerging as an area of study. North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) constitutes its own field. The so-called conflict zones likewise emerge as their own categorical subfields (Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Yemen), a brief comparative moment (Egypt and Tunisia) emerged around the events of 2011 and so forth.  Finally,  given the unevenness of scholarship across the Arabic-speaking region,  and within, the mapping project confronts the challenge of not contributing to the subalternisation of subjects and territories on the scholarly margins. Likewise, certain themes, areas, categories dominate the visibilisation of women in the production of knowledge (rural in Morocco, urban in Egypt), war in Syria and so forth.  Hence, one of our objectives through the reviews is to open up the space for a critical reading of the library itself.

Comparative work in the region has emerged almost exclusively in recent years through global governmentality. The hegemony of (neo) liberalism, and the rendering and domestication of  “the woman’s question” as a particular form of governmentally has ushered in a new vocabulary and grammar, a process of capturing and stabilizing a category — at the same time that de-colonial scholarship and activism began to critical engage the scaffolding of modern subject production, explore the instability of the subject through critical intersectionality and a focus on relations.  In the global south, and especially so in the Arab region,  the Millennium Development Goals (and the followup Sustainable Development Goals) was the vehicle through which the imagination of “gender justice” became stabilized and de-politicized through datafication. The comparative data-machine across territories of the global south (re) consolidated powerful discourses and imaginations of colonial developmentalist temporalities in the contemporary. “Belatedness” emerges as a temporal measure in the Arabic-speaking region alongside new discourses of “cultural difference” accounting for regional exceptionalism in late neoliberalism. The previously alluded to limited comparative academic work within the region, not to mention its entanglements with the global south,  emerges and is constituted by and through the data-machine.

The challenge for this mapping project is not only how to engage the discrepancy of scholarly work in different national contexts across the Arab region and reinforce a center/ periphery imagination, but also be attuned to ways in which the robust scholarly national libraries produce their own silences and illegibilities. The generative possibilities of the mapping project is to provide scholars and activists with tools to critically engage how/ why/ when gendered subjects are made visible and silenced in specific spaces and times.