NPF Cycle One Fellows and Projects
Akram Abbas: The Gendering of Spaces and Institutions of Islamic Sovereignty in Contemporary Sudan
Abstract: This paper discusses the experience of women in Sudan confronting the state and its policing entities and legal institutions. In particular, this article maps gendered resistance to the state’s flexible, arbitrary, and informalized deployment of “Public Order Law.” The Sudanese state deploys this law in order to bolster and moralize its particular form of absolute sovereignty over peoples, bodies, and practices. This law narrows women’s opportunities for institutionalizing their roles. And the law limits their social aspirations and demands for alternative forms of gendered popular sovereignty and rights to public space and embodied dignity. This article describes how this “Public Order Law” serves as a main channel through which law is Islamized, and through which the state integrates a particular form of state sovereignty with gendered/naturalized social authority. In this context, this study asks: Can mainstream paradigms for analyzing sovereignty be adequate for analyzing state power and social authority? I argue for a new kind of sovereignty theory that can grapple with two essential problems: The first is that Sudanese women are burdened with the particularly gendered form of absolutist state sovereignty, whose nationalist and racist formations intensively rescript their priorities and strategies. The second problem, on a more positive note, is that generalizing theories of either absolutist or popular sovereignty cannot help us understand Sudanese women’s capacities for new forms of mobilization and organization, around bodies, spaces, and alternative public moralities. Women have participated in several movements and a strong and lively feminist culture has been revived and is vital and active as of 2013, despite the country’s split into north and south, and the continuing conflict in Darfur and along the border with South Sudan. This paper tackles the ways in which Sudanese women (largely those organized into social movements in Khartoum) conceive of the gendered sovereignty of the state and generated alternative forms of rule and authority. They have worked to amend laws in order to preserve women’s rights and protect their interests while trying on the other hand to obtain maximum benefit from the options available through the existing legal system despite the persistence of a form of repressive state-sovereignty that essentially refuses gender equality and grounds its authority through restraints on women’s actions, bodies, and public strategies.
Akram Abbas is a PhD candidate at the University of Khartoum and has an MA from the University of Khartoum. He is a researcher in the fields of gender equality, women’s movements and gender, power and politics, and political discourses. Currently, he works as a researcher at the Center for Economic, Judicial and Social Studies and Documentation (Centre d'Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ)) in Sudan and is part of a project on violence against women and access to justice in Northern Sudan associated with the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI).
