Feminisms and the Mobilisation of Law in Gulf Countries

Abstract

Overview of Current Literature

Current literature has tended to analyze feminist activisms in MENA almost exclusively from the point of view of their effect on social change broadly defined. This has reemphasized the reifications of women as victims by sharia laws, the veil, and repressive cultural and political systems.

Focus on Visible Activism

In addition, scholars have often directed their attention to visible forms of feminist activism, including protesting in revolutionary countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, and Bahrain, among others. This focus has marginalized feminisms in stable countries.

Groundbreaking Aspects of GulfFeminisms

In this context, the GulfFeminisms project is groundbreaking in three ways:

1. Under-Studied Domains: It examines the under-studied domains of the genealogies of feminisms and the mobilization of the law in the three Gulf States of Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Women’s rights in all three countries are interpretatively, but differently, operationalized under Sharia law, abridging women’s freedom to fully participate in decision-making processes at the national level.

2. Shifting Perspectives: While established scholarship has provided valuable studies of how patriarchal religious and political authorities use legal and religious frameworks to repress feminists, maintain gendered inequalities, and restrict women’s rights, this project shifts the established scholarly perspective. It examines how feminisms in the Gulf are self-motivated political movements that mobilize laws, including Sharia, to operationalize women’s agencies and practices within private and public spheres and to generate political change.

3. Original Analytical Framework: GulfFeminisms offers an original and leading perspective on feminisms in MENA as a practice promoting positive social and political change. To analyze the relation of feminisms and the mobilizing of the law, GulfFeminisms combines the multidisciplinary, novel, comparative analytical framework of Feminist Comparative Policy theory (FCP) and Epstein and Martin’s (2004) approaches to qualitative and quantitative empirical law research.