“Feminism is a Danger to Society” vs “Kuwaiti Feminism Represents Me”: Resisting the Anti-Feminist Backlash on Kuwaiti Twitter (X)
By: Balsam Mustafa (she/her/hers)
Feminism faces a global backlash. Both offline and online, anti-feminist and misogynistic discourses are on the rise. However, feminists and women’s rights activists do resist and fight back. The Arab world is no exception. The question is, how do Arab feminists do so in the online realm in socially conservative contexts? This article addresses this question by taking Kuwait as a case study. During the pandemic, the embodied and emotional dimension of Kuwaiti cyberfeminism intensified when Kuwaiti feminists from different backgrounds came together to challenge gender-based violence, constituting a visible and embodied feminist presence and triggering a counter-anti-feminist mobilization.
In this context, my article explores a particular case of contestation between the Kuwaiti Ministry of Awqaf (endowment) and Islamic Affairs and feminists in Twitter (X) that took place in December 2021.
In December 2021, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs advertised for an offline symposium titled “alfikr al-niswi wa khatarih’ ala almujtama al-Islami” [The feminist ideology and its danger to the Islamic society]. After facing pushback from Kuwaiti feminists and women’s rights activists supported by a campaign by the liberal-leaning Aljarida daily newspaper, the ministry cancelled the seminar, and it was eventually moved to a Twitter Space – an online space where people could have live audio conversations – on December 23, 2021. The discussion was streamed simultaneously on YouTube, with Dr Mutlaq al-Jasir from the College of Sharia at Kuwait University hosting his colleague, Dr Muhammed Dhawi Al-Osaimi. The ministry saw this as an opportunity to deliver its message to a broader audience, including feminists.
In the seminar, gender inequality was promoted by both the speaker and the host through ideological discourses, attacking and rejecting feminism. In my article, I argue that the lecture incited sentiments of irrational fear towards feminist activists, what I term feminismphobia, to misrepresent feminism and strategically used language to convey the ex-communication of Kuwaiti feminists from the religion and society while minimizing violence against women. For example, Dr Al-Osaimi reiterated that “feminists blindly imitate everything existing in the west”, stressing in several instances that “feminism has defied Islamic Sharia... allowing for mocking the prophet... feminism is hostile to religion”. As a result, the speaker and his host recommended socially resisting feminism to immunize society against its ills.
These accusations can have dangerous ramifications, including triggering a takfiri discourse against Muslim feminists, as has recently happened with the Jordanian feminist and human rights advocate Hala Ahed for her involvement in raising feminist awareness, impeding feminists’ ability to convince others to pursue social change.
How did Kuwaiti feminists respond? Drawing on the work of Carrie Rentschler and Mona Lilja, the article examines an Arabic hashtag: al-niswiya alkuwaitiya tumathlni [Kuwaiti feminism represents me] created by Kuwaiti feminists in response to the above symposium, viewing it as a form of constructive resistance. It argues that cyberfeminism(s) represents a set of embodied social media practices through which feminism is made and done by self-identified feminists and those who identify with feminism, resisting hegemonic powers and discourses. Despite the online anonymity of many women activists for protection purposes, their bodily and emotional experiences are not detached from their online activism. Emotions bring their bodies together as they resist in online spaces and produce new discourses. Therefore, tweeting under this hashtag, women activists aimed to reclaim their feminist identity, mostly resorting to a reverse discourse strategy. Their strategy attempted to situate their struggle within local and national discourses, connecting women from diverse backgrounds.
However, the hashtag did not appeal to all women activists, particularly the Bidoon [stateless] ones, because they felt excluded from the narrative it triggered – albeit unintentionally. Cyberfeminism can have limitations, including fragmentation and the intensification of the binary opposition of ‘us versus them’ – an inevitable outcome of a hostile narrative by their opponents. Kuwaiti writer Sara Mubarak broke away from this binary by writing a lengthy article grounded in evidence from multiple sources. Still, the effectiveness of both responses in deterring and countering anti-feminist claims remains an open question.
The contestation between Kuwaiti feminists and conservative Islamists has resurfaced in subsequent events, including political attacks on the Women’s and Gender Studies Research Unit at Kuwait University, prompting women academics to respond in a statement, the government’s cancellation of a women’s yoga retreat after backlash by conservative Islamists and clerics, and the circulation of a “values document” signed by conservative candidates, prior to the 2022’s National Assembly elections. The signatories called for implementing strict Islamic laws, including gender segregation in public spaces. At the time of writing, outrage by Kuwaiti civil society groups and activists was expressed over Article 16 of a new draft law on the formation of the National Electoral Commission, requiring women to abide by the Sharia rules and provisions to be able to exercise their right to run and vote.
The offline impact of cyberfeminism(s) can be short and long-term. The former pertains to more tangible and concrete policies and regulations, such as the “family protection” law. The latter includes less informal consequences, including keeping a lively feminist discourse or moving the feminist discourse from the realm of cyberspace to that of mainstream media or TV drama. I concur with other scholars that more abstract outcomes can be far more crucial than short-term concrete ones.
Read the full article here: Cyberfeminist resistance against hegemonic and anti-feminist discourses: the case of Kuwait
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Balsam Mustafa is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University, UK. Her research project explores cyberfeminism in the Arabic-speaking world, focusing on Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. She is the author of Islamic State in Translation: Four Atrocities, Multiple Narratives (Bloomsbury Academic).