Surfacing vol. 1, no. 1

Surfacing
vol. 1, no. 1
An Interdisciplinary Journal for Gender in the Global South
1
Surfacing is sponsored by the Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s
Studies (IGWS) at The American University in Cairo (AUC). It is published two times a
year—the spring and fall—at AUC, 113 Kasr El Aini St., P.O. Box 2511, Cairo, 11511,
Egypt.
web sites
Surfacing is an online journal, published at www.aucegypt.edu/ResearchatAUC/
rc/IGWS/GraduateCenter/Pages/Surfacing.aspx on the IGWS web site
www.aucegypt.edu/ResearchatAUC/rc/IGWS/Pages/default.aspx.
Submissions and Correspondence
The Student Collective is eager to develop networks and assist with activities related to
gender throughout the global South. Inquiries about submissions to Surfacing or
correspondence regarding workshops and other activities should be sent to
[email protected]. Manuscripts should be no longer than 8,000 words, written in
accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. Fine art and photo submissions are
encouraged.
Permissions
This copyrighted journal is published online, in the public domain, and articles may be
photocopied without permission so long as the authors of Surfacing content are
recognized for their work.
Vol. 1 · No. 1 · May 2008
© Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies 2008.
2
Surfacing
An Interdisciplinary Journal for Gender in the Global South
Editors
Ali Atef
Tanya Schenk
Student Editorial Collective
Karem Said
Yasmine Rifaat
Nadia Illahi
Contributing Editors
Karem Said
Yasmine Rifaat
Copy Editor
Jennifer Fugate
International Advisory Board
Kamran Ali
Susan McKinnon
Andrea Cornwall
Farha Ghannam
Janet Halley
Barbara Harlow
Martina Rieker
Hanan Sabea
Amr Shalakany
Hania Sholkamy
Mariz Tadros
3
Surfacing
vol. 1, no. 1
An Interdisciplinary Journal for Gender in the Global South
Introduction
Ali Atef and Karem Said
i
ARTICLES
Ruminations on the Art of Domestic Glass Display: The Commodity Capture
of Two Grandmothers
Karem Said
1
Rethinking Women’s Empowerment: A Critical Appraisal of Gender
Mainstreaming in International Human Rights Law
Kavita Kapur
27
Blogging the Body: The Case of Egypt
Yasmine Rifaat
52
NOTES FROM THE FIELD
A Fragment on the Everyday and its Burdens among Cement Carriers in
Saft El-Laban
Fouad Halbouni
73
PHOTO-ESSAY
Shadows of Cement Dust: My Experience with Cement Carriers in
Saft El-Laban
Ragaui Moussa
80
4
Why an Interdisciplinary Graduate Journal about Gender in the Global South?
It is the belief of the Surfacing Student Collective that there are several cumulative needs
for the launch of a graduate student journal from what is now termed the “global South”
– a journal conceived under the auspices of the sponsoring Cynthia Nelson Institute for
Gender and Women’s Studies (IGWS).” Firstly, there is a need for an academic
engagement with the analytic construction of “gender,” with critical reference to regional
context, among both graduate students and professors; there is also a need to develop
alliances with a wider intellectual community throughout the Middle East and North
Africa region and the world, via writing and other forms of expression; and finally, there
is a need to cultivate a space of interdisciplinary exchange that allows graduate students
to engage each other and create their own potentially transnational networks across
disciplinary boundaries.
Interdisciplinarity
To possibly surface much of the expressions in our everyday lives as well as the thoughts
and reflections of concerned individuals and groups, an interdisciplinary journal offers an
interesting starting point. This is particularly important in the face of the many academic
institutions
that
persist
in
maintaining
strong
disciplinary
boundaries,
compartmentalizing theoretical engagements, methodological instruments and styles of
writing that designate a disciplinary course for each specialized scholar. Surfacing is
interested in encouraging young scholars to explore multiple types of source material
relevant to their research and to challenge disciplinary formulations that inhibit such
exploration.
The Surfacing Collective believes that while a need for common foundation
remains indisputable, it is equally beneficial to select information on the basis of its
relevance rather than its disciplinary demarcation. Amidst debates, controversies, and
discussions over the demarcation of academic disciplines, the birth and death of
disciplines, and so forth, the communicative potential of interdisciplinarity must be
recognized as essential to enriching academic study that pushes its caged confines in the
university (the university being one among other spaces for the production of knowledge
which would enrich Surfacing.)
i
The drive for interdisciplinary research does not correspond with its practical
support within the social sciences and humanities.
The difficulty of entering in a
constructive exchange among disciplines is a widespread academic reality. As such,
Surfacing very practically provides a forum for productive interaction. In the face of
increasing theoretical sophistication and scholarly productivity, researchers must take
advantage of the speed of information exchange enabled by internet and other
technologies. They must also discover specific scholarly nodes that feature work in
different disciplines, in order to remain informed about emerging cross-disciplinary
conversations and interventions.
The Surfacing Collective is born out of the conviction that different tools for the
acquisition of knowledge should be laid bare, compared, and reassembled in order to
recognize more compelling insights than can arise from single areas of study. Surfacing
provides an intellectual space to experiment with the logistics of method and applicability
as well as the scope of research problems and objects of study. As a group of postgraduate students, the Surfacing Collective yearns for a space that fosters creative and
critical exchange among young scholars of different backgrounds. One must learn to
extend and challenge thought processes to effectively dialogue with scholars from
different specializations.
Precisely for this reason, young researchers should extend the knowledge they
acquire within their disciplines to other approaches in hopes of developing and adopting
different analytic skills. This not only requires the possibility of exchanging knowledge
but also discussion on the importance of methodological tools and their relevance in
shaping disciplinary boundaries.
Location, Location, Location…
The Surfacing Collective, through its particular location, also desires to create strategies
that circumvent a conceptualization of knowledge that erases the possibility of thinking
from different local histories and centers geopolitical space around Western Europe and
North America. Fairly recent deployments of neoliberal governing techniques within
countries of every region variously frustrate and reassert the centrality of Euro-America.
National expressions of neoliberalism vary as widely as the specificity of
historical process and political context, and neoliberal production yields unanticipated
results, such as augmenting analytic awareness of space. Neoliberal deployments have
ii
rekindled dormant south-south trade relations and generated southern political alliances,
even as states reconfigure national territory, erecting novel and often self-contained, selfreferential areas. One result of such deployments is to throw open questions of spatial
categorization and geographical proximity.
As a group, we do not find it problematic to think from certain Western canons,
even when such canons problematically situate the global South in critical discussion of
modern processes. Indeed, the Collective would highlight the extra-geographical status
and political claims inherent to the notion of a coherent “West” – a discursive category
that exceeds actual territory and camouflages other geographies of cultural semblance.
The Collective, through workshops and production of the journal, attempts to disrupt
epistemic dependence on that geopolitical category called the West in ways that expose
how knowledge is shaped by geographies of power. The Collective aims to historicize
such geographies of power and to work toward constructing alternative geographies.
The scaffolding of (neo)colonial geography continues to be dismantled by the
details of actual biographies, migratory histories and a ceaseless media-driven acceleration
of encounter and cultural exchange. Stubborn realities that would disable polarity
between categories of people and place offer a dynamic foreground from which to
expand possibilities of thought and the surfacing of new perspectives. Thinking must be
located rather than universally abstracted.
Gender in the Global South
Surfacing aims to publish work that reassess the politics of gender in regions of the
world sometimes designated as the global South. Such papers favor empirical evidence
over received narratives about gender relations defined by regional contexts and strain to
develop alternative narratives that reflect the actual social contexts from which they arise.
The global South includes Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America,
yet it also extends beyond these regional domains. Southern areas exist in the midst of
northern territories, as populations divide against themselves, marking each other within
polarizing logics. Most cogently, the concept of a global South defuses notions of
deficiency generated by specific north-south economic and political relations.
It
neutralizes the hierarchy of these relations by constructing multiple and overlapping
networks, within the global South, of intellectual and political exchange.
Gender, following feminist studies, has granted researchers an analytic tool used to
iii
investigate the lacuna in scholarly attention paid to women, and then to men. It has
ruptured the easy confidence of generalizing, objectivist approaches towards and within
the humanities and social science by promoting reflexive specificity, from the stage of
conceptualization to that of analysis. Scholars across disciplines continue to recognize
the importance of gender difference in shaping social structure, public culture, social
reproduction, notions of intimacy, and so on. Surfacing believes that gender as an
analytical tool continues to grant new insight into social problems, including those of the
global South.
That being said, any gender journal from and about the global South must also
acknowledge the types of gender knowledge produced by powerful agents (deemed
experts at times) such as the United Nations about areas in the global South. Surfacing
has been conceived of during a historical moment in which a tremendous amount of
resources have been deployed toward satisfying UN-authored, gender-focused Millenium
Development Goals by the year 2015. International and local NGOs the world over
have adopted these goals and are working toward their implementation. We must ask
about the ramifications of such heavily-funded enterprises that posit gender equality and
similar notions as primary social problems in the global South.
Clearly, gender is not just an analytic category. The word has been used to
mobilize heavily financed development agendas that formally articulate inequality
between the global South and Euro-America. Gender is also used within ongoing
development constructs to formalize regional differences, posited as cultural and even
essential difference. We have to attend to the ways in which attempts that would
supposedly eliminate inequality actually emphasize and manufacture difference—
specifically difference that would disqualify great swaths of the earth from gaining entry
to an exclusive post-development status quo.
The Surfacing Student Collective would like to thank the AUC School of
Humanities and Social Sciences, Dean Ann Lesch and Provost Tim Sullivan for their
patience and support in this project.
Without the creative suggestions of our
international advisory board, this issue would have not have been realized. For that, we
are grateful. The Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women's Studies has devoted
time, space, and energy to this project, housing us from the very beginning and
continuing to encourage us every step of the way. Without these efforts, Surfacing
would not have surfaced. Thank you.
Ali Atef and Karem Said
iv
Ruminations on the Art of Domestic Glass
Display: The Commodity Capture of Two
Grandmothers
by Karem Said
Abstract: This paper offers a meditation on a particular furniture item – the domestic
glass and mirror display case, or vitrine – considering some of the social and historical
processes that have contributed to its construction. By focusing on three examples of the
vitrine, belonging to my Egyptian and American grandmothers, I hope to reassert the
indispensable role of the gendered aesthetic subject in processes of commodity display
and fetishization. By contextualizing the entry of the vitrine into the domestic
environment, the paper aims to make strange a familiar furniture item in bourgeois
homes around the world. Of particular relevance, outside of any biographical trajectory,
is the rise of commodity appreciation and fetishization during the interwar period and
subsequent times of dearth and rationing. Social conditions related to national context,
upbringing, travel and class shape various aesthetic choices. Yet, despite their different
socialiaties and contexts, both of my grandmothers engaged with the historically
contingent medium of domestic glass display and in practices of commodity
decontextualization, recontextualization, misuse and gaze.
The domestic glass and mirror display case or vitrine – a furniture item that can be traced
to the early 20th century – brought a commercial element of display, sale and purchase to
the domestic environment. I came to wonder about this furniture item in gazing into
those cases that exist in both my Egyptian and American grandmothers’ homes. In this
paper, I attempt to explain the emergence of the domestic glass display case not in terms
of a rupture of domestic privacy and inviolability, but as a set of practices constructed by
women who filled and arranged these cases according to different aesthetically-mediated
choices, necessarily premised upon a fetishization of commodities. I will consider the
relationship between consumption and the fetishization of material objects and wartime
experiences of objects and materiality – specifically the interwar period during which new
forms of sale and purchase emerged. To contextualize processes of fetishization, I will
1
draw upon insights from works by Timothy Mitchell, Walter Benjamin and Arjun
Appadurai on materiality, its circulation, history and reception.
This paper is written in a speculative mode as it attempts to explore polyvalence
at the intersections of gender, consumption, property, and fetishization, as invoked by
the domestic glass display case. By fetishization, I refer to the complex process in which
commodities are granted use-value by various actors in ways that are often commonly
recognized, and that facilitate and are facilitated by circulation. Marx writes of the
mystification involved in this process, whereby the “perceived action of objects”
(1978[1867], 323) obscures the labor-value inherent in any commodity. Objects may
appear to act independently of actors, to demand admiration in and of themselves,
enabling their own circulation. The apparent autonomy of objects granted by
fetishization obscures not only labor power but also the role of human actors in
designating the use-value that both completes the commodity and calls it forth into
existence. I elaborate upon processes of fetishization that surround glass display cases
left by my two grandmothers – material artifacts that perplex the (extra)geographical
division between East and West. One case is located in Cairo, Egypt, in the apartment I
currently live in, and the other two are in Montgomery, Texas, a small lake town about an
hour north of Houston, where my parents currently live. I consider the incorporation of
the glass display case as a technology of commerce within the domestic environment.
Allowing that wartime crisis and periods of dearth inform a desire to capture the
commodity, I suggest that the fetishization processes surrounding the glass cases are
mediated by three fields of influence: the historically contingent proliferation of glass and
reflection in display; diversionary decontextualization of objects within display; and the
power of the aesthetic subject to illuminate the secret life of objects via gaze and misuse.
Photographs of glass display cases can only heighten the valorization of the
objects therein. The flash catches, reflects and ricochets off the facets of glass objects,
2
the glass shelving and the mirrored walls of the case. Ordinary objects, once placed in a
glass display case, are instantly transformed for the viewer. They settle into their place
within a constellation of objects that communicate to the viewer against each other. The
objects are replicated in the mirrors, creating a feeling of boundlessness and expanse that
promotes imagistic multiplicity. The play of light upon the objects lends them an aura of
exclusivity: they become hallowed things. In fact, the insinuated coherence and
interconnection of the objects – intensified by their reflected reproductions and in spite
of their concrete physicality – overwhelms and denies the casual glance. One can only
really see the objects by concentrating on them individually, visually isolating and dividing
them from the larger constellation. It is an exercise in assimilation, to consider the
objects individually and then in their various relationships to each other – the possible
themes and patterns that lie in texture, material, form and function.
I have taken pictures of the case here in Cairo, which is much older than those in
Montgomery. My Egyptian grandfather asked his carpenter to build it for Nani1 as a
wedding present more than 70 years ago, along with an entire set of dining room
furniture. They brought this Art Deco-styled set with them when they moved to the
upscale neighborhood of Zamalek from Shoubra 50 years ago. Although I’ve spent time
gazing into and at Nani’s case, photographs of its contents offer further dimensions of
visuality and prompt the poetics complicit with gaze. My parents have provided me with
digital photos of the cases in Montgomery, which I have used to trigger memories of the
many times I peered past the glass cabinet doors to consider the objects within. These
mirrored cases were built into the walls of my grandparents’ retirement home, on either
side of a fireplace in a somewhat formal family room.
1
Nani is what I called my Egyptian grandmother, Akram El-Nabarawi. Honey is the name I gave my
American grandmother, Bonnie Grace Stanley.
3
Furniture and display
When considered as a circulating form, a piece of furniture that manages to
bridge what appears as a temporal and geographic disjuncture, the glass display case can
be understood as both buttress and suture to larger historical narratives and “publicmaking” (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003, 385) entities such as The Market. What interests
me is less a social history of how and when the glass display case circulated around the
globe but more the practices and meanings that surround new ways of organizing
domestic space. It is a concern for what occurred when a particular method for
displaying commercial goods entered the domestic domain in apparently disparate places.
Timothy Mitchell (1988) has written about commercial glass display in European
department stores, which emerged in the second half of the 19th Century (Russell 2004,
50):
Non-European visitors would remark especially on the panes of glass, inside the stores
and along the gas-lit arcades, which separated the observer from the goods on display.
‘The merchandise is all arranged behind sheets of clear glass, in the most remarkable
order… Its dazzling appearance draws thousands of onlookers.’ The glass panes inserted
themselves between the visitors and the goods on display, making the former into mere
onlookers and endowing the goods with the distance that is the source of their
objectness. Just as exhibitions were becoming more commercialized, the machinery of
commerce was becoming a means of creating an effect of reality, indistinguishable from
that of the exhibition. (Mitchell 1988,11)
Egyptians came into contact with large department stores in Europe as early as 1882. A
story printed in Arabic that year features two Egyptian characters in a French store
arranged as a labyrinth of mirrored corridors. The manager of the store must rescue the
Egyptians, who get lost running into their own reflections (Mitchell 1988, 11). By the
time of Khedive Ismail’s reign (1863-1879), Cairo’s Azbakiyya neighborhood boasted
several European-style stores (Russell 2004, 55) that likely made use of glass display.2
The domestication of commercialized cases, once part of a “machinery of
commerce,” should be understood in relation to the effects of industrialism and other
2
Omar Effendi, which has become the largest department store in Egypt, was established in 1859,
according to Business Today Egypt magazine (Hassan 2008, 40).
4
forces upon the home. That being said, the household display of commodities long
precedes 19th century industrialism. The display of objects in the domestic environment
can be traced along at least one trajectory to the libraries of medieval European
monasteries, where specialized furniture such as lecterns and cupboards were developed
for the storage and display of books (Lucie-Smith1979, 51). While display was important
in the medieval European home, emphasis was placed on tapestries, since rooms at this
time were usually multi-purpose and furniture was not specialized or fixed (Lucie-Smith
1979, 49). The medieval English display dresser would exhibit plates, silver cups and
tankards.3 “Objects of virtú would later be displayed in 16th and 17th century Flemish
cabinets; curios, trinkets and dishware would also be displayed in Italian Renaissance
cabinets, 17th century Dutch cabinets, Elizabethan cupboards and on 18th century English
display shelves (Boger 1959, 17, 69, 36, 77, 207-208, 250, 261). These furniture items,
especially in their display of objects other than chinaware or the books found in libraries
or masculine workrooms, represent a step towards the modern glass display case. Yet,
none of the examples of furniture above makes use of glass and/or mirrors. Wall mirrors
were first introduced to the home during the Italian Renaissance (Boger 1959, 40) and
became more common during the 17th century when they were placed over matching side
tables, magnifying the amount of light in a room and reflecting furniture in a way that
increased a sense of continuity in furniture design and placement (Lucie-Smith 1979, 80).
It wasn’t until the 19th century that mirrors were regularly incorporated into furniture
design. Boger writes that several 18th century furniture types, such as the armoire, glazed
china cabinets and bibliothèques, were in 19th century France “frequently designed with
3
After tying ancient Greek examples to those of medieval Europe, Louise Ade Boger’s book Furniture Styles
focuses on
European developments in furniture design, including American manifestations, offering a thorough
analysis of furniture
types covering the period before the 19th century. She gives only cursory attention to furniture from the
19th century to
the present due to an apparent explosion of complex furniture forms during the 19th century (Boger 1959,
399).
5
mirror panels, a practice which is never considered to be in good taste” (1959, 180).4 The
only pictured example of mirrored backing in Boger’s book is a French desserte, a tiered
shelving unit used in the dining room as a buffet and for the display of vases and other
objects, dating between 1830 and 1848 (Boger 1959, 157-158, 175). The guide American
Furniture pictures shelving units with mirrors, called étagère, designed for the display of
objects (Comstock 1962, 294-295). This furniture item was previously built in 1810
without the mirror panels and termed a “whatnot” (Comstock 1962, 283)5, probably in
reference to the assortment of objects that could acceptably be displayed on its shelves.
A mid-nineteenth century development, the étagère “marks the final evolution of the
whatnot from an incidental accessory to a major form” (Comstock 1962, 294). Yet, the
objects d’arts of the desserte and étagère did not sit encased in glass or on glass shelving, as
found in the later form of those glass and mirror display cases that most clearly mimic
the commercial display found in department stores and other shops. These furniture
guides never mention domestic glass and mirror display cases, suggesting that the
furniture item was more of a 20th century phenomenon.
Over the course of the 19th century, the Egyptian upper-class household
undertook major transformation, moving from a Mamluk style where spaces could be
used for different activities by moving pillows and furniture, to a European style wherein
rooms were designated a certain function (Russell 2004, 36-37). This shift can be
understood as a disciplining of domestic space that reflects those spatial disciplinary
techniques of prisons, factories, hospitals and schools that emerged in 18th century
Europe and America (Foucault 1995[1977], 141-9, 211). 19th century industrialism is
commonly described as having separated work from home, and by the turn of the
century, the Egyptian home was demoted from its function as a central site of power and
4
It’s unclear if this is Boger’s opinion or one prevalent in 19th century Europe.
Boger writes that “what-nots… were indispensable” to the Victorian home along with an “infinite variety
of knick-knacks” (1959, 399), which suggests a growing interest in the accumulation-for-display of
sentimental or lower-cost items.
5
6
was reconceptualized as a kind of seedbed from which women were charged with
competently raising the youth that would rise to form a new nation (Russell 2004, 80-87).
Nationalist calls to educate the woman-cum-mother went beyond highly detailed treatises
on how she should raise her children (El-Shakry 1998) and included textbooks specifying
commercial products that would allow the mother to create a hygienic and healthy
environment in the home. Women were expected to be arbiters of household
management and budgeting of anything from grocery items and clothing to furniture and
decor (Russell 2004, 144, 84-86). By the 1920s, home economic textbooks instructed
Egyptian women in home decorating techniques, and detailed desirable furniture items
such as “Louis XIV-style furniture, Western-style lighting fixtures, English tea services,
statuettes, and even a bearskin rug” (Russell 2004, 148).
Reading about the nationalist prognostications issued to Egyptian women in the
early 20th century, especially those regarding hygiene and the cleanliness of the home
environment, helps explain the systematic manner in which Nani approached not only
the cleaning of her home but also her various daily routines within the apartment. The
7
upheaval
of
repositioned
couches,
chairs
in
The top two of three shelves in Nani’s glass display case in Cairo.
precise rows, rolled up rugs, lamps and television on the floor, framed pictures facedown:
what some might qualify as a seasonal or even yearly spring-cleaning was for her a
weekly, compulsory ritual. While the dust of the khamiseen’s springtime dust storms may
have howled down the streets below, the apartment remained defiantly tranquil and
immaculate. Nani’s vitrine surely bore a place in her systematic cleaning schedule,
although I don’t know exactly how often she slid the glass walls apart to wipe away the
dust that inevitably collected on the objects and their glass shelving. Interestingly, the
spatial discipline she imposed upon her case is noticeably more regimented than in
Honey’s, which is far more haphazard in the grouping and interspersing of objects as
well as the breadth of their variety. It is difficult to separate the heightened discipline in
Nani’s case from the Egyptian nationalist focus on the education of women for a more
modern, i.e. scientific way of managing the home, raising children and living life – one
8
coupled with an anxiety of failing to meet European colonial standards. Aside from
social and historical forces, the more personal circumstances of their lives also serve to
distinguish the cases and the objects therein.
Objects d’arts and the architects of display
Who did my grandmothers imagine would appreciate their artful arrangements?
Who would engage in the complex exercise of gazing – a kind of visual grazing – and
who would discern the choices these women had made? My grandmothers hardly spoke
to each other and led markedly different lives. My Egyptian grandmother, Nani, was
born into an affluent Cairene family and lived her entire life in the city, eventually
traveling to the United States several times to visit her son – my father and our family.
My American grandmother, Honey, was born into a farming family in Eastern Texas.
Her marriage to my grandfather, who was hired by Exxon, led to extensive traveling
across the United States and the world. They lived in Australia for several years and then
spent close to 15 years in Egypt, where my grandfather worked as the general manager of
Esso. In the mid-1980s, they built their dream home in Montgomery, Texas, designing
two glass display cases, with mirrors and backlighting, as insets on both sides of their
fireplace.
Honey was a highly meticulous woman with an eye for poor stitching, stained
fabric, and loose ends – that is, as much for imperfection as perfection. A combination
of various aesthetic styles reflected her lifetime trajectory from a childhood in rural
Eastern Texas, to various places in the United States, Australia and Egypt. Her home
contained paintings of countryside windmills and embroidered bible verses as well as
portraits of Bedouin women and the geometric cascades of Egyptian mother-of-pearl
inlay. She adored pastels: especially shades of rose, and decorated her salon with salmon-
9
colored upholstery and a centerpiece of large, assorted seashells. Honey’s glass
Two of three shelves in the glass display to the left of the fireplace, in Conroe, Texas.
display cases were not placed in the salon, however. Situated on either side of the
fireplace, the cases were built into the wall of the adjacent family room, literally reflecting
family objects back to the family as we would gather in this space to visit, play games or
sit around her Christmas tree. Nani’s case, likewise, is not located in the salon but in her
dining room – a space almost exclusively reserved for family. In the final years of her life,
Nani, in order to minimize the amount of cleaning she had to do, tended to eat her meals
at a small table outside of the kitchen. When family came to visit, she generally fed them
in the living room or at this table, and it was only when my father visited from the
United States that she would open the dining room for breakfasts and lunches. While the
room was characterized by some degree of ceremony and special use, it was resolutely a
10
family room, and hence, the Egyptian glass display case also reflected family objects back
toward the family.
Nani’s glass display case actually carried more gifts overall than objects she had
selected herself for encasement. Much of the crystal, the various teacups and the silver
tea set were wedding presents from family members. On the left-hand side, on the
middle shelf, she had arranged several of those ceramic boxes, usually filled with candied
almonds and chocolates, which are offered in celebration of births amongst family and
friends. Another gift has a miniature ceramic plate propped up behind a miniature teacup
and teapot, arranged in descending order. There is no Arabic in this case; the plate and
teapot read, in English, “I Love You Grandmother,” framed by blue birds and blue
roses. On the middle shelf, a small, ceramic bell with a heart-shaped handle reads, in
cursive font, “I Love Mother,” above a loose pile of roses. Near the teapot sits another
gift, from my uncle, the pilot: Elfin salt- and pepper-shakers in a copper-colored metal. A
thin post rises up from their infantile casing and bears the head of an eagle, the Egypt Air
motto. The shakers work to inscribe my uncle’s position as a pilot within the larger story
of the case, which includes objects memorializing marriage, birth and the thoughtfulness
of children and grandchildren. Thus, Nani’s glass display case in particular also
memorializes the family as a sphere of exchange, albeit a somewhat terminal exchange,
depending on the life of the display case and its architect(s).
In his essay “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,”
Igor Kopytoff describes singularization as a process by which commodities are in essence
de-commodified by various practices, including the demarcation of a limited sphere of
exchange, such as the family. He writes “commodities are singularized by being pulled
out of their usual commodity sphere” (1986, 74). I would take issue with the idea that
commodities can be de-commodified as well as the notion of a “usual commodity
sphere.” First, it is not the event of exchange that grants an object the status of
11
commodity, but its productive emergence as an object of capital, axiomatically endowed
with use-value and exchange-value, within our current mode of production. To display
an object in a glass case is to fetishize the object in a way that valorizes it; far from
negating the use-value of the object, the valorization of commodities by display
multiplies its use-value in the eyes of anyone who might stop to take note of it. Second,
what is a “usual commodity sphere”? Where would we find these usual spheres? In
department stores, before the items have finally been separated from their massproduced clones? As this paper hopefully shows, privileging the point of production or
distribution over realms of consumption severely limits any attempt to understand the
power of the commodity in various social configurations. Are the objects of Nani’s glass
display case not, in a sense, just as primed for display as for any other purpose? Even the
salt-and-pepper shakers had been crafted for admiration beyond the realm of food and
dining. Yet, the desire to singularize objects, or to highlight their singularity, is certainly
present in the construction of the domestic glass display case and should be considered
in relation to desires for authenticity.
In Nani’s display case, a few objects – the silver teapot set and glass teacups in
the Easter colors of pink, baby blue and pale yellow – directly reference a British
aesthetic circulated within the province of colonialism. Nani’s display case captures these
items within a photogenic prism, imprisoning them while also granting them authenticity.
This process of capturing commodities in a glass display case – somehow informed by
metaphors of hunted game or scientism’s specimens – reflects in part a desire to distance
possessions and property from a mass market aesthetic. Elizabeth Outka writes in her
article “Crossing the Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity and the Commodified
Authentic” that the British department store Selfridges irreparably altered the strategy of
British marketing. Opening in 1909, Selfridges ushered in a new trend of uncluttered
displays that spotlighted objects – objects that were seemingly priceless in that price tags
12
were intentionally left off displayed items. Outka writes that such displays offered the
illusion of a “non-commercial purity” that promised an escape from homogenous mass
consumption (2005, 312). Goods at Selfridges were thus rendered “authentic” by way of
display that promised purity and hid from view their mass-production. Outka provides a
historical example of how class-based claims for distinction may alter the very structure
of commercial exchange and realms of visibility. The desire to authenticate and to make
singular an object overlap, yet the former desire is premised on satisfying the requisites of
some other, perhaps earlier form or setting – one that approves or disapproves. This
authenticating form or setting helps to set the standards for what is correct and incorrect
accumulation and display. With Nani’s glass display case, the authenticating forms lie
partially in a European design formation with British and French aesthetics (tea sets,
ceramic plates and crystal), granted a point of entry into the Egyptian home by way of
European colonialism. Nani’s glass display case, originally built in the1930s in Egypt,
assimilates the class status of her family with further claims to European authenticity and
colonial power by way of aesthetic manipulation. Authenticity is granted not only by the
objects themselves or by the selection of the objects by the actor, but also by the artful
placement of the objects within the case. Thus, it is the display case in sum that is
scrutinized for authenticity: the total combination of singularized objects and their
interrelationship within the arranged space.
Although Nani’s case enjoys the allure of authenticity, the singularization of
certain items valued by Selfridges customers – cottage industry products and hand
crafted goods made by peasants, mythologized by the department store (Outka 2005,
317) – would actually devalorize Nani’s case within the Egyptian context. Almost all the
items in her case are made of ceramic, glass/crystal or metal. The handmade object
cannot be found here, as it can in Honey’s cases. In fact, a kind of substitution of
13
materials is evident in two small “baskets” made of colorful ceramics that suggest a
woven property. The elision of actual basket weavings, clays or carved woods may be
Detail of Nani’s glass display case in Cairo.
seen as a significant difference between the cases of the two women. Walter Benjamin
has argued that the artful use of iron for decorative purposes, as opposed to its structural
purpose, represents a desire to “return” to a future that references a distant past (Brown
1999, 6). In contrast, the symbolic substitution of basket weavings with ceramic material,
or the more important elision of handmade goods, reveals a desire simply to abscond
from the past and the villager’s present. This present continues to haunt the Egyptian
post-colonial subject; the rural element constitutes a fact to be diminished if not denied.
Thus, while 18th century romps are nostalgically figured on miniature boxes in Nani’s
case, nostalgia for an Egyptian past prior to the French invasion in 1798 is absent.
Upper-class Egyptians are, in a sense, burdened by a past ubiquitously invoked by the
14
village migrant, if only fleetingly by the attire of the galabiyya in the streets of Cairo, that
must actively be denied in the present. It is not that 18th century romps play no part in
Egyptian history or that they do not belong to Egyptians, because a colonial legacy has
assured that they do, but that the handmade object is necessarily incompatible with
Egyptian bourgeois display. Within the confines of contemporary habits and modes of
accumulation, upper-class living denies material evidence of peasant life; objects and
habits of such life are axiomatically interpolated as artifacts that may bear witness against
the bourgeois, urban family.
A denial of handmade objects in Egyptian bourgeois display reveals how
postcoloniality may structure the accumulation of symbolic capital and help mediate class
divisions; postcoloniality thereby incites and delimits everyday practices. Viewing the
construction of the vitrine through this postcolonial lens acknowledges the bourgeois
Egyptian woman’s uni-directional line of sight, so that the mistake of citing peasant
materiality is mere subtext to a concern for constructing the display case in accordance
with colonial norms.
Yet, to view the practice of building and filling glass display cases as simply a way
of complying with convention or obeying the dictums of home economics textbooks
would offer a very narrow reading. For both of my grandmothers, these glass cases are
also filled with gifts from children and grandchildren; these mementos hold their own
amidst glass, mirrors and crystal, so that the cases both celebrate and pay tribute to the
roles these women played in our families. The construction of these cases has to be read
as a creative act, although not necessarily as an individualistic one.
Furthermore, while the compulsion to display objects in a case of glass and
mirrors structures authentic space in one’s home, this practice also goes beyond issues of
authenticity. In domesticating the presentation style of large department stores and
foreign shops, two compulsions are revealed: one is a desire to appropriate the
15
techniques and therefore selling power of, not a single, personable merchant, but the
anonymous, spatial domain of a large store. The cases carry an element of exclusivity that
extrapolates that selling power to the realm of the home. One can look, but not touch; in
domestic display cases, objects are not even for sale, and possession is thus denied.
Secondly, if the careful placement of objects (so that they never touch) could be said to
represent “order” as modernity’s disciplining force and expression, a woman’s
arrangement of mementos in domestic glass display cases can be viewed as an
appropriation of male modernist techniques applied in the built environment.6
Nani placed glass objects (two lanterns, two crystal vases and rows of crystal wine
glasses) in the corners of all three shelves, against the mirrors, as if to capitalize on their
reflective properties. Symmetry is reproduced on each level so that taller objects occupy
the middle of the shelves, flanked by much shorter objects on either side. The artful
arrangement thus betrays a knowledge of how to discipline space within the specific and
commodified terms of a glass display case. A woman’s organization of objects in a glass
case hence demonstrates an awareness of the techniques used to beguile her in the
marketplace and used to morph the built environment without her input, as well as her
ability to apply those techniques towards her own ends. She demonstrates her own
potential to structure production, creating a zone of commercial exclusivity within the
domestic sphere that at least symbolically retrieves what she loses as a consumer.
That which motivates these artful arrangements also extends and resonates
beyond the self, implicating larger socialities. Honey’s cases likewise feature 18th century
figures, such as a painted plate of a man in tights politely kissing a woman’s hand. This
image is reproduced on the back of several miniature chairs and a matching table.
Although Honey’s ancestors were British, the painting is French Rococo in design. In
6
Timothy Mitchell has written about the disciplining aspects of widened roads and equidistant buildings
during the mid-19th century, when the ‘disorder’ of Cairo suddenly became apparent and the need for
organization became “a political matter” (Mitchell 1988, 68).
16
any case, the gentility of the images bears no clear continuum with Honey’s southern,
rural upbringing. For both grandmothers, the images represent a desire for bourgeois
sentimentality rather than an actual nostalgia or a tribute to familial lineage, whereby
sentimentality reestablishes the rooted position of the family home by selectively
referencing only those homes in the urban/suburban environment that utilize similar
decor and household habits. The effect is to more firmly entrench the household and the
actual family into schemes of bourgeois establishment without engaging the larger urban
fabric or polity. Certain household objects or furniture items, such as the bed, allow for a
greater sense of rootedness or establishment in a given place.7 The bed is a place to
return to night after night and quickly becomes foundational to any spatial sense of
routine or household ritual. The display case, in contrast, hardly constitutes an implement
of basic necessity. Yet, the display of objects symbolizes the ability to accumulate capital
and references larger networks of circulation. By signaling correct accumulation – a style
approved of within both local and global commodity collection – the objects in the glass
display cases paradoxically suggest other places and times while forging a stronger
embeddedness within local schemes of bourgeois terrain.8
Both grandmothers displayed items from elsewhere. As mentioned earlier, one of
Nani’s sons, my uncle, was a pilot for Egypt Air, and he most likely brought her the two
ceramic boxes that feature Japanese paintings. The case also bears a couple of glass items
from the United States. Although these are the only ostensibly “foreign” objects in the
case, most of the objects extend from a foreign lineage. Likewise, Honey’s cases are
dominated by mementos from her time spent abroad, most of them from Egypt. These
7
I owe this thought to Valentina Napolitano Quayson who has mentioned the bed as a possession that
works to “embed memory and ties to places and human relations” (2005, 346) in an article on
homelessness and changing masculinity amongst Latino migrants in San Francisco.
8
I’m thinking here of the potential for commodities to help generate those aborescent metaphors and
assumptions about the fixity of people to land and space, as highlighted by Liisa Malkki (1992) and Arjun
Appadurai (1988). Yet, the spatial register in this context is mediated by class and its exclusionary spaceselective networks within the greater landscape.
17
include Pharaonic-style teacups; miniature, brass replicas of fool and tamaya carts; wooden,
comically painted and shaped Egyptian figures; a ukulele; a doll from Holland; and WWII
bullets.
The objects mentioned above become valorized not only via the medium of
display or spheres of exchange, but by virtue of the contexts the objects came from.
According to Arjun Appadurai’s discussion on “diversion” in The Social Life of Things,
removing items from systems of exchange constitutes a diversion from their social routes
that is typically afforded by the politically and economically powerful. Appadurai
contextualizes this statement within a broader framework of “tourist art” and the
“aesthetics of decontextualization”:
Of course, the best examples of the diversion of commodities from their original nexus
is to be found in the domain of fashion, domestic display, and collecting in the modern
West. In the high-tech look… the functionality of factories, warehouses, and workplaces
is diverted to household aesthetics. The uniforms of various occupations are turned into
the vocabulary of costume. In the logic of found art, the everyday commodity is framed
and aestheticized. These are all examples of what we might call commoditization by
diversion, where value… is enhanced by placing objects and things in unlikely contexts.
It is the aesthetics of decontextualization (itself driven by the quest for novelty) that is at
the heart of the display, in highbrow Western homes, of the tools and artifacts of the
“other”: the Turkmen saddlebag, Masai spear, Dinka basket. In these objects, we see not
only the equation of the authentic with the exotic everyday object, but also the aesthetics
of diversion. (Appadurai 1986, 28)
Appadurai argues here that everyday objects that are entirely ordinary within, for
example, the context of the Masai, become extraordinary in a collector’s home. It is by
plucking the unusual from their “specified paths” that we are able to grant additional
value to objects. However, this concept of diversion does not adequately explain objects
created exclusively for the tourist. With the exception of actual vendors, Egyptians do
not make use of miniature fool and tamaya carts in their daily lives. Such an object is only
decontextualized in terms of place – not in terms of function. Furthermore, the foreign
items in Nani’s case upset Appadurai’s easy conclusions about collectors being
“Western.” Appadurai’s general point is salient for understanding the processes
surrounding the more mundane items in all three glass display cases. Teacups turned
18
upside down, plates propped up for view, a silver spoon sheathed in plastic, a mirror
turned backwards to exhibit it’s decorative backing, empty boxes, and unused tea sets: all
of these represent mundane objects deprived of their function and decontextualized in a
manner that disturbs their objectification in everyday life.
Appadurai
argues
that
diversion is “always a sign of creativity or crises,” the latter being commonly realized in
warfare (Appadurai 1986, 26). Although both of my grandmothers exercised creativity in
the assemblage of their glass display cases, it must also be considered that both were old
enough to remember the effects of World War II on their families and larger
communities. Nani additionally experienced Egyptian wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973.
Honey had childhood memories from the American Great Depression and both women
lived through periods of rationing and general lack. Such periods may be said to have
encouraged fetishization of objects, since times of dearth resist processes of
objectification that render objects part of a normalized schema. Furthermore, both were
children of the 1920s, a period between two World Wars and “the decade when ‘things’
emerge as the object of profound theoretical engagement in the work of Georg Lukacs,
Heidegger and Walter Benjamin…” (Brown 1999, 2). Such theoretical concern can be
attributed to economic shifts that privileged commodity consumption over production
along with advanced levels of both production and consumption across the globe. By the
time my grandmothers were born, the interruption of consumption patterns by recession
or warfare would have been keenly felt. Thus, a dialogic interrelation between crises and
historically specific forms of fetishization is literally crystallized in my grandmothers’
cases. We must also consider ramped up American production during World War II and,
more generally, the wartime government-sponsored directives to buy national products
as a patriotic duty toward the economy. This historical nexus of war-time production,
consumerism and a consequent burgeoning of commercial modes of living surely
permeated and even administrated the lives of these two women, producing visible
19
effects and material artifacts, partly evidenced in the domestic realm by glass and mirror
display. Nani’s case more definitively reflects this nexus, as it was built in the 1930s in an
Art Deco style that emerged toward the end of World War I (Lucie-Smith 1979, 170) and
became an established trend during the 1930s (Lucie-Smith 1979, 172).
In his essay, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of
Modernism),” Bill Brown recognizes the impact of World War I on Virginia Woolf’s
treatment of objects in a short story called “Solid Objects,” published in 1920. The main
character becomes obsessed with collecting found pieces of china, glass and other solid
detritus until he eventually gives up his career as a rising politician. Brown writes that the
`man is enraptured by the secret lives of objects, which render them as things that slide
between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity (Brown 1999:2). He writes that it is the
“misuse value” – produced when, for example, one uses a knife as a screwdriver – that
brings the knife’s thing-ness to our attention. To use Appadurai’s term, the knife is
decontextualized by improper or alternative use; thus, it is not only in display that we are
able to deobjectify objects but in action as well.
The object may in fact beg for diversion in times of crises – not only because of a
dearth of objects or possessions but because its solidity may both distract one from
hardship and signal stability and thus security. Yet, even outside of display cases, objects
must await their (de)objectification by an actor. Brown implies that what is hidden in an
object is more than its labor value; what is hidden is a secret life only granted to the
object by the aesthetic subject. In this case, the aesthetic subject grows out of moments
of crises into periods of symbolic accumulation and display.
There is much less crystal in Honey’s cases than in Nani’s. In looking at just one
shelf, the center shelf in the left hand case, one finds instead an assortment of figurines,
most of them Egyptians in galabiyyas, crafted from wood or plaster. The lives granted
20
these anthropomorphic objects need not be coaxed forth as they would with saucers and
little boxes. The features on their
painted and carved faces are in several cases expressionless, one with wide, luminous
eyes, another with slanted, black dashes. Quaint shapes and colors ensure that the aspects
of such working class men that foreigners might find threatening are rendered diminutive
and therefore manageable. Aside from one wooden figure, the only woman on this shelf
is a larger doll in a back corner, swathed in translucent, black cloth, covering her face and
hair. During her years in Egypt, Honey was close friends with at least one Egyptian
couple, and they certainly looked and dressed nothing like these figurines. Nor did she
spend much time on the streets of downtown, amidst tameya carts and juice stands. Yet,
these caricatured objects became one way to remember the country and her time there.
Whereas Nani’s case is primarily filled with gifts, Honey approached her case as a way to
represent the far-flung trajectories of her life experience, often choosing objects created
to commoditize the experience of a visitor or tourist. Although she did visit many
countries as a tourist, she lived in Egypt for more than a decade. In her glass cases,
camels of various sizes and materials crowd the same shelf, yet I’m sure Honey saw
camels only when taking visitors to see the pyramids. She and my grandfather lived in a
spacious villa in Maadi – an upscale neighborhood filled with Americans and other
foreigners – where one would be more likely to see a poodle than a camel. The selection
of these objects may figure as exotification, but not with a pernicious intent to limit the
possibilities for the representation of Egypt to an Orientalist mode so much as to
manifest the extravagance of her own life experience – to substantiate that experience so
that by looking into her case, she could look back at her life as one well lived.
Conclusion
21
The fetishization involved in the transnational display of objects within domestic
glass display cases is too differently accomplished and motivated by their architects to
suggest a singular practice or approach. The action (and potential for action) of the
aforementioned objects would have been differently perceived by my two grandmothers
and subsequent visitors to the display cases.
In Nani’s case, the objects were more likely to hold promises of authenticity and
admittance to the realm of modernity, somehow satisfying national duty while evincing
the domestic merits of a brighter national future. The action of these objects would have
been perceived as designating a kind of universal standard.
The objects in Honey’s case, when placed within the larger contexts of
Montgomery, Texas and the United States, could only communicate the specificity of
Honey’s experience, which we, as her family, somehow understood as our experience
too. Far from deceptively universal standards, her memorabilia suggested only very
specific routes and modes of circulation, narrowed even further by the particular
combination of styles that comprised her taste.
Despite these differences, the fetishization processes found in my grandmothers’
display cases are generated by three common fields of influence: the historically
contingent medium of glass display; the decontextualization and disjunctive
recontextualization of objects; and finally the life-granting perception of the aesthetic
subject who acts upon the objects via placement, misuse and gaze.
In closing, I would like to tease out the secret life of one particular object in
Nani’s glass display case in order to suggest directions for understanding other effects of
fetishization and the attribution of use-value to commodities. On the bottom shelf, in the
very center, sits a frosted glass, circular box, crowned by a brass woman wearing only a
scant stretch of cloth, her hands clasped above her head. My grandfather gave this to
Nani two years before they were married in 1938. This is probably the oldest item in the
22
case and can be said to represent a kind of beginning, for the case and for their marriage.
If subject and object are interdependent, meaning that objects never completely control
the subject or relinquish control, the two may also accelerate/accumulate in tandem
during different life phases such as marriage and career. The frosted glass box, and the
glass display case that followed two years later, thus signify passage into adulthood. Yet,
at the same time, these items allowed for Nani’s adulthood and maturity within agreed
upon customs in Egypt at the time. In a sense, commonplace fetishization of objects
redefined what it meant to progress through life as a human being, asking us to
reconsider notions of poverty. Daniel Miller very importantly counters the notion that
only middle-class or wealthy consumers care about symbolic consumption: “It was those
living in the worst slums of England that kept the best room of the house as a ‘parlour’
reserved almost exclusively for show. Peasant villagers in India often get into debt not
for basic land rights but by funding wedding feasts” (2001:230). In another example, a
low-income Egyptian family may begin purchasing items for a daughter’s future wedding
trousseau years in advance of an actual engagement. A “typical” trousseau might include
several sets of glasses, plates, trays, cookware, clothes, cutlery, incidentals and linen
(Singerman 1995, 114-116) – far more objects than are required by the bare necessities of
life. Poverty cannot be understood as merely a lack of food and clean water but also as a
lack of possessions and access to modes of display. Further research might explore just
how central objects and their fetishization are to notions of maturity, human value,
personal growth and societal advancement. We should also ask the attendant question of
how such object and display-centered poverty may in fact be a gendered experience.
23
References
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(1986)
----------. Putting Hierarchy In Its Place. Cultural Anthropology 3(1): 36-49. (1988)
Boger, Louise Ade. The Complete Guide to Furniture Styles. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons. (1959)
Brown, Bill. “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism).”
Modernism/modernity 6(2): 1-28. (1999)
Comstock, Helen. American Furniture: Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Century Styles.
New York: The Viking Press. (1962)
El-Shakry, Omnia. “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-ofthe-Century Egypt.” Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Lila AbuLughod, ed. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. (1988)
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Book.
(1995[1977])
Gaonkar, Dilip and Elizabeth A. Povinelli. “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation,
Transfiguration, Recognition.” Public Culture 15(3): 385-397. (2003)
Hassan, Hassan. “The Effendi is Back.” Business Today Egypt. (January, 2008)
Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Arjun Appadurai, ed. New York:
Cambridge University Press. (1986)
Lucie-Smith, Edward. Furniture: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson. (1979)
Malkki, Liisa. “National Geographic: The Rooting of People and the Territorialization of
National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 24-44. (1992)
Marx, Karl. “Capital.” The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd edition. Robert C. Tucker, ed. New
York: W.W. Norton. (1978[1867])
Miller, Daniel. “The Poverty of Morality.” Theme section, “Morality and Consumption,”
Journal of Consumer Culture 1(2): 225-243. (2001)
Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. (1988)
Outka, Elizabeth. “Crossing the Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity, and the
Commodified Authentic.” Modernism/modernity 12(2): 311-328. (2005)
24
Quayson, Valentina Napolitano. “Suffering and Embodied States of Male Transnational
Migrancy in San Francisco, California.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 12:
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Russell, Mona L. Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education and National
Identity 1863-1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (2003)
Singerman, Diane. Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of
Cairo. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. (1995)
25
Rethinking Women’s Empowerment: A Critical
Appraisal of Gender Mainstreaming in
International Human Rights Law
by Kavita Kapur
Abstract: This paper will focus on the empowerment dimensions of the human rights
project. In particular, it will explore how international human rights law, as constituted by
the resolutions and policies of the United Nations (UN), conceives of women’s
empowerment. I will begin by introducing gender mainstreaming, the dominant
discourse of women’s rights among international institutions, as well as the feminist
theory foundations from which it stems. I will then apply this feminist lens to a reading
of a number of texts by international institutions, including resolutions, definitions and
statements, in an attempt to outline the parameters of gender mainstreaming and some of
its most salient debates.
In what proceeds, I will offer a critique of gender mainstreaming as the hegemonic
strategy for women's empowerment within international human rights law. I will seek to
dismantle the notion of mainstreaming as a sufficient and effective strategy for advancing
women’s rights by demonstrating the limitations and problems associated with this
policy. I argue that gender mainstreaming is at once both under and over inclusive,
particularly when studied in light of the feminist positions to which it seeks to respond.
In focusing on the dimensions of “gender perspective,” “women mainstreaming” and
“gender(ed) equality” that constitute the core constructivist aspects of gender
mainstreaming, I highlight the ways in which disruptive narratives are marginalized,
gender is reduced and naturalized as a man-woman binary and systems of oppression go
unchecked. As such, this paper is not simply a pragmatic critique of gender
mainstreaming, but rather questions the need for and usefulness of gender
mainstreaming and highlights the problems associated with the creation of a gendered
mainstream.
Although often understood as primarily an emancipatory discourse, human rights also
make claims of empowerment (UN OHCHR 2005). That is, the rights-based framework
is employed to simultaneously argue for liberation and freedom from oppression as well
as development and capacity building.9 Without getting into what I believe is a less than
9
This reading of emancipation and empowerment comes from a personal intuitive grasp of the terms, and
is not the only possible way of understanding these concepts. Though both terms have various technical
and theoretical definitions, their use in this paper is simply to indicate the shifting focus of human rights in
addressing both “freedom from” and “freedom to” questions.
26
useful categorization of negative and positive rights,10 I would like to note that while they
are fluid and intertwined, emancipation and empowerment are two dimensions of the
same human rights project.
In this paper, I will focus on the empowerment dimensions of the human rights
project. In particular, I will explore how international human rights law, as constituted by
the resolutions and policies of the United Nations (UN), conceives of women’s
empowerment. I will begin by introducing gender mainstreaming, the dominant
discourse of women’s rights among international institutions, as well as the feminist
theory foundations from which it stems. I will then apply this feminist lens to a reading
of a number of texts by international institutions, including resolutions, definitions and
statements, in an attempt to outline the parameters of gender mainstreaming and some
of its most salient debates. In this paper, I will offer a critique of gender mainstreaming
as the hegemonic strategy for women's empowerment within international human rights
law. I will seek to dismantle the notion of mainstreaming as a sufficient and effective
strategy for advancing women’s rights by demonstrating the limitations and problems
associated with this policy. I argue that gender mainstreaming is at once both under and
over inclusive, particularly when studied in light of the feminist positions to which it
seeks to respond. In focusing on the dimensions of “gender perspective,” “women
mainstreaming” and “gender(ed) equality” that constitute the core constructivist aspects
of gender mainstreaming, I highlight the ways in which disruptive narratives are
10
A typical division made in human rights is between ostensibly negative and positive rights. The
difference between the two is that in the former, the government is charged with protecting citizens from
certain designated violations, whereas in the latter the government must secure an individual’s right to
certain conditions or actions. Negative rights are generally understood to place no additional burden on the
government, whereas positive rights require that the government take additional steps and make
expenditures. This distinction, however, has been dismantled by showing that certain rights that can be
perceived as negative, such as the right to a fair trial, do actually involve positive governmental action, such
as training and paying the salaries of staff, maintaining court houses and detention facilities and so on. That
is, both negative and positive rights contain negative and positive dimensions. In considering the projects
of emancipation and empowerment separately, I do not mean to imply that they are separate goals in and
of themselves, but rather that human rights have both emancipatory and empowerment dimensions that at
times are discernible.
27
marginalized, gender is reduced and naturalized as a man-woman binary and systems of
oppression go unchecked. As such, this paper is not simply a pragmatic critique of
gender mainstreaming, but rather questions the need for and usefulness of gender
mainstreaming and highlights the problems associated with the creation of a gendered
mainstream.
Nearly every international institution has made a commitment to gender
mainstreaming, whether in the form of a resolution or simply by adopting the term as the
working strategy for gender equality. It has become what Hilary Charlesworth calls a
“mantra” (2001, 1) repeated without effort or conscious thought, as the simple, end-all
solution to inequality. Many scholars understand gender mainstreaming as the way to
overcome various obstacles facing women, regardless of the context in which they live.
Local and national level organizations have even adopted this new vocabulary when
advocating for improved rights for women. In effect, mainstreaming has become the
hegemonic discourse for addressing women’s rights.
Though the term is sufficiently vague and encompassing, maintaining only the
parameters that gender, however defined, must be brought into the mainstream, again,
however defined, it is possible to discern a more narrow definition. Mainstreaming refers
to the reigning in of the marginalized from the outskirts into centralized, normative
systems.11 The progressive tense of the verb indicates that it is a process that is not
restricted to a moment, but that it continues.12 As such, it is a move away from
addressing gender issues through separate and specific institutions, and is instead an
attempt to recreate a system that is sufficiently favorable to gender.13 Gender
11
See Riddell-Dixon (1999) where she notes that “[t]he concept of mainstreaming is usually understood to
exist to the concepts of marginalization and of being related to the sidelines” (1999, 149).
12
See Williams (2004), where she notes that “Gender mainstreaming is not simply a point to get to; it is a
process. It is a process for ensuring equity, equality and gender justice…” (2004, 2).
13
Though this is still contentious, with the UN gender/women specific body noting that women-specific
institutions should not be mainstreaming but that they are “still needed because gender equality has not yet
been attained and gender mainstreaming processes are not well developed” (UN Office of the Special
28
mainstreaming is, in effect, the inclusion of disenfranchised ideas and entities related to
the concept of gender within ordinary, majoritarian structures. As explained in the 1997
ECOSOC Agreed Conclusions:
Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for
women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies and programs in all
areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and
experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and
evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres. The
ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality. (UN General Assembly 1997)
This definition clarifies a number of features of gender mainstreaming. First, what is
mainstreamed through this strategy is a “gender perspective.” This involves implications,
concerns and experiences that are felt by individuals in relation to their gender. Second,
both men and women are considered in this process. The definition explains hat the term
gender is read as consisting of these two operational groups. Third, the purpose of the
strategy is “gender equality.” This end goal is what prescribes the ways in which
mainstreaming is applied. These three dimensions, while not the only discernible aspects
of the strategy, are critical elements of this gender mainstreaming policy with potentially
problematic consequences.
Extending David Kennedy’s critique of the hegemonic relationship between
human rights and emancipatory possibilities, I believe that gender mainstreaming
occupies the field of (women’s) empowerment possibility (Kennedy 2002). Though not
necessarily separate projects, I find that gender mainstreaming has not quite reached the
position of dominance within discussions of emancipation as it has within those of
empowerment. This is not to say that it is the most effective means of empowerment or
even the most widely subscribed to among women and women’s rights activists. What I
mean here is that gender mainstreaming as an idea is sufficiently broad and allencompassing that its invocation precludes other ways of imagining women’s
Advisor 2001, 1), the focus of mainstreaming is still on creating a sufficiently gendered mainstream
structure.
29
empowerment. The scope of the term ‘mainstreaming’ is such that it covers any general
sense of inclusion. 14 Any strategy that seeks to bring women in from the margins could
ostensibly be understood as gender mainstreaming, while anything that is not
mainstreaming can be tagged as exclusionary, isolationist or disempowering.15 But
without a clear understanding of what gender mainstreaming is, there is the danger that it
will become empty, stop-gap rhetoric: gender has been mainstreamed; what more can be
done? In this way, gender mainstreaming runs the risk of simultaneously meaning
everything and nothing.16
Having recognized the dominant position of this strategy within discourses of
women’s rights, the question then becomes one of how. That is, how did gender
mainstreaming come to occupy this space, and even before that, how did gender
mainstreaming develop in and of itself?
The roots of this strategy lie at the intersection of human rights discourse with
feminist theory. The spheres of law and human rights have long been the targets of
feminist activism and advocacy.17 As early as the first wave of feminism18 in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, self-proclaimed feminists predominantly in the
14
The broad rhetoric of the term gender mainstreaming is such that it labels the whole field or stage of
empowerment (and emancipation). Extending Naz Modirzadeh’s critique of the relationship between
international non-governmental organizations and Islamic law, where she argues that INGO’s, by nature of
being “bolder, brighter and louder (by design) than anything that competing projects might muster” (2006,
227), manage to shut out alternative approaches to Islamic law; in this same way, gender mainstreaming, by
way of its all-inclusive rhetoric, serves to render subordinate and invisible alternative possibilities of
women’s empowerment.
15
The terms exclusionary, isolationist and disempowering are used here to describe marginalization and being
relegated to the sidelines, which is exactly what gender mainstreaming seeks to overcome (Riddell-Dixon
1999).
16
Indeed, it also runs the risk of covering little or superficial change. While most texts on gender
mainstreaming highlight the importance of equality, the International Labor Organization focuses on other
benefits of the strategy: “[g]ender mainstreaming calls for very little extra work and helps in achieving a
favourable response from potential donors” (International Labor Organization 1997).
17
For an overview see, Engle (1992, 517). A further discussion of particular interfaces between feminism
and human rights can be found in Zalewski (1995, 339); Oloka-Onyango and Tamale (1995, 691); and
Chinkin (1992, 241).
18
This paper employs the common periodization of feminism into three waves simply for the purpose of
providing a generalized overview of the multiple ways that feminists have engaged in matters of law.
However, the division of feminist criticism into distinct periods is problematic and contentious as has been
highlighted by Bailey (1997, 17) and Freeman (1996).
30
Western world began to demand equality between men and women and organized
themselves against de jure inequalities. By advocating for women’s formal rights, primarily
suffrage, this first generation of feminists sought to transform law to be more inclusive
of women. With the rise of international human rights law in the post-World War II era,
feminist theory began a shift into a second wave that focused on those inequalities that
persisted despite formal gains. That is, the second wave of feminism can be characterized
by a recognition of substantive, de facto forms of inequality, and consequently by advocacy
against discrimination and oppression. It was between the activism of the movement and
the developments in second wave feminist theory that the idea of gender mainstreaming
began to take shape.19 By the 1970s, feminist demands for women’s rights had evolved
into specialized Women in Development programs that focused attention on the
particular ways in which women experienced and were affected by development
processes (Jahan 1995). This brought to the surface what has been considered one of the
more basic tensions in feminism: “whether women’s rights are best protected through
general norms or through specific norms applicable only to women”20 (Charlesworth
2001, 1). Thus, when separate programs for women were viewed by some to be isolating
women’s concerns from those of ordinary development discourse, mainstreaming
entered the scene as a way to integrate women while simultaneously recognizing their
specificity.21
Gender mainstreaming thus emerged as a way for international institutions to
respond to feminist concerns. Formally introduced in the 1995 Beijing Declaration and
Platform for Action, set forth at the Fourth World Conference for Women, the idea that
19
Though most definitions of gender mainstreaming do not stipulate whether the goal is formal or
informal equality, nearly all definitions carry a reference to “implications,” “experiences” or some other
subjective element, which proposes a move beyond the denial of difference. As the Council of Europe
notes “[g]ender equality is the opposite of gender inequality, not of gender difference, and aims to promote
the full participation of women and men in society” (Council of Europe 1999).
20
This references eighteenth century French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges, responsible for publishing
the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen.
21
For an overview of the pervasiveness of the discourse of gender mainstreaming, see Moser, Torngvist
and Van Bronkhorst (1999).
31
“[g]overnments and other actors should promote an active and visible policy of
mainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programmes” was identified as a
strategy for reducing inequality. Mainstreaming quickly grew past its origins in the field of
development and was soon repeatedly articulated in conflict and post-conflict contexts
(UN Fourth World Conference on Women, 1996). UN Security Council Resolution
1325, passed in 2000, recognized “the urgent need to mainstream a gender perspective
into peacekeeping operations” (UN Security Council, 2000). In 2001, the United Nations
Population Fund held a consultative meeting on “mainstreaming gender in areas of
conflict and reconstruction” (UNF FPA, 2001). Many feminists considered these
developments advancements for the cause of women’s rights. As Jacqui True noted,
[f]eminist scholars have created the conceptual language and causal stories/ideologies
that underlie gender mainstreaming initiatives. Feminist activists have forged
transnational networks to leverage political support, the sharing of information,
resources and strategies, and feminist policymakers have built bridges to women’s
NGOs and feminist research while working inside institutions to change them. In
general, these networked feminist actors have sought constructive engagement with
institutions. (True 2003, 374)
In this way, gender mainstreaming began its rise from intertwined strands of feminist
theory and human rights to become the most common way of talking about women’s
rights.
Although mainstreaming makes claims of advancing a feminist agenda in a way
that seemingly eases and erases tensions, a close reading of international legal texts
through the lens of feminist theory reveals that many (feminist) anxieties persist. That is,
the resolutions and guidelines that relate to gender mainstreaming articulate a number of
dimensions of this strategy that correspond with debates and questions within feminist
theory and serve to problematize gender mainstreaming as both a strategy for women’s
rights and a project of the feminist agenda. The remainder of this paper will focus on the
dimensions of “gender perspective,” “women mainstreaming” and “gender(ed) equality”
that I argue constitute the core constructivist aspects of gender mainstreaming. Through
32
a discussion of these features, I will highlight how gender mainstreaming is
simultaneously and problematically over and under inclusive in its construction of gender
and the corresponding possibilities of empowerment.
A. Gender Perspective
Both the Beijing Declaration and the Security Council Resolution 1325 (Resolution
1325), mentioned above, make reference to the importance of including a gender
perspective in national policies and programs, as well as in peacekeeping and
peacemaking. A resolution passed by the Economic and Social Council in 2002 called for
“[m]ainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programmes in the United
Nations system” (UN ECOSOC, 2002). This type of statement indicates that the
integration of this “gender perspective” may somehow improve the development of
human rights projects. But what is a gender perspective? It seems clear from the above
mentioned texts’ callings for mainstreaming that one marker of this perspective is that it
is ordinarily absent from dominant discourse, and thus needs to be included. It follows
that a gender perspective is somehow different and distinct from the mainstream and
that there is some unique and particular contribution to be made from its integration.
Additionally, each reference to the gender perspective is in the singular form of
“mainstreaming a gender perspective.”22 This implies that there is, or can be, one, single
discernible perspective.
This idea of a distinct and distinguishable gender perspective throws up red flags
for feminist theorists who have long argued and debated around the issue of a feminist
standpoint. Formally introduced by Nancy Hartsock (1983) in the 1980s, the idea that
women’s experiences could define a distinct viewpoint and position, a feminist
22
Nearly every resolution or statement by the UN related to gender mainstreaming adopts the definition
put forth by ECOSOC in 1997, which refers to a (singular) gender perspective.
33
standpoint, that could be used to critique and oppose patriarchy, has been under
contention ever since. Though such a standpoint has been argued as necessary for the
feminist agenda of promoting women’s rights, as it allows for women’s experiences to be
articulated as unique, yet in a cohesive and coherent manner conducive to the political
and legal arenas, discussions of differences among women have pointed out the
inadequacy and sterilizing nature of constructing a singular standpoint (Hekman 1997,
343). One of the most prominent expressions of anxiety with regards to this idea has
come from black feminists,23 or others theorizing about women in relation to race, class,
ethnicity or a number of other identity variables, who have argued that a descriptive
feminist standpoint cannot possibly include the innumerable experiences of women. As
such it is impossible to claim a single “women’s experience,” a necessary pre-requisite for
establishing a standpoint.24 The tension between the need to claim truth and authenticity
of a specific woman’s experience and the recognition of “situated knowledges” (Hekman
1997, 353) that are particular to the experience of each woman, is an anxiety agitated by
the idea of a singular gender perspective.
Though celebrated by many feminists, the idea of including a gender perspective
necessarily harks back to this feminist tension over the differences amongst women.
Whose experiences will be privileged to compose this gender perspective that will inform
the policies and processes of international law and human rights? Such an idea fails to
account for differences in privilege and power, and assumes that a group disadvantaged
and marginalized by a social system may be emancipated and empowered by simply being
incorporated into that system, and that the experience of all women can be expressed as
a coherent narrative. The question then becomes: whose voices are privileged to
participate in constituting the mainstream, and to articulate women’s concerns and
23
See, for example, Collins (1990), where she notes that an expression of a single standpoint is a form of
“specialized thought representing the dominant group’s standpoint and interests” (1990, 223).
24
See Narayan (1989).
34
experiences? It is unlikely, after decades of opposition and women’s activism in the nonWestern world, that white women’s feminism will be allowed to define this perspective,
at least not without protest.25 However, if it is not black women who are excluded, it is
likely to be some other group. It may be rural women or poor women, or those
otherwise disenfranchised and who lack access to justice or agency. The number of
different ways in which women identify themselves is far too great to be expressed in any
arrangement where they are reduced to simply “women.” Here again the category of
women is constructed with particular parameters for the purpose of articulating a gender
perspective. As Susan Hawthorne puts it, “[g]ender mainstreaming does not allow for
context sensitivity, instead it goes for a one-size-fits-all approach which actually only fits
the person deemed of a standard size, the norm” (Hawthorne 2004, 87-88). A gender
perspective will unavoidably fall prey to a politics of inclusion and exclusion wherein
those who do not fit within the standardized category of woman are prevented from
constituting this perspective.26 Indeed, these voices are silenced and marginalized by the
very tool and strategy that claims to empower and mainstream them. Gender
mainstreaming presents a gender perspective that has been sterilized in a way that
renders internal contestations and diverse multiplicities invisible and yet maintains its
claim of expressing women’s experience.
B. Women Mainstreaming
25
While this is not to say that black feminists have reached a point where their perspectives are treated
equal to those of white feminists, it is indisputable that the organization of non-white feminists in
opposition to allowing white women to speak for them (by assuming the perspective of all women) is quite
present. Based off of this history, I find it doubtful that black feminists as well as womanists and others
who choose not to define themselves with a particular movement for reasons associated with race, would
allow for white women to define “a gender perspective” without resistance.
26
A “gender perspective” is tasked with representation of women whose life experiences are often too
varied and multiple to be expressed in a coherent and stable fashion, and are many times contradictory to
each other. In defining such a category, certain perspectives are included and others are simply not. See
generally Butler (1990) where she argues that “[b]y conforming to a requirement of representational politics
that feminism articulate a stable subject, feminism thus opens itself to charges of gross representation”
(1990, 8).
35
In addition to calling for the integration of a gender perspective, among other things,
Security Council Resolution 1325 “[u]rges Member States to ensure increased
representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and
international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and
resolution of conflict” (UN Security Council 2000). The Secretary General is also
encouraged to include more women as special representatives and envoys (UN Security
Council 2000). Further, ECOSOC’s 2002 resolution instituting mainstreaming within all
policies and programs of the UN “stress[ed] the need to include women in planning,
decision-making and implementation processes at all levels” (UN ECOSOC 2002). From
these statements, it is clear that another dimension of the mainstreaming project is the
integration of women.
This focus on the inclusion of women renders gender mainstreaming a project
that hinges on physical distinction. That is, by stressing the importance of “women,”
rather than simply “women’s perspectives,” gender mainstreaming assumes that there is
indeed such a thing as an undisputable, uncontested category of “woman.” Without
recourse to a consideration of the fluidity or constructed nature of this category,
statements calling for the incorporation of women are demanding greater representation
of biologically female-sexed bodies at the table in question.
Viewing women’s mainstreaming through a feminist lens offers both celebratory
and cautionary responses. On one level, the inclusion of women in important and
formative mainstreaming projects and institutions is a huge victory for those feminists
concerned primarily with the advancement and betterment of the woman subject.27
Indeed the commitments articulated in the statements above have the potential to push
the ceiling for many women who have been denied access to the mainstream. However,
27
Though some feminists have as their end concern the status and condition of women as their subjects,
others have different priorities. See, for example, Butler (1990).
36
this focus on women as female-sexed bodies reifies naturalist and biological ideas of
women that have long been recognized as a significant barrier to women’s
advancement.28 By understanding women as a fixed and immutable category,
mainstreaming lends its support to entrenching ideas of essentialized difference,
problematic associations of gender roles with biological determinism and notions of
natural order and hierarchy. As such, women mainstreaming can serve to fortify those
obstacles that many feminists seek to transcend.29
Additionally, incorporating women into the mainstream assumes that women can
be clearly discerned from the human population at large. That women are not men, on a
biological level, serves as a way to distinguish women from the rest of the population of
men. The strategy is thus one that defines individual persons as either woman or man.
These are the two categories that are considered in the process of mainstreaming, which
provokes a feminist to ask, “What has happened to gender?” It is implicit in this
definition of gender mainstreaming that men and women are the only two components
of this strategy, leaving many theorists and activists to bemoan the disempowerment of a
term with the potential to serve both feminist and queer advocacy. While the linking
together of these two projects is a highly contentious and debatable position,30 what is
28
The idea that essentialized and naturalized ideas of gender roles may be problematic for the
advancement of women and for the feminist cause can be located in the shift in emphasis from de jure to de
facto inequalities that is often used to describe the temporal transition from the first to the second waves of
feminism. A growing relationship between lesbianism and feminism at this time also helped some feminist
thinkers to agitate an activism to disrupt constricted gender roles.
29
This subversion of natural categories of gender would most likely resonate with those feminists who
subscribe to ideas derived from second wave feminist thought, as many concerned with first wave
priorities would be content with or ambivalent towards entrenched biological ideas as long as de jure
equality could be secured.
30
The argument made in this paper relates to feminist and queer advocacy potential, which is necessarily
tied in to the ways that both are theorized. While the debate over the relationship between feminism and
queer theory revolves around ideas of the limitations and potentials of each, this paper does not argue that
the two should necessarily work together, but rather that a fluid and contingent “gender” is beneficial to
both. To outline some of the contours of this debate, Janet Halley has noted the limitations of feminism’s
primary concern with the woman subject, stating that “a feminist will always describe everything in terms
of M/F, and will always describe M/F as the domination of M and the subordination of F” (Cossman,
Danielsen, Halley and Higgins 2004, 623), thereby closing itself off to the fluidity of queer theorizing. Such
a call for a separation of feminism from queer theory echoes the work of Rubin (1984, 261) and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick. On this idea that the two should be divided, Cossman argues that feminism is capable
37
meant here is simply that the idea of gender can be imagined in a way that is beneficial to
conceptualizing activism for women, men and queer subjects. The term “gender” has
been utilized to signify that the categories of men and women are socially constructed,
and as such, are not fixed, but rather fluid.31 This advances the position that women
should transcend constricted gender roles, while simultaneously enabling more gender
possibilities. There is rather a spectrum of gender that includes both the constructed
categories of man and woman, as well as that of transsexual and intersex, among others.32
By reducing its operational categories to men and women under the title of “gender,”
gender mainstreaming has effectively hijacked a vehicle of rights-based advocacy for
subjects beyond men and women. Despite the potentially progressive implications of its
name, the man-woman binary, through which it defines itself and operates, renders the
strategy of gender mainstreaming unable to promote the rights of sexual minorities and
of genders beyond this binary. As a result, in order to campaign on behalf of queer
of both a commitment to the woman subject and the “liberatory” fluidity of queer theory, and says
“[f]eminism and queer theory are cast in an antagonistic relationship, their differences incommensurable.
Feminism has come to be associated with one side of the sex wars – those who seek to regulate the harms
that sexuality presents women with; while queer theory has come to be associated with a more liberatory
politic that seeks to destabilize the disciplinary regulation of sexuality. It is a divide that obscures significant
currents of feminist thought and fails to interrogate the more productive potential of analyses that lie in the
interstices of gender and sexuality, feminism and queer theory” (Cossman, Danielsen, Halley and Higgins
2004, 634). My position in this paper, that feminist and queer theories may potentially share the term
“gender,” is resultant of a broad and expanded reading of the term, as well as a commitment to a fluid
feminism a la Cossman. In response to Halley’s call for a break from feminism, Khanna posits that “[t]wo
important questions arise from this: (1) does feminism, any more or less than queer theory, really have to
be primarily about gender and the logic of m/f? (That is, didn’t ‘difference’ feminism already tackle this
problem?); and (2) what is compromised when the ‘supplement of gender’ is not only critiqued,
remaindered, and exchanged, but actually left behind and abandoned?” (2004, 71). These questions are
reflective of the possibility of understanding feminism as necessary and important for considering issues
that Halley claims for queer theory. That is, Khanna espouses “[a] ruthlessly vigilant and constant ethicopolitics informed by feminism, and a reading practice open to the other” (2004, 69) that resonates with a
theory of an open and contested feminism. Such a theory of feminism lends itself more favorably to
sharing “gender” with queer theory. As Butler puts it, “[t]he internal paradox of [the foundationalist frame
in which feminism has been articulated] is that it presumes, fixes and constrains the very ‘subjects’ that it
hopes to represent and liberate…If identities are no longer fixed as the premises of political syllogism, and
politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of
ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old.
Cultural configurations of sex and gender might proliferate, or rather, their present proliferation might
then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very
binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness” (1990, 189-190).
31
See, for example, de Beauvoir (1972) and Butler (1988, 519).
32
See, for example, Monro (2005, 3) where she argues that a gender spectrum, as opposed to a binary,
polar conceptualization of gender yields a more flexible model of gender that is capable of overcoming the
problematic consequences of a poststructuralist theory.
38
subjects, advocates would need to theorize a new term, or else transcend the formidable
binary reading of gender that mainstreaming continues to reify in international law.
The dichotomous focus of a man-woman binary is almost surprising given the
highly transgressive definition of gender that has been established by the UN Office of
the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women:
Gender roles are learned through socialization processes; they are not fixed but are
changeable. Gender systems are institutionalized through education systems, political
and economic systems, legislation, and culture and traditions. In utilizing a gender
approach the focus is not on individual women and men but on the system which
determines gender roles / responsibilities, access to and control over resources, and
decision-making potentials. (UN Office of the Special Advisor 2002)
The emphasis of this definition on processes and systems would seem more likely to
resonate with feminist and queer thought, particularly in the way that it denaturalizes
gender and reads it as something that is contextual and contingent.33 However, such a
definition appears an anomaly that has not left paper and that has certainly not
manifested itself in gender mainstreaming policies. In effect, gender mainstreaming deals
with women, not with gender. Resolution 1325 makes numerous calls for the
representation and participation of women. The Resolution defines a gender perspective
as to include
(a) The special needs of women and girls during repatriation and resettlement and for
rehabilitation, reintegration and post-conflict reconstruction; (b) Measures that support
local women's peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution, and that
involve women in all of the implementation mechanisms of the peace agreements; (c)
Measures that ensure the protection of and respect for human rights of women and girls,
particularly as they relate to the constitution, the electoral system, the police and the
judiciary. (UN Security Council 2000)
The repetition of “women and girls” in the Resolution makes it clear that the object of
mainstreaming is women, and not gender. By assuming the label of “gender” instead of
33
Though this definition destabilizes gender from being read as a natural category, it still refers to
discernible categories of men and women on the level of the human individual, probably as constituted by
sex. However, many theorists are increasingly seeing the idea of sex as a construction as well. (Davies 1997,
25-27)
39
“women” as the name for this strategy, gender mainstreaming has stripped gender of its
progressive and transformative political potential. As Hilary Charlesworth observes,
“[g]ender has been defanged” (2001, 16).34 There is no gender mainstreaming, only
women mainstreaming.
Another problematic consequence resultant from this focus on women is that it
entrenches a man-woman oppositional binary. The repeated emphasis on difference,
apparent in, for instance, gender-disaggregated statistics or sector specific gender studies
and surveys, constructs an identity for women as necessarily different from men. While
women mainstreaming should be celebrated for the clear achievements of including
women in decision making and other processes, and in considering some gender specific
implications, this focus on difference again provokes questions of which women are
being considered. Who are the women brought to the table, and who are those whose
experiences are being articulated? The enforced binary marginalizes those women whose
experiences are not necessarily distinguishable from those of men due to complicating
factors. The intersections of other forms of diversity such as ethnicity or religion can
serve to keep women away from the mainstream just as much as their gender identity
can. In these situations, those women who are privileged within ethnic and religious
spheres will be those whose concerns are visible. Focusing simply on the difference
between men and women renders invisible the similarities in oppression that are shared.
As Olena Hankivsky notes, “[Gender mainstreaming] has not moved beyond the malefemale dichotomy so prevalent in second-wave liberal feminist theorizing. As a result, [it]
has become a watered-down approach to challenging the status quo” (2005, 977-978).
C. Gender(ed) Equality
34
Though in her usage of “de-fanged,” Charlesworth refers to the way in which mainstreaming “has
stripped the feminist concept of ‘gender’ of any radical or political potential” (2005, 16). The idea is being
extended here to describe the reduction of its meaning to “women” or “sex.”
40
Each text that calls for gender mainstreaming includes, either implicitly or explicitly, a
mention of the goal of gender equality. In a report from the UN Office of the Special
Adviser on Gender Issues, it was noted that “what is common to mainstreaming in all
sectors or development issues is that a concern for gender equality is brought into the ‘mainstream’
of activities rather than dealt with as an ‘add-on’” (UN Office of the Special Advisor 2002,
2) This idea of equality, however, is effectively a limited and gendered notion of equality.
As this section seeks to highlight, the gender equality sought after through gender
mainstreaming is predefined and constituted with particular gender implications that are
potentially problematic for serving women.
At least two distinct types of equality are possible. Formal equality, or equal
treatment, is reminiscent of first-wave feminism’s focus on the de jure conditions that
disadvantage women. Eliminating formal legal barriers to equality is undoubtedly an
important part of advocating the rights of women and pushing a feminist agenda.
Though the aim of formal equality strategies is for women and men to be treated the
same way under law, this usually means that women should be treated the same as men,
and consequently be held to a man-defined standard (Rees 2002, 2). But if, as Catharine
MacKinnon notes, “[r]elevant empirical similarity to men is the basis for the claim to
equal treatment for women” (MacKinnon 1989, 217), how can formal equality strategies
address the disenfranchisement and disempowerment said to characterize the experience
of women? Additionally, if the goal of gender mainstreaming is to establish formal
equality, it seems clear that it would have limited potential to actively address some of the
informal, substantive sources of inequality.
Substantive equality, on the other hand, relates to the de facto conditions and
systems that perpetuate inequality. Affirmative action, also called positive action, is a
common form of this model. This often looks like “special measures” taken to
compensate for specific forms of marginalization, be they in terms of gender, race or
41
other identity variables. Substantive equality strategies tend to emphasize the differential
experience, recognizing that, in relation to gender, “[s]ystematically elevating one-half of
a population and denigrating the other half would not likely produce a population in
which everyone is the same” (MacKinnon 1989, 217). Yet despite the focus on
difference, substantive equality also holds women to a standard established in relation to
men. Though women’s differences may result from structural obstacles, the goal of
substantive equality is still to bring women on par with men. It is as though women must
overcome their woman-ness in order to enter into the realm of man-ness; this is equality.
Although substantive equality strategies offer potential to unpack and address the diverse
array of complex multiplicities in women’s experiences, they fail to question how this end
of equality has already been defined, constructed and established based on a male
standard. Women’s historical absence from these processes has left a mainstream notion
of equality that serves to limit and problematize gender mainstreaming.
Though references to gender mainstreaming do not specify what form of equality
should be established, the distinction becomes unimportant when equality itself is
problematic. This points to a larger feminist issue with gender mainstreaming: a failure to
interrogate the processes, systems and structures that produce the mainstream. The aim
of gender mainstreaming is a mainstream notion of equality.
In exploring the question of how international law is gendered, Hilary
Charlesworth utilizes three types of analyses: the historical-participative, the cultural and
the discursive.35 While there is room for critique of Charlesworth’s handling of the
second set of questions, regarding which cultural ideas of gender underlie international
law,36 if such ideas are recognized as constructed instead of primordial, such a lens can
35
For an instructive discussion see Charlesworth (2002, 93).
Charlesworth appeals to ideas that particular character qualities of men and women that are associated
with institutions such as law, or international law in her case, make law gendered in that way. She appears
to be essentializing sex and gender by not explaining where the notions of these qualities come from (2002,
93).
36
42
offer a useful perspective on gendered structures. This cultural analysis, along with
questions about women’s participation in international law as a historical artifact as well
as of the categories and operational terms international legal discourse itself offer, in my
opinion, three important angles from which to explore the mainstream.
Through
the
historical-participative
lens,
Charlesworth
points
to
the
disproportionate representation of men in the institutions of international law (2002, 94).
Women have been historically absent from the development of the international legal
system, and as such, the structure is characterized by a bold masculinism. In relation to
the mainstream, if gender mainstreaming is advocating for the inclusion of women and
the integration of a gender perspective, then it follows that both have historically been
absent. If, as a result, the mainstream is read to be gendered masculine, this might serve
as an impediment to the realization of women’s rights within the mainstream. Gender
mainstreaming would be simply another attempt to fit women’s rights discourse within
parameters defined by men, with potentially problematic consequences. Indeed, as
Charlesworth notes elsewhere, “[w]omen, so often on the margins of the international
arena, are more likely to drown in, than wave from, the mainstream, unless they swim
with the current” (2001, 18). Because this exclusion is part of what defines the structure
of the mainstream, gender mainstreaming is unable to question it.
Despite room for critique of Charlesworth’s idea of cultural coding, social and
cultural ideas of women and gender remain a useful point of departure for
interrogation.37 Indeed, women and men are socially constructed and entrenched into
differential gender roles through multiple cultural forces, such as religion, beliefs about
37
Charlesworth’s analysis of international law poses a number of questions in need of clarification. When
she refers, for instance, to how the adversarial and hawkish nature of law reflects on a masculine gender, is
she talking about de facto or de jure law? Would she say the same of law that utilizes an inquisitive method
rather than an adversarial? And where do these ideas of masculinity and femininity come from? She seems
to argue that they are part of a difference that just exists, essentially and inherently, between men and
women. While the existence of such definitions that place men and women into a distinguishable binary is
still contentious, the idea that cultural ideas of gender roles can somehow be reflected in law and
consequently have implications for women and men, is however, a useful one.
43
tradition and history and mass media, among others. Feminists have long identified some
of the more problematic constructions of women as the mold from which women
should be free to diverge. These are the images of the wife, the mother, the cook, the
cleaner, the caretaker, the understanding, the sensitive, the virginal, the fragile and the
proper, to name but a few of the many cultural roles and characters that have been
assigned to women. Though these are concededly different between and within cultures,
it seems to me irrefutable that cultural ideas do exist about what women and men should
be within societies. These ideas make up the mainstream, the structure that cannot itself
be critiqued by gender mainstreaming. It’s not, as Charlesworth might argue, that the
mainstream is masculine or feminine. Instead, mainstreaming is gendered in the way that
it reifies limited ideas about men and women that make their subversion, a central
lobbying point amongst many feminists, increasingly difficult and rare.
With regards to discourse, Charlesworth highlights the ways in which the
language of international law is constructed in relation to gender (Charlesworth 2002,
97). Though she refers back to ideas of cultural coding in her critique, I believe that the
construction of terms and categories of international legal discourse offer a useful point
of departure from which to critique the mainstream. For instance, as we have seen, the
category of woman upon which gender mainstreaming relies on is constituted in a
narrow and limited fashion, leading to the exclusion of many women who do not fit
within the parameters of that category. Additionally, as women are reduced to being
“different from men,” the questions of what constructed that difference are ignored.
According to MacKinnon, “considering gender a matter of sameness and difference
covers up the reality of gender as a system of social hierarchy, as an inequality” (1989,
218). The same can be said of the constricted definition of gender, which fails to
advocate for gender behaviors beyond a man-woman binary and in doing so drastically
44
reduces the gender spectrum. These ideas are produced by the mainstream itself, and so
fall beyond the scope of interrogation.
Without questioning whether or not the mainstream is itself problematic, gender
mainstreaming is a problematic strategy. It precludes scrutiny of the ways in which its
own discourse and history of participation may be sources of marginalization. As gender
mainstreaming is advocated, the ideas that make up the mainstream are never questioned,
but entrenched and reified. Advocating equality within the frame of this mainstream
necessarily implies the promotion of a mainstream, which itself is problematic for
women’s rights.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have highlighted the ways in which gender mainstreaming, the main
discourse of women’s empowerment within international law, reflects upon some of the
tensions brought forth by feminist theory. The three primary critiques made, the
complications associated with a gender perspective, the focus on women rather than on
gender, and the inability to interrogate the mainstream, are all interrelated in the sense
that they reinforce each other and are complicit in the construction of a gendered
mainstream.
A common thread running through the definitions of gender mainstreaming
presented in this paper, however, relates to the constructivist scope of the strategy. That
is, in each of its applications, gender mainstreaming is concerned with the creation of a
new structure that appropriately addresses gender. Whether by advocating for the
inclusion of a gender perspective, for formalized participation of women or for greater
responsiveness to women-specific concerns, each project of mainstreaming has as a goal
the emergence of a new, improved institution. The end is a coherent system suitable for
45
women’s rights. But there is always an end, a perfectable construction that is somehow
able to serve the multiplicities of marginalization experienced by women.
It is perhaps possible to imagine an alternative strategy for women’s
empowerment and to revise the way we think about gender policies. To challenge the
constructivist tendency, I propose the following series of questions. What possibilities
for women’s empowerment are opened up in recognizing forms of gender beyond the
man-woman binary? What potential options are opened up if we move beyond the need
to generate structures that are inclusive of “gender”? In what ways can we imagine a selfreflexive strategy capable of interrogating constructions of gender and that is favorable to
expressions of contestation and fluidity? Considering these questions, perhaps we can
begin to pave a path towards a more responsive paradigm of women’s rights.
46
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50
Blogging the Body: The Case of Egypt
by Yasmine Rifaat
Abstract: Bloggers’ representations of the body often aspire to challenge and expose
what is otherwise either ignored or denied by the state. Blogging produces an unregulated
narrative, which counters hegemonic norms without directly confronting the state, as do
other traditional forms of political or social activism. This paper presents Egyptian
bloggers’ writings on the body as a gendered and embodied experience of resistance. It
maintains that by resisting the state’s hegemonic narrative, Egyptian activists bring their
local struggle to global (online) attention, and provide their readers with alternative
discourses. Nevertheless, participation in this political culture is not inclusionary or easily
accessible; those connected to the blogging scene are mostly young, educated and urban,
while the majority of Egyptians remain offline. The first part of this paper will focus on
how bloggers produce a subjective account of the female body by investigating a number
of writings posted following the October 2006 sexual harassment incident, which was
initially made public by bloggers Malik and Wael Abass. Of interest is how the female
body is imagined by male and female bloggers as they share their views on sexual
harassment and suggest courses of action. This incident presented bloggers with an
opportunity to speak out against the government’s masculinist discourse, which positions
the female body within the private sphere, restricting a woman’s access to public space.
The second part of this paper will focus on how bloggers portray the tortured body by
looking at their recent postings of free exchange videos showing images of physically
abused bodies and their defiant writings on the government’s treatment of detainees and
activists, both inside and outside prison. Bloggers are challenging the state’s disciplinary
mechanisms by exposing images of the tortured body to the citizen subject. Images of
state torture posted on Egyptian blogs provide a counterhegemonic view of the Egyptian
government, and aim to undermine its legitimacy, both locally and globally.
This essay maintains that the Egyptian blog phenomenon is a personalized and gendered
experience that is informed by bloggers’ own feelings of embodiment and shaped by
their views of the world. Blogging is not a culturally neutral exercise; rather, it remains
directly linked to specific socio-cultural realities that mold the “virtual.”
It can be argued that the Internet is “neither inherently oppressive nor automatically
emancipatory; it is a terrain of contested philosophies and politics” (Warf and Grimes
1997, 259). Cyberspace, as a disputed locality where public and private interests are
interwoven between the local and global, can both challenge hegemonic discourses and
51
reinforce normative political and social messages. With the emergence of web logs,38
known as blogs, Internet activists39 are effective in resisting mainstream narratives by
providing counterhegemonic40 discourses, which challenge established political and social
systems.
According to the Internet World Stats website,41 there are an estimated 6 million
Internet users in Egypt – around 8.2% of the population and 13.6% of users in Africa –
30% of which are female.42 Egyptian activists have been politically engaged online since
2004, when the number of bloggers was as low as 200. Today, the official number listed
on the outdated Egyptian blog ring is 1,481, with 900 more awaiting approval. Accurate
statistics and data on the number of bloggers in Egypt are almost impossible to come by;
estimates range from thousands to a few hundred. It is evident that while the amount of
Egyptian blogs is steadily increasing, only a few hundred of these blogs can be
considered “active.” The average blogger is estimated to be between 18-30 years old.
Female bloggers are approximated by some to make up around 50% of Egyptian blogs
(Otterman 2007, 1). “Like male Egyptian bloggers, most female bloggers tend to be
middle-class, upper-middle class or wealthy, and the vast majority are under 30 years of
age” (Otterman 2007, 8).
Blogging in Egypt has provided mostly young, educated middle- and upper-class
Egyptians with a space to voice their opinions and present issues they feel are important.
I am not suggesting here that all Egyptian bloggers are produced by the same habitus;43
since there is clearly a variety in bloggers’ views, backgrounds and styles of writing. My
38
Web logs are websites that provide commentary on specific issues (anything from politics to cooking
recipes) and can serve as personal diaries, as defined on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog.
39
I am using the term ‘activist’ in this paper to refer to bloggers who are actively critical of government
policies and engaged in writing about political issues, social issues and human right’s issues in particular.
40
Counterhegemonic refers to a variety of ideas and opinions expressed by groups or individuals who
reject prevailing ideologies and politics and are “swimming against the tide” (Warf and Grimes 1997, 260).
41
http://www.internetworldstats.com.
42
To view statistics and to compare with other countries, view:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm.
43
Following Pierre Bourdieu, I consider the term habitus to mean a system of class-based dispositions a
person learns through experience and practice starting from childhood.
52
interest is not to generalize about how Egyptian bloggers write, but to focus on a limited
number of blogs and analyze how these bloggers write about the body. I will examine the
writings of a mix of male and female activist bloggers, who write in both English and
Arabic, with the purpose of assessing their writings on the body and its relationship to
power, culture and social construction.
Blogging on the body is a gendered exercise, where issues of sexual harassment,
sexuality and modesty often focus on the female body, and torture, political activism and
state brutality are frequently embodied in descriptions and images of the tortured male
body. Bloggers present specific social and cultural constructions in their writings, which
are not separate from those cultural categories that exist in the “real” world. Bloggers
often aim to reinforce, reproduce or challenge these categories (Boudourides and Drakou
2000).
In this paper, I will use a Foucualtian framework to argue that within cyberspace,
bloggers’ representations of the body often aspire to challenge and expose what is
otherwise either ignored or denied by the state. Blogging produces an unregulated
narrative, which does not abide by hegemonic norms, without directly confronting the
state, as do other traditional forms of political or social activism. I will present Egyptian
bloggers’ writings on the body as a gendered and embodied experience of resistance. I
will maintain that by resisting the state’s hegemonic narrative, Egyptian activists bring
their local struggle to global (online) attention, and provide their readers with alternative
discourses. Nevertheless, participation in this political culture is not inclusionary or easily
accessible; those connected to the blogging scene are mostly young, educated and urban,
while the majority of Egyptians remain offline.
In the first part of this paper I will focus on how bloggers produce a subjective
account of the female body by investigating a number of writings posted following the
October 2006 sexual harassment incident, which was initially made public by bloggers
53
Malik and Wael Abass. This attack on women in Cairo’s streets, exposed by bloggers,
created a nation-wide debate on the issue. I am interested to see how the female body is
imagined by male and female bloggers as they share their views on sexual harassment and
suggest courses of action. I will examine how bloggers’ writings on the female body serve
to contest normative patriarchal ideology through the use of both texts and images. I will
argue that this incident presented bloggers with an opportunity to speak out against the
government’s masculinist discourse, which positions the female body within the private
sphere, restricting a woman’s access to public space.
The second part of this paper will focus on how bloggers portray the tortured
body by looking at their recent postings of free exchange videos44 and images of
physically abused bodies, and their defiant writings on the government’s treatment of
detainees and activists both inside and outside prison. I will argue that bloggers are
challenging the state’s disciplinary mechanisms by exposing images of the tortured body
to the citizen subject. I will maintain that images of state torture posted on Egyptian
blogs provide a counterhegemonic view of the Egyptian government, and aim to
devastate its legitimacy, both locally and globally. I will discuss the state’s attempts at
controlling the bloggers’ writings and postings on torture in Egypt through subtle and
indirect confrontation, relating the state’s surveillance apparatus and monitoring of
bloggers to Foucault’s Panopticon.
Finally, I will maintain that the Egyptian blog phenomenon is a personalized and
gendered experience that is informed by bloggers’ own feelings of embodiment and
shaped by their views of the world. Blogging is not a culturally neutral exercise; rather, it
remains directly linked to specific socio-cultural realities that mold the “virtual.”
Theoretical Framework
44
http://www.youtube.com.
54
In her article “Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body,” Susan Bordo provides
an analysis of the relationship between the body and power by looking at the linkages
between feminism and Foucault. She argues that “power relations are never seamless, but
always spawning new forms of culture and subjectivity, new openings for potential
resistance to emerge. Where there is power, he came to see, there is also resistance”
(Bordo 1999, 192). It is by using a Foucaultian analysis of power and its relationship to
resistance that we can better understand how bloggers counter the state’s narrative of the
“ideal” female body and her position within the public sphere and resist the state’s
disciplinary mechanisms by exposing the tortured body to the public.
Michel Foucault illustrates in his book Discipline and Punish that power is
communicated and transported through those who lead, however it remains invisible,
impersonal and decentralized. Foucault argues that power produces knowledge and
asserts that through disciplinary methods the body learns certain movements, exercises
and techniques that serve to create the “docile” body. The docile body, according to
Foucault, is carefully crafted by subtle and cohesive control over the citizen through a
series of disciplinary mechanisms that result in a self-disciplining of society with the
practice of daily regulatory norms. It is this state of normalization that allows the
Egyptian authorities to maintain power and produce a specific national narrative.
Foucault states: “The power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes
by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties and to render
the differences useful by fitting them one to another” (Foucault 1979, 184). This
Foucaultian analysis of power is central for examining how blogging produces a nonregulated space where bloggers, as self-disciplined subjects, resist their state of
normalization and rebel against the state’s normative discourse.
Blogging Sexual Harassment
55
On October 24, 2006, bloggers Wael Abbass and Malek described the wave of sexual
harassment attacks they witnessed in downtown Cairo during the Post-Ramadan Eid
break. Malek posted an eye-witness account of what happened, photos taken by fellow
blogger Abass and a tube video showing a mob of people running after several women in
the streets of downtown Cairo. Malek wrote, “What happened was a scandal by all
means, I don’t understand the motivation for over a thousand young men to sexually
attack and harass women in the street of all sorts veiled, wearing the niqab, unveiled,
Muslim and non-Muslim.”45 Malek’s post produced an array of responses from other
bloggers and was investigated by several popular satellite television shows and
independent press entities, including the show “Al Ashera Masaen” (“10 O’clock”) and Al
Masry
Al
Youm
newspaper.
Alaa Seif Al Islam, a well-known blogger who blogs with his wife Manal
Hassan and was detained briefly in 2006, writes on his blog, “Sexual harassment of
women in public spaces has been discussed several times before in the Egyptian
blogosphere, everybody knows it’s prevalent but denial flows like a river in Egypt, any
woman dares open the topic has to face an avalanche of abuse on anonymous comments
sometimes even from fellow bloggers. Blaming the victims is the most common response
but sometimes they even deny it happens at all, with the abuse also comes more accounts
and stories of how it’s like to be female in urban Egypt.”46 Hossam El Hamalawy, a
Cairo-based journalist, reacted angrily, writing on his blog, “Should we blame those
animals who were involved in the molestation fiesta? Why? If everyone can see the police
and NDP thugs sexually assaulting women in the broad day light, stripping them off their
clothes and manhandling them in demos under the blessing of Mubarak’s security…
45
46
http://malek-x.net.
http//www.manalaa.net.
56
Why is it wrong then? Go ahead boys. Molest some more. You are doing your country a
great job, you sick fucks!”47
Female bloggers also reacted to the incident, writing in a variety of styles
ranging from poetry to point-form suggestions on ways to respond. Wa7damasrya, who
writes anonymously, wrote, “I know this incident will pass without any formal
investigation or punishment of those responsible, or even any attempt to study this
situation or provide solutions for this disease.”48 Zeinobia, a female blogger who
describes herself as an Egyptian girl who lives in the present with the glories of the past
wrote, “It happened before in the same street and area, Talaat Harb Street, in front of
Metro ‘Cinema’ in Downtown Cairo, and the police also saw what happened and stood
still, just like spectator, even a silent one who doesn’t protest or even cheer !!!!!”49
Zeinobia goes on to say that sexual harassment is not unique to Egypt and happens in all
societies. Nermeen Edris, who writes under the name Nermenna, shared some thoughts
on ways to respond to the incident: “I brain stormed keda shwaya (a little), and I came up
with a couple of ideas: 1- we can organize ‘Wa2fa banati,’ el wa2fa teb2a samta (a girls
protest, a silent protest), we all dressed in black. 2- Presentation about el entehakat
(elections) starting the events of 25 May, we can present it either @ studio 206, or neqabet
el sa7afeyeen (journalists’ syndicate).”50 Nermenna’s writing combines English and Arabic –
a style used by many bloggers who choose to write in both languages interchangeably.
Sherin Zaki, a 24-year-old Christian woman, writes furiously in her blog, “I might as well
warn you, if I receive one comment about how sluttily I dress, or how slutty the women
of Egypt are (because God knows the streets are full of harlots with their necks showing,
and feet!) I will tear you a new one, reach in, pull out your lying tonsils and wrap them
47
http://arabist.net/arabawy.
http://wa7damasrya.blogspot.com. I translated this quote from Arabic; Wa7damasrya’s blog is the
only blog mentioned in this paper that is written entirely in Arabic.
49
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com.
50
http://nerro.wordpress.com.
48
57
around your misogynistic delusional throats. You do not know me, and do not know
how I dress in public.”51
Wa7damasraya’s predictions were correct; the government did not issue an
official investigation. In fact, the government continues to deny the incident ever
occurred. Sandmonkey writes in his cynical, quick-witted blog about the government’s
official response to the media: “You know what their response was: we didn’t hear of
anything. This didn’t happen. Things were just crowded in downtown that day, but no
girls were assaulted, because no police reports were filed in that regard!”52 The denial of
the incident by the government outraged bloggers almost as much as the incident itself,
however the state quietly ignored the issue.
Finding Voice
Both male and female bloggers write in anger when describing the sexual harassment
incidents and the Egyptian government’s denial and inaction. The reactions to the
October 2006 incident illustrate that bloggers have a lot to say regarding the relationship
between the female body, public space and the role of the state in perpetuating,
supporting or ignoring attacks on women. Through their writings, bloggers have
managed to ignite a fiery debate both online and within mainstream media about issues
related to sexuality, the female body and harassment.
Egyptian women are currently facing a patriarchal social and cultural
framework, which imagines the female body as a source of sexual desire, encourages
women to honor the veil, and disapproves of women frequently engaging with men in
public spaces. Women are often blamed for the sexual harassment they continuously face
in the streets of Cairo, however bloggers provide an alternative view to this masculinist
51
52
http://forsoothsayer.blogspot.com.
http://www.sandmonkey.net.
58
assumption. Where women sometimes feel powerless when faced with harassment in the
streets, bloggers display a sense of agency and empowerment as they write online about,
not only sexual harassment in general, but also their own individual feelings of
embodiment in a disembodied environment, where their physical bodies remain invisible.
It is this ability to be whoever you want to be online that offers female bloggers the
power to challenge traditional gender lines through their writings. This freedom of
expression does not come without criticism, however; several taboo issues discussed by
female bloggers have led to heated debates online, debates that are often dominated by a
patriarchal discourse supported by some bloggers and readers. An anonymous reader
commenting on Forsootheyer’s blog writes, “why you give a rat’s ass about what guys say
to you on the street. Why do you let it get it to you to the point where you write about it
too often. I’m sure there are plenty of beautiful things around you that could distract you
from it and inspire you to praise the good things in Egypt. I think the contradictions and
the diversity could be looked at in a humorous, open-minded way instead. Keep in mind
you’re judging them, when you cannot blame them. Not everyone gets a chance to live in
a developed country and seek higher education. If you’re not fed and your “superiors”
are crapping all over you, day in and day out, you would be angry, hostile and maybe
even judgmental to the passerbys, as an outlet to all the anger building up inside.”53
Comments and responses to sexual harassment incidents on blogs have been varied;
male and female bloggers and readers debate the issue online, each with his/her personal
view.
Female bloggers discuss a number of issues, including sexuality, religion and the
position of the female body in Egyptian society. Many of the postings made by women
online are met with a variety of responses ranging from support to outrage. The virtual
spaces created by female bloggers are producing a variety of viewpoints and encourage
the exchange of ideas of issues deemed taboo in the “real” world. In her essay,
53
http://forsoothsayer.blogspot.com.
59
“Publicizing the Private: Egyptian Women Bloggers Speak Out,” Sharon Otterman
attests to the gap between such a “real” world and the sentiments of women in Egypt:
“The blogosphere is remarkably diverse; there’s everything from Islamite and
homosexuals, to liberals and Arab Nationalists. The high rate of female participation
shows that Egyptian women have much to say that the male-dominated, state-managed
mainstream media sector is missing” (Otterman 2007, 15). Bloggers produce an
individualized narrative that engages with their gendered subjectivity and challenges the
normalization of the female body. Accorfdin to Otterman, bloggers are potentially
redefining gender: “By making their personal thoughts public, they are adding complexity
to the concept of femininity in Egypt.” (Otterman 2007, 15). Blogging connects men and
women in an intimate dialogue online, and blurs the public/private divide that challenges
rigid patriarchal notions of the female body and relations between the sexes. Female
bloggers are occupied with a resistance of their own as they write in a variety of styles
about their bodies and other female bodies. They confront the constructions of the
“ideal” female body shaped by a variety of political, social and religious interests.
As Bordo argues, this “eruption of difference” (Bordo 1999, 193) produced by
a number of opinions and ideas exchanged online, and by the continual emergence of
opportunities to resist, as female and male bloggers reject the homogenization of the
female body, provide readers with alternatives to the state’s discourse on issues of
femininity, gender and sex. This discourse, which aims to deny the violence inflicted on
women and presents the Egyptian woman within a patriarchal structure, ensures that the
state’s role as protector of Egypt’s traditional family values is not questioned or
challenged.
Blogging the Tortured Body
Bloggers have been actively campaigning against the Egyptian government’s use of
torture in police stations and detention facilities, and have increasingly been engaged in
writing on and publishing images of state torture on their blogs. Bloggers like Wael
Abass routinely post images and YouTube videos of detainees being beaten, humiliated
60
and tortured in a variety of ways. These images are often captured on the mobile phones
of police officers and are eventually leaked and widely published on blogs. Bloggers
write, not only about torture inside prisons and detention facilities, but also about the
humiliation and arrest of protestors, political activists and fellow bloggers in the streets
of Cairo.
Sandmonkey passionately writes in reaction to his witnessing of the arrest and
beating of activists during a demonstration in downtown Cairo in March 2007: “whether
we like it or not, the government is a reflection of the people. So if the government is
ruthless, corrupt and dictatorial, what does that say about the people? What does it say
about a nation that produces such a government, and accepts it, even as it plunders the
country and enslaves its people?”54 Abdel Moniem, a member of the outlawed Muslim
Brotherhood and a blogger who has been detained several times and was last released in
June 2007, wrote about his own experience in prison following his 2003 arrest: “I stayed
for 13 days in a 2×3 meter cell. I spent five full days in it sleeping, praying and using the
WC while I was handcuffed behind my back. At mealtime, the guard would handcuff me
in front. I was obliged to remain on this cement terrace all the time, including performing
the prayers because the floor was not clean. My interrogation ended after eight days but I
was held for more five days in my cell to increase the psychological pressure. I also heard
the screams of my colleagues, and they heard mine, while they were beaten by the
guard.”55
Baheyya, who writes anonymously and describes her pseudonym as a name
which “has come to stand in for Egypt itself,” writes in her blog, “There is an entire
subculture of invisible citizens in this country with first-hand experience of the state’s
ferocity. There are dozens of wives, mothers, sisters, and sisters-in-law who were beaten,
54
55
http://www.sandmonkey.net.
http://monem-press.blogspot.com.
61
stripped naked, and raped by police officers, sometimes in front of their detained
husbands and/or children. There are dozens of pregnant women who miscarried due to
torture. There are dozens of haunted women with scarred souls and violated bodies
whose stories we don’t know. There are dozens of haunted men with scarred souls and
violated bodies whose stories we don’t know.”56 Nora Younis, who writes in both
English and Arabic on her blog analyses why there is what she refers to as a “war on
bloggers”:57 “Bloggers have put a name and face to state security torturers and therefore
the battle became personal. To have uncontrollable bloggers in Egypt who shape public
opinion and force topics of torture, sexual harassment, corruption, and election
falsification on mainstream media is not something a police state would accept. State
security in Egypt controls Egypt.”58
Facing Torture
The homogenous social body imagined by the state’s nationalist narrative is being
challenged by the production of images and writings, displaying the tortured body on
Egypt’s blogosphere. Egyptian bloggers, by bypassing mainstream media, have
“threatened to unravel the carefully managed state-controlled narrative which frames
government policy as morally just and sensible” (Al Malky 2007, 10). The images and
eye-witness accounts of detention and torture at the hands of state officials posted on
Egyptian blogs reveal what is usually imagined but never witnessed by the citizen subject,
and creates an intimate relationship between the blogger and his readers, delegitimating
the state’s stance as guardian of the Egyptian nation. Images of the male tortured body
have become the most potent symbol of state oppression online. Bloggers write in detail
56
http://baheyya.blogspot.com.
The interior minister, Habib El-Adly, has accused bloggers of being non-patriotic and of aiming to harm
the Egyptian police’s reputation. He has warned Egyptians not to use the Internet in ways that could
“endanger national security” (Elzelak 2007).
58
http://norayounis.com.
57
62
about how the body is physically abused and the mind psychologically manipulated by
state officials; it is this focus on detail that provides an “insider’s” view of the statemechanisms of discipline. Most cases of torture exposed and discussed by bloggers
remain focused on male bodies. The images and writings describing torture and sexual
abuse in Egyptian prisons reinforce the notion that it is men who are being tortured and
often sexually assaulted in detention by other men.
As Bordo argues, the power exerted by the state against activists and individuals
viewed as crossing the “acceptable” line, has been met with resistance. Those carrying
tortured bodies and those who either witness the spectacle or gather information about it
are beginning to voice their objections online, and are calling on others to speak and
share their experiences; this desire to bring the tortured body to the public is a central
part of bloggers’ strategy for political and social mobilization.
The Panopticon and State Control
Foucault’s Panopticion,59 a structure that ensures the subject’s visibility at all times,
proves symbolically appropriate for analyzing the relationship between the state and
bloggers. Despite the fact that bloggers are engaged in resisting the state’s normalization
narrative and attempt to remain unseen by using pseudonyms to hide their identities
online, the state has responded to this resistance by ensuring that bloggers are visible at
all times. They are constantly being watched and monitored without being able to see
those who watch over them. The Internet, a medium meant to maintain its user’s
anonymity, does not protect Egyptian bloggers from the gaze of the state. SandMonkey,
who decided to stop blogging briefly in May 2007 because of, among other reasons, the
government’s surveillance and intimidation, wrote, “I no longer believe that my
59
Foucault argues that the Panapticon serves to “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1979, 201).
63
anonymity is kept, especially with the State.”60 Sandmonkey has since returned to the
blog scene, and his return indicates that bloggers are neither online, nor offline, but may
appear and disappear depending on the political and social circumstances that effect their
writings. Despite this flexibility, however, it is evident that the state plays an active role in
shaping how, when and why bloggers blog or choose to stop blogging. While the
Internet has granted bloggers the ability to write about torture, harassment, sexuality and
other topics deemed taboo, it has not protected them from being watched – a key
component of state power. Many bloggers have been unable to remain anonymous. They
are no longer faceless disembodied agents online, but have become clear targets of State
monitoring and offline surveillance system in “real” space. The Panopticon in this case
serves to ensure that the state can observe bloggers’ movements, actions and writings;
through this system of monitoring and reporting, the government maintains its power.
According to the writer Rania Al Malky, blogger and journalist Hossam El
Hamalway “believes that although bloggers are not being arrested from their homes, the
government is still very much keeping an eye on them. El Hamalawy believes the
regime’s energies are focused less on detention and more on discrediting activist
bloggers” (2003, 23). The state is launching an all-out attack on bloggers, and the
crackdown is aimed at discrediting their writings through an delegitimatization tactic. The
government hopes to ensure that the normalized state of government control is
maintained and that bloggers are seen as marginal and irrelevant.
It remains to be seen whether this campaign to tarnish the image of bloggers will
prove effective, however it is apparent that bloggers are increasingly facing
restrictions on their writings and will continue to face legal battles as the state and
government officials take their war against the bloggers to court. Activist bloggers
fearing arrest or detention now face the dilemma of choosing to either remain
anonymous (which has proven quite difficult for many bloggers), practice selfcensorship or shut down their blogs.
60
http://www.sandmonkey.net.
64
Embodying Resistance
Since its inception, the Internet has been presented as a space where the mind could be
“free” of its body and transcend into a utopian, virtual world. This mind-body
dichotomy has shaped the discourse on the relationship between the body and
cyberspace, however this idealized reading of the Internet is misleading; the Internet is a
product of specific social and cultural constructs and remains firmly connected to the
‘real’ world. “Technology therefore is never neutral but always inflected and influenced
by specific ideologies and preconceptions” (Gunkel, 1998, 112).
Egyptian bloggers are involved in transforming, altering and concealing their
identities or adopting new ones to suit their online political and social agendas. The idea
that one can be whatever he/she chooses to be online has attracted many young
Egyptians, who confronted by social and cultural pressures to conform in the “real”
world, choose to speak out online. While bloggers have been successful in creating a
personalized “virtual” world through blogging their thoughts, their opinions continue to
be informed by their own feelings of embodiment and the materiality of the world they
live in.
The assumption that cyberspace is a disembodied medium is illusive; it is clear
from the writings of Egyptian bloggers that embodied feelings shape how they use the
Internet. Forsoothsayer writes, “I’m 24, female, and Egyptian. I try to be funny.
However, I do not try to be polite. This is my refuge from the social demands of the
outside world.”61 Despite Forsoothsayer’s desire to escape the outside world, her writings
are all about that world, how she experiences it, views it and embodies it, and her
writings on women, harassment and her daily struggles at work are shaped by who she is
off-screen.
More politically active bloggers such as Malek, Wael Abass and Nora Younis focus
61
http://forsoothsayer.blogspot.com.
65
their blogs on the socio-political issues they feel are important. The way they write about
the body symbolizes how they view the political situation in Egypt; like the body, Egypt
continues to be abused, raped and beaten by the state. The tortured/harassed body as a
symbol of Egypt effectively translates the bloggers’ feelings of frustration and anger as
they write on their blogs. The fact that these bloggers are activists offline is directly
related to how and what they post online. Many of the activist bloggers discussed in this
paper are members of a political group or party and have been engaged in protests and
political rallies. They are not passive in sharing their views about the world, and continue
to express their embodied feelings through cyberspace for those who care to read about
them.62 In “Blogging for Reform: The Case of Egypt,” El Malky argues that “if bloggers
are individuals first, and opposition activists second, there are repercussions not just for
the sense of community they may inspire. Individualism also comes to shape the very
opposition movements that drive their writings” (2007, 8). Bloggers’ own experiences
with sexual harassment, torture and abuse by the state impacts how they write about the
body and how they use the Internet to challenge state control of citizen subjects.
Gendering Cyberspace
Gender identity plays a key role in how bloggers write about the body and their own
sense of embodiment. While most bloggers reviewed for this paper are politically active
or at least politically aware and seem troubled by the political situation in Egypt, there are
differences in the way male and female bloggers engage in activism on the Internet.
Sexual harassment is presented as an issue centered around the female body and its
relationship to public space. Female bloggers often describe their own experiences with
harassment and write in fury about their feelings of victim-hood. Sexual harassment for
62
Several bloggers are members of the Kifaya movement and have been actively engaged in Kifaya
protests since the movement’s inception in September 2004 (Al Malky 2007).
66
female bloggers is both personal and political. Female bloggers through their writings are
attracting men who are interested in what women have to say, and many male bloggers
comment on female blogs and engage in gendered discussions on the body. Otterman
argues that the blogosphere is one of the only public domains where Egyptian women
can express themselves on par with men. She states: “Whatever the reason, the
blogopshere has become one of the few public spaces in Egypt where men and women
are represented more-or-less equally, and this helps make possible some discussions that
are uncommon off-line. Strangers from across the ideological spectrum are participating
in discussions of arranged marriage, homosexuality and the necessity of veiling for
Muslim women on the comment section of female blogs. And activism fueled by the
Internet is also making possible male-female collaboration on social issues, such as sexual
harassment, often thought of in Egypt as ‘women’s problems.’” (2007, 3). The Internet
has proven attractive for young women, who use their blog space to share their feelings,
ideas and thoughts with the world. Women’s virtual diaries are varied in style. Baheyya
provides engaging political analysis of the current situation in Egypt and posts several
blogs that center around historical accounts, literature and arts, while Forsoothsayer
writes in a more light-hearted, witty form about her daily life, her friends and the social
and political issues that interest her.
The tortured body remains for the most part the domain of male bloggers, who
focus on exposing incidents of torture, and mostly tortured male bodies. Bloggers such
as Wael Abass and Malek devote much of their blogs to posting videos or images and
writings on cases of torture in Egyptian detention centers. Abass was involved in
exposing the story of Emad El Kebir, a 21-year-old bus driver who was tortured and
sexually assaulted in detention. This exposition resulted in the charging of two police
officers with sexual assault, a rare case in which the Egyptian state has taken legal
67
accountability for a tortured man.63 The male tortured body has become commonplace
on Egyptian blogs, specifically on male blogs. Unlike their female counterparts, the
majority of male bloggers don’t provide intimate details about their own lives, but rather
focus their writings on providing commentary on social and political issues they view as
important. The male blogs are presented in a less personalized manner and focus more
on engaging political and social issues; male bloggers often present their blogs as onlinenewspapers or journals that aim to provide updated information on what is happening in
Egypt and the rest of the world. This reflects a gendered approach for how to use
cyberspace: “Cyberspace, like all complex phenomena, has a range of psychological
effects. For some people, it is a place to ‘act out’ unresolved conflicts, to play and replay
characterological difficulties on a new and exotic stage. For others, it provides an
opportunity to ‘work through’ significant personal issues, and to use new materials of
cybersociality to reach new resolutions” (Turkle 1999, 644). A variety of psychological
issues are exposed through bloggers’ writings, and specific gendered identities play a key
role in how male and female bloggers use the Internet. While for the most part women
choose to use the Internet to address specific personal conflicts and as a refuge from
society’s social and cultural taboos, male bloggers engage in presenting a politicized
persona that deflects explicit personal issues and focuses on a more ‘objective’ discourse.
I am not claiming that female bloggers are not engaged in politics or that male bloggers
do not share anything personal online. However, it is rather important to note that male
and female bloggers carry complex gendered and sexual identities that continue to form
their modes of embodiment, and shape how and why they blog.
63
For a detailed account of the Al-Kabir case, see
http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/regions/middle-east-and-north-africa/Egypt.
68
Conclusion
Blogging has given a number of mostly middle-upper class young Egyptian activists the
opportunity to write about their views and share their ideas on everything from sexual
harassment to torture online. This has created an environment of free-flowing
information with little or no control by the state. It further complicates notions of a
clearly defined public sphere: “Blogging is an emergent phenomenon that is blurring the
boundaries between the public and private sphere in Egypt. Because it trespasses these
divides and challenges official authority, it is a subversive form of communication”
(Radsch 2006, 42).
The way bloggers write about the body indicates that through text, images and
information exchange they aim to provide gendered alternatives to the official state
narrative. Blogging on issues such as sexual harassment and torture provides people with
an opportunity to voice their embodied feelings and thoughts online. This cyberspace,
while allowing some to engage in counter-hegemonic discourses on the body, continues
to be the privilege of a limited number of Egyptians. Ahiwa Ong argues in “Cyberpublics
and the Pitfalls of Diasporic Chinese Politics”64 that action provoked by these activists
could have consequences even for those who do not have access to the Internet. She
writes that “progressive activists should beware of the unexpected repercussions on
millions of people offline whose fates can be drawn together online” (Owg 2006, 72).
Ong warns that the Internet and blogging can prove to be an elitist exercise that further
marginalizes people who don’t have access to this digital technology. Additionally, the
weakness of Internet activism lies in the fact that “those who may benefit the most from
counterhegmonic uses of the Net may have the least access to it” (Warf and Grimes
1997, 270). Online activists are producing a unique narrative, and while this form of
activism has been effective in narrating a resistant socio-political stance against the state
and patriarchal norms, it has limited appeal amongst the majority of citizens, who are not
connected to this technology.
64
This is Chapter Two of her book Neoliberalism as Exception.
69
To quote Sandmonkey, these “keyboard warriors” have been resisting state
oppression through video and text postings – a method that in some ways mirrors the
state’s strategy of reserved intimidation of bloggers. Blogging on the body has
undoubtedly had an impact on cyberpolitics, that provides an alternative to the masculine
discourse on the female body, exposes state-controlled mechanisms of punishment, and
provides a space for an unrestricted, personalized gendered narrative to emerge.
References
Websites and blogs:
Manal and Alaa’s bit bucket:
Forsoothsayer:
Nora Younis:
Malik:
Arabaway:
Wa7damasrya:
Zeniobia:
Nermenna:
Abdle Moniem:
Sandmonkey:
Baheyaa:
Amnesty International:
http://manalaa.net
http://forsoothsayer.blogspot.com
http://norayounis.com
http://malex-x.net
http://arabist.net/arabawy
http://wa7damasrya.blogspot.com
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com
http://nerro.wordpress.com
http://monem-press.blogspot.com
http://www.sandmonkey.net
http://baheyya.blogspot.com
http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Region
s/Middle-East-and-North-Africa/Egypt
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=18136
Reporters without Borders:
http://hrw.org/reports/2005/mena1105/4.htm
Human Rights Watch:
Arab Network for
http://hrinfo.net/press/2007/pr0408.shtml
Human Rights Information:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm
Internet World Stats
Online and print references:
Al Malky, Rania. “Blogging For Reform: The Case of Egypt.” Arab Media & Society.
(February, 2007)
http://www.arabmediasociety.com/topics/index.php?t_article=39 (last accessed March
31, 2008)
Bordo, Susan. “Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body.” Feminist Theory and The
Body: A Reader. Price, Janet and Margrit Shildrick, eds. New York: Routledge. (1999)
Boudourides, A. Moses and Evangelia Drakou. “Gender@Cyberspace.” 4th European
Feminist Research Conference, Bolgona, Italy, September 28 - October 1, 2000.
70
Elzelak, Ehab. “Egyptian Bloggers: Practices and Challenges” Conference on New Media
and The Press Freedom Dimension. UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, February 15-16,
2007.
Hurwitz, Roger. “Who Needs Politics? Who Needs People? The Ironies of Democracy
in Cyberspace.” Contemporary Sociology, 28(6): 655-661. (1999)
Ong, Ahiwa. NeoLiberalism As Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Duke
University Press. (2006)
Otterman, Sharon. “Publicizing the Private: Egyptian Women Bloggers Speak Out.”
Arab Media & Society. (February, 2007)
http://www.arabmediasociety.com/topics/index.php?t_article=28 (last accessed March
31, 2008)
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
(1979
Gunkel, David. “ Virtually Transcendent: Cyberculture and the Body.” Journal of Mass
Media
Ethics, 13(2): 111-123. (1998)
Radsch, Courtney. “Speaking Truth to Power: The Changing Role of Journalism in
Egypt.” Mortara Center for International Studies. Georgetown University. (2006)
http://mortara.georgetown.edu/includes/20050901/CultureWPs/RadschC02-07.pdf
(last accessed March 31, 2008).
Turkle, Sherry. “Cyberspace and Identity.” Contemporary Sociology, 28(6): 643-648. (1999)
Warf, Barney and John Grimes. Counterhegemonic Discourses and the Internet.
Geographical Review, 87(2): 259-274. (1997)
71
A Fragment on the Everyday and its Burdens among
Cement Carriers in Saft El-Laban
by Fouad Halbouni
72
1.
The following notes are a result of several visitations paid to twelve Christian cement
carriers living in a squatting area around the governorate of Giza, Saft El-Laban. I began
my visits around the month of September 2006 with the assistance of my fellow
ethnographer Ragaui Moussa, who happens to belong to the same upper Egyptian village
to which they periodically return to every two to three weeks of toil (El-Barsha in the
governorate of El-Minya). The decision to return is usually taken haphazardly. The
worker only decides to return to visit his family when his meager savings reach an
adequate sum (almost 500 L.E.) or when a case of severe illness overcomes one of his
immediate family members. After the arrival of the group’s oldest member, ‘Atta
Teyufalis, in the early eighties, the group initiated a relation of trust with a few
contractors in the area, which consequently has secured their status as trustworthy and
fairly known workers. Instead of waiting, forming lines of white faces smeared with
73
cement dust near the gates of the coffee shops, sitting for hours on end waiting for
shipments of cement, they are summoned by the one of the contractor’s men from their
own place of settlement (an unfinished, uninhabited building with skeleton-like walls in
red brick). They all gather on top of the tractor and ride to the designated site where they
will unload tons of cement packs from the nearby trucks. However, as I have noted in
my visits, the episodic rhythm of work necessitates an ineffable form of patience. In one
day, they could surprisingly be summoned to unload three shipments of cement, whereas
in other times, they could remain waiting for days on end. They would usually fill their
sense of waiting with a game of cards in the nearby ahwa (coffee shop) or immerse
themselves in reasonably long conversations with the vendors of the nearby market.
Naturally, their rations would diminish with the passage of days without work. The small
plate of rice and chunks of fat covered with thin veins of meat would start to disappear,
giving way to long days of falafel and fava beans until the promise of al-zafar65 (chunks of
meat) would return with the resumption of work. However, with the slow torturing
passage of time, their sense of waiting is still figuratively linked to a promise of al-farag
(relief, release), which is in the hands of a benevolent god who never lets his slaves go
hungry. “Although one cannot fool himself,” affirmed ‘amm ‘Atta, one of the oldest
members of the group, “time and anticipation are devouring your flesh.” What I could
never fathom is how they situated my visits between shipments of cement, specifically
during days that seemed impossibly hard to endure. I could not believe that my visits
were in the hands of god too: not because of my ability to master my own time, but
because of a timeless condition of hospitality (the carriers refusing to join the tractor for
the sake of the “visitors”). The ethnographer’s task in this case resembles an impossible
search for the meaning of toil in the lives of others, as if one traces it through the white
65
My transcription is in accordance with the standard system for the transliteration of Arabic followed by
the International Journal of Middle East Studies. However, I must point out that the upper Egyptian dialect has
lost a lot of its unique sound qualities in transcription.
74
clouds of cement. Hence, a more difficult question arises: how could one capture the
everyday without noting that in its captivity, the intensity of the conversations is reduced
to mere formats and notes? All our attempts, perhaps unintentionally, seem to capture
the precipitation of dust: as if we are attempting to reduce the stories of toil, which seem
innumerable, some of which refute description in ethnographic time, to a certain
redundancy present in the notion of the “everyday,” giving form and coherence to what
might as well only be worthless without the winds that carry them, that scatter and gather
them momentarily. Here, the concept of the everyday seems to be extremely problematic
as it retains a form of incessant recurrence belonging to another orbit. The notions of
everyday life in the texts of Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Michel De Certeau (1984) are
embedded in modernity, where everyday life itself is subjected to forces of mass
production and consumption. Paradoxically, the everyday is that which denotes a
condition of incessant recurrence yet also “everydayness” is what remains as a
supplement of the working day, lying on the margins of utility, a by-product of corporate
time (hence, notions of familiarity, triviality and boredom are linked to the notion of
everyday life). Consequently, the everyday is reduced to the monotonous intermission
between events in which common people, living in temporalities on the margins of the
laws of capitalist production, could endure “wastefully.” It is in those conditions that De
Certeau speaks of le Perruque, which is the laborer’s sharp tactic to “poach” time from the
factory time allocated to production, using only “scraps” of factory material, prohibiting
the waste of its resources (De Certeau 1984: 25).
75
76
2.
In our conversations, I noted that ‘amm ‘Atta mentioned something about how one rises
up to a potential threat in the very heart of the day, a potential threat and yet also a latent
promise which one cannot refuse because it is carved out in one’s flesh…it is fate. Your
fate could be awaiting you under the wheels of the tractor under which hundreds of
young workers lost their lives or in encounters which seem beyond their own powers of
patience and endurance – encounters which certain games or faith in the miraculous
could never alter. Usually those encounters are charged with the inevitable powers of
fate, equated with the experience of “being summoned by death.” Describing their fear
in almost the same words, the men compared the experience of falling near the tractor’s
wheels to the moments in which an incidental brush with the police officers occur. When
one of them is captured by the police during his return from the site after a long day, the
experience resembles not only the “infinite hour of fear” but perhaps the advent of fate’s
rupture with their sense of patience and promise. Usually the workers are arrested for
indefinite “investigative”66 purposes (taћari)67. Most of the men attribute their arrest due
to their features or apparel as they return smothered with cement dust (“our ghost-like
appearance”). They are detained for a day or two until the authorities confirm their
identities. The several Beys and Bashas,68 which the workers have met throughout their
lives, would never yield to any form of pleading (as through them, the mysteriously
deserving or undeserving acts of punishment pass from potentiality to actuality, an
almost godly attribute). In those encounters, one cannot even express hope or
expectation of mercy, lenience or hospitality from the law (in comparison with the
mysterious yet benevolent ways of god). It is difficult to understand how power isolates,
66
The emergency law has been used by the executive power since 1981 to obliterate many basic rights and
freedoms outlined in the Egyptian Constitution.
67
Here the Cyrillic character ћ represents the letter ‫ح‬, as the suitable character is absent in the Word
program.
68
Terms often used to address police officers in Egypt.
77
individualizes them through its burden upon their sense of waiting and patience,
expressed beyond all known limits of patience. It is also difficult for me to understand
how one “endures,” “survives” or “outlives” the day given the gift-curse of patience.
References
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Rendall, trans. Berkeley:
University of California Press. (1984)
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. New York: Verso. (1991)
78
Shadows of Cement Dust: My Experience with
Cement Carriers in Saft El-Laban
by Ragaui Moussa, translated by Fouad Halbouni
‫ ﻭﻟﻡ ﺃﺠﺩ ﺤﺠﺭﺍ ﻟﺭﺍﺤﺘﻲ ﺇﻻ‬،‫ ﻤﻥ ﺍﻟﻤﻨﻴﺎ‬،‫ ﻗﺎﺩﻤﺎ ﻤﻥ ﺼﻌﻴﺩ ﻤﺼﺭ‬،‫ ﻨﺯﻟﺕ ﺍﻟﻘﺎﻫﺭﺓ‬1994 ‫ﻓﻲ ﻋﺎﻡ‬
‫ ﻋﻨﺩﻤﺎ‬،‫ﻤﻌﻬﻡ ﻓﻲ ﻟﻴﺎل ﻜﺜﻴﺭﺓ‬
‫ ﻭﻨﺯﻟﺕ ﻟﺤﻤل ﺍﻷﺴﻤﻨﺕ‬،‫ ﻋﺸﺕ ﻤﻌﻬﻡ ﺃﺭﺒﻌﺔ ﺍﺸﻬﺭ‬.‫ﻭﺴﻁﻬﻡ‬
‫ ﺃﺤﺴﺴﺕ‬،‫ ﻜﺄﻨﻲ ﺃﺒﺤﺙ ﻋﻨﻰ ﺃﻭ ﻋﻨﻬﻡ‬،2006 ‫ ﺘﺭﻜﺘﻬﻡ ﻭﻋﺩﺕ ﺜﺎﻨﻴﺔ ﻓﻲ ﻤﺎﺭﺱ‬.‫ﻴﺼﻴﺒﻨﻲ ﺍﻟﻔﻠﺱ‬
‫ ﻫﻲ ﻨﻔﺱ‬،‫ ﻓﻠﻡ ﺃﺠﺩ ﺇﻻ ﻅﻼﻻ ﻭﻋﺘﻤﺔ ﻭﻏﺒﺎﺭﺍ‬،‫ ﻓﻌﺩﺕ ﻟﻜﻲ ﺍﻟﺘﻘﻁﻪ‬،‫ﺃﻨﻰ ﺘﺭﻜﺕ ﺠﺯﺀﺍ ﻤﻥ ﻨﻔﺴﻲ ﻫﻨﺎ‬
،‫ ﺍﻟﻔﻭل ﻭﺍﻟﻁﻌﻤﻴﺔ ﻭﺼﻔﺎﺌﺢ ﻟﻐﻠﻰ ﺍﻟﻤﺎﺀ ﻤﻥ ﺃﺠل ﺍﻻﺴﺘﺤﻤﺎﻡ‬،‫ ﻟﻡ ﺘﺒﺭﺡ ﻤﻜﺎﻨﻬﺎ‬،‫ﺍﻷﺸﻴﺎﺀ ﺍﻟﺘﻲ ﺘﺭﻜﺘﻬﺎ‬
‫ ﻭﻫﻡ‬،‫ ﺼﺭﺕ ﺃﺴﻌﻰ ﺃﻥ ﺃﻜﻭﻥ ﺇﺜﻨﻭﺠﺭﺍﻓﻴﺎﹰ‬،‫ ﻭﻟﻜﻨﻨﺎ ﺘﻐﻴﺭﻨﺎ ﺒﺎﻟﺘﺄﻜﻴﺩ‬.‫ﻭﺸﺎﻱ ﻤﺭ ﻋﻠﻰ ﻭﺍﺒﻭﺭ ﺠﺎﺯ‬
.‫ ﻭﺍﻟﺒﻌﺽ ﻤﻨﻬﻡ ﺼﺎﺭ ﻟﻪ ﺃﺤﻔﺎﺩﺍ‬،‫ ﻭﺃﻨﺠﺒﻭﺍ ﺃﻁﻔﺎﻻ‬،‫ﺸﻴﺩﻭﺍ ﺒﻴﻭﺘﺎ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﻘﺭﻴﺔ‬
I arrived in Cairo in 1994, coming from the governorate of El-Minya in Upper Egypt. It
was only amongst them that I could find shelter. I lived with them for four months and
even carried cement with them many nights (when I was afflicted by pennilessness). I left
them only to return in March 2006, as if I was searching for them or myself. I felt as if I
had left a part of myself there and that I returned to collect it only to stumble upon
shadows, darkness and dust. The same things that I left are still there, they have not
moved from their places: Fava beans, falafel and tin canisters used for heating up water
for bathing, or for making sour tea on a stove burner. Yet we have certainly changed.
Now I am striving to become an ethnographer. While they have built houses back in the
village, bore children and even grandchildren.….
79
‫ أﻣﺎ أﻧﺎ ﺳﻴﺄﺗﻲ أﺳﻤﻰ‬،‫ هﻢ اﻟﺬﻳﻦ ﺳﻴﺤﻀﺮون داﺋﻤﺎ ﺑﺄﺳﻤﺎء ﻣﺴﺘﻌﺎرة‬،‫ وﻧﺰﻟﺖ ﻋﻨﺪهﻢ‬،1994 ‫ﺟﺌﺖ اﻟﻘﺎهﺮة ﻋﺎم‬
.‫ هﺬﻩ ﻣﺘﺎهﺔ ﻇﻼل ﻏﺒﺎر اﻷﺳﻤﻨﺖ‬،2006 ‫ إﻟﻰ‬1994 ‫ ﺻﻔﻂ اﻟﻠﺒﻦ ﺑﻴﻦ‬.‫أو ًﻻ‬
I came to Cairo in 1994 and I settled down with them…Those that will always be
summoned by pseudonyms. As for myself, my name will appear in the beginning.
Saft El-Laban from 1994 to 2006… A labyrinth of infinite shadows; shadows of
cement dust.
80
‫ أو اﻟﺬﻳﻦ أﻗﻌﺪﺗﻬﻢ اﻹﺻﺎﺑﺎت واﻟﻤﺮض ﻓﻲ‬،‫ﻳﺤﻜﻮن ﻋﻦ رﻓﺎﻗﻬﻢ اﻟﺬﻳﻦ ﻟﻘﻮا ﻣﺼﺮﻋﻬﻢ أﺳﻔﻞ ﺟﺮارات اﻷﺳﻤﻨﺖ‬
.‫ﺑﻴﻮﺗﻬﻢ‬
They tell me about their companions who had lost their lives under the tractors’
wheels or from sickness and irredeemable injuries that crippled and confined
them to their own homes.
81
.‫ ﺧﺒﺰ أﺳﻤﺮ وﻓﻮل وﻓﻼﻓﻞ وﺑﺼﻞ‬،‫ﻃﻌﺎم اﻟﻐﺮﺑﺔ‬
The food of estrangement: dark bread,69 fava beans, falafel and onions.
69
‘Aish asmar: brown pita bread made out of a mixture of wheat and white flour – an essential and daily
source of food for most Egyptians.
82
.‫ ﻟﻠﺸﺮب واﻻﺳﺘﺤﻤﺎم‬،‫ﺻﻔﺎﺋﺢ وﺟﺮاآﻦ ﻣﻦ اﻟﺒﻼﺳﺘﻴﻚ ﻣﻦ أﺟﻞ ﺟﻠﺐ اﻟﻤﻴﺎﻩ‬
Tin canisters and plastic flasks used for bringing water… for drinking and
bathing.
83
.‫ﺣﺎﺟﺎت ﻣﻌﻬﻢ ﻳﺤﻤﻠﻮﻧﻬﺎ أﻳﻨﻤﺎ رﺣﻠﻮا؛ آﻴﺲ ﺑﻼﺳﺘﻴﻚ ﻟﻠﺠﻼﺑﻴﺐ وﻟﻠﻤﻼﺑﺲ اﻟﺪاﺧﻠﻴﺔ وﻟﺼﻮر أﻃﻔﺎﻟﻬﻢ‬
Things they must carry with them wherever they go: plastic bags for their
galabeyas,70 their undergarments and photographs of their children.
70
These are l oose garments worn by Egyptian villagers.
84
.‫ﺣﺒﻞ ﻏﺴﻴﻞ وﺟﻼﺑﻴﺐ ﻓﻲ ﻣﻮاﺟﻬﺔ ﻣﺪﻳﻨﺔ‬
Clothes lines and galabeyas confronting the city.
85
،‫ ﻋﻠﻰ ﺑﻌﺾ ﻗﻮاﻟﺐ ﻣﻦ اﻟﻄﻮب اﻷﺣﻤﺮ ﺗﺮﻓﻊ أﻟﻮاح ﻣﻦ اﻟﺨﺸﺐ ﻣﻦ أﺟﻞ اﻟﺮﻗﺎد‬،‫رﻗﺪة اﻟﻐﺮﺑﺔ‬
The repose of estrangement…a few bricks holding up a wooden plank for
reposing.
86
.‫ ﻓﺎﻟﺸﺎرع ﻟﻠﻜﻼب وﻟﻠﻌﺴﻜﺮ‬،‫ ﻋﻠﻰ اﻟﻤﺮء أن ﻳﺘﺪﺑﺮ ﻣﻜﺎﻧﺎ ﻟﺮﻗﺪﺗﻪ‬،‫هﻨﺎ ﻓﻲ اﻟﻤﺪﻳﻨﺔ‬
Here in the city, one must find a place to lie down, as the streets belong to the
dogs and the soldiers.
87
‫ ﻟﻘﺪ ﺗﺮآﻮا ﻗﺮاهﻢ ﻣﻦ أﺟﻞ ﻟﻘﻤﺔ اﻟﻌﻴﺶ وﻣﻦ أﺟﻞ ﺣﻜﺎﻳﺔ‬.‫ﻋﻠﻴﻚ أن ﺗﺴﺘﻤﻊ ﺟﻴﺪا ﻟﻠﺤﻜﺎﻳﺎت ﻓﻬﻲ إرث ﻏﺮﺑﺘﻬﻢ اﻟﻮﺣﻴﺪ‬
.‫أﻳﻀﺎ‬
Diligently, you must listen to their stories, as they are the remaining heritage of
their estrangement. The men have left their villages to search for a morsel of
bread as well as a tale.
88
.‫ أﻧﻪ ﻳﺆدى إﻟﻰ ﻣﺰﻳﺪ ﻣﻦ اﻟﺸﻘﺎء واﻟﻐﺒﺎر واﻟﻮﺳﺦ‬،‫هﺬا اﻟﻀﻮء ﻻ ﻳﻘﻮد إﻟﻰ ﺷﺎرع‬
This light does not lead you to the streets; it leads to further toil, dust and dirt.
89
.‫ ﻳﺘﻄﻠﻌﻮن إﻟﻰ اﻟﺴﻮق واﻟﻤﻘﺎهﻲ وﻳﻨﺘﻈﺮون ﺻﻮﺗﺎ ﻳﺴﺘﺪﻋﻴﻬﻢ ﻟﻠﻌﻤﻞ وﻟﻨﻘﻞ اﻟﻐﺒﺎر‬،‫ﻣﻦ ﻓﺘﺤﺎت ﻋﻤﺎرة ﻏﻴﺮ ﻣﺄهﻮﻟﺔ‬
From the openings of an uninhabited building they peer at the market and the
coffee shops. From those apertures, they remain waiting for a voice that
summons them to work and carry dust.
90
.‫هﺬا اﻟﻀﻮء اﻟﻤﻌﻔﺮ ﺑﻐﺒﺎر اﻷﺳﻤﻨﺖ واﻟﺸﻘﺎء واﻟﻐﺮﺑﺔ ﻻ ﻳﺤﻤﻞ ﻟﻬﻢ ﺷﻴﺌﺎ ﻣﻦ ﻗﺮاهﻢ اﻟﺒﻌﻴﺪة‬
This dusty light, infested with cement dust, toil and estrangement, carries
nothing of resemblance to their distant village.
91
.‫ وﻟﻴﺲ هﻨﺎك ﻧﻴﻞ ﻳﻨﺘﻈﺮك ﻟﻠﺘﻄﻬﺮ‬،‫ وﻳﻼﺣﻘﻚ ﻏﺒﺎرهﻢ وﻋﻔﺮهﻢ‬،‫ ﺳﻮف ﺗﺼﻄﺤﺒﻚ أﺷﺒﺎﺣﻬﻢ‬،‫ﺑﻌﺪ أن ﺗﻐﺎدرهﻢ‬
Once you leave them, you will be accompanied by their shadows, and their dust
will follow you… and there’s no Nile where you can purify yourself.
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Surfacing
An Interdisciplinary Journal for Gender in the Global South
Call
for
PAPERS
Surfacing, the new online gender
journal, is soliciting papers for
consideration for the Fall 2008 issue
on "Gender and Conflict." All topics
under this theme are welcome.
Conflict sits at the center of many
contemporary debates of a broad range
of topics, and various inter-disciplinary
fields have to deal with the ubiquity of
conflict as part of their research.
Definitions of conflict, however, are
usually arbitrary and contradictory and
unfortunately reinscribe certain political
and epistemological rifts within the
discourse on "gender and conflict."
how we come to understand “gender”
in the construction of historic and
contemporary conflict.
Formats of all kinds are welcomed:
photo-essays, notes from the field,
articles, essays, working papers,
commentaries, letters to the editor,
reviews, talks and conference papers, et
Surfacing seeks to create a conversation
amongst emerging scholars of the
Global South about the centrality of
gender to conflict and its importance in
understanding
contemporary
and
historical conflicts. Surfacing is keen to
explore the way in which conflict is
manifested in political, social, and
economic realms, and the various roles
violence plays in the relation between
these realms in any specific junctures,
past or present. It seeks to examine the
ways in which conflict is theorized,
enacted, represented, and obscured, and
•
•
•
•
•
Both theoretical and empirical articles are welcomed.
Deadline for abstracts is June 15th, 2008 and the final articles will be due on
August 1st, 2008.
Formatting standard: Chicago Manual of Style 15th ed.
Submissions should be no longer that 8, 000 words.
All questions and queries can be addressed to [email protected]
93
Vol. 1 · No. 1 · May 2008
© Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies 2008.