NPF Cycle One Fellows and Projects
Imen Yacoubi: Disassociative Sovereignty from Below: State Feminism and the Politics of Women against Women in Tunisia
Abstract: One of the most powerful myths about feminism in Tunisian politics pre-Arab Spring was that women in this country have enjoyed one of the most privileged and “modern” legal and policy frameworks for gender equality in the Arab world. It is my argument here that analysis of women’s empowerment and feminist achievement in Tunisia that focus overwhelmingly on the issue of the Status Law reproduce the conflation of Tunisian feminisms as “State Feminism.” State feminism is the clientelistic and disciplinary deployments of the state that have been used to “boost” and “modernize” the Tunisian gender order since the founding of the postcolonial state. However, the mobs that rose up against the state in Tunisia 2010-2011 exposed the repressed aspects of the Arab citizen who affirms self-sovereignty (always in gendered, embodied forms) in ways that trouble state feminism and its normative notions of the woman’s body and her “modern” role in society and the polity. The rebellious women who protested did not resemble the state-feminist image of the coveted, respectable, and self-satisfied daughters of Ben Ali. In this essay, I consider looking at women’s rights in Tunisia beyond the usual lenses of the law-focused state sovereignty paradigm, which most gender experts identify with State Feminism. I suggest that insurgent, “disassociative” feminist sovereignty paradigm needs to be theorized as one that draws inspiration from the figure of the dissident Tunisian woman-in-uprising that provide alternative models. I identify this alternative sovereignty paradigm with three traits: (1) this paradigm asserts an inherently gendered and critical notion of the Tunisian state (pre AND post Arab Spring) as deeply patriarchal in structure, rather than as an emancipatory and pro-women apparatus that is more “feminist” than the people itself; (2) this alternative model is based in non-governmental and civil-collective claims of popular sovereignty claims that disassociate from state-clientelist avenues for legitimation and instead create broad linkages between mobilized social bodies and public spaces rather than around lawyer, policymakers and codes of law; and (3) that this form of insurgent feminist sovereignty is performed and represented through living, direct-action presence, embodied occupation of public space, and diverse forms of expressive femininity that come together and reject normative, reductive, or monolithic representations of the Tunisian nation and its gendered bodies public. This article grounds the emergence of this alternative insurgent feminist sovereignty model in both the geography of protests, recently, as well as in the history of diverse forms of feminism in Tunisia and the Arab World.
Imen Yacoubi is currently doing her doctoral research in gender and cultural studies. She holds a BA in English language and literature, and the ‘Agrégation’ (teaching qualification degree) from the Faculty of Letters, Humanities and Arts of Manouba and the École normale supérieure de Tunis. From 2005 to 2009, she taught at the University of Gabes, and she has been teaching at the University of Jendouba since 2009. From 2007 to 2010, she attended the Medi-Café (The Trans-Maghreb Writing Project) under the mentorship of the British Council. At present, she is an editor and a co-founder of Moorings, a cultural Maghrebi magazine in English. She is an alumnus of the Civic Engagement and Leadership Fellowship, a program affiliated with Syracuse University, NY. She participated in YAANI (Young Arab Network International), a project affiliated with the British Council and the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs (Chatham House).
