Making Space and Women's Activism in the Arab World

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Breathwaite, Marisa
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

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This thesis explores how women in the Arab World have made space for social and political activism in the years leading up to, during and after the Arab Spring. By assessing the varyingmethodologies women in the Arab World use occupy different spatial realms, I assert that despite Western media portrayal of Arab women as non-actors or recent participants in sociopoliticalactivism they consistently take part in dynamic activism in order to fully experience citizenship and progress in the processes of empowerment. This thesis covers three distinct spatial realms: streets, public gathering places and curated, women-only spaces. I detail women’s activism initiatives from each spatial realm, with examples coming from the Arab countries Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine. The examples come from news outlets, interviews and academic analyses via journals and other collaborative projects. I engage the examples with scholarship on western imagination of Arab women, patriarchal structures and feminist geography. In analyzing the significance of space in how Arab women engage in sociopolitical activism, I argue that Western conceptualizations of activism often exclude Arab women’s activities and that activism does not yield a penultimate status of “empowerment”, but continuous progression and pushback.

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