This article centers the narratives of Tunisian women who lived through a state-sanctioned ban on wearing the veil in educational and state institutions that was instated in the 1990's. It provides a more complex interpretation of the everyday politics of women’s rights in Tunisia that goes beyond both the secular top-down modernization narratives as well as the dominant Islamic narratives that conceptualize the secular state as the root of all evil within a highly polarized context.
Read MoreThis article studies the political discourse of sisterhood within #MeToo and other social movements in China, Hong Kong, and transnational Sinophone communities. The current People’s Republic of China regime has emphasized a new conception of love that associates notions of family, obedience, and social stability with Confucianism and “traditional cultures,” aided by new gendered narratives of nationalism in the cybersphere.
Read MoreIn recent years, “digitalization” has made its way into the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. While none of the United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs) on WPS mentions digitalization, it has increasingly entered the discourse, policy, and practice around the agenda. In this article, we cast an initial eye on the conceptualization and implementation of digitalization within the WPS agenda. We do so through a three-step analysis of discourse, policy, and practice. Our preliminary findings suggest that United Nations member states’ discourse on digitalization within the WPS agenda has moved from an instrumentalist perception of technology as a tool to support one-off initiatives related to the agenda to a more holistic view of it as an integral part of the environment in which the agenda is implemented.
Read MoreThis article offers a close reading and feminist analysis of servicewomen’s narratives of war to illustrate how personal accounts of women combatants who are part of bigger patriarchal military institutions matter for women and gender equality, and how they improve our understanding of the workings of military structures and the power relations within them during war. It is argued that women’s narratives constitute a gendered experience, and take place in a certain context and under particular circumstances; therefore, such narratives can shift the focus from a general nationalist, masculinist story of war to a personal one that flags women’s contributions and expertise, which might have a transformative and long-lasting impact on gender roles at war and contribute to deconstructing gendered binaries.
Read MoreIn this article, the authors examine the practices of survival that Rohingya and Syrian refugees perform as they confront multiple forms of violence resulting from their forced displacement in India and Turkey, respectively. We consider these practices as they are performed in the everyday and reflect on how they expand existing debates in social reproduction feminism.
Read MoreHow do Kuwaiti cyberfeminists resist hegemonic and anti-feminist discourses? This article seeks to answer this question by exploring the contestation between Kuwaiti feminists and their Islamist opponents on Twitter.
Read More