![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ajnabiehFor those of us who spend a great deal of time on the internet thinking about gender, the Middle East, and the intersection of these interests, it's been a productive, if sometimes frustrating, two weeks. Mona El Tahawy, an Egyptian-American journalist, wrote a provocative (probably deliberately so) article in Foreign Policy magazine called "Why Do They Hate Us?" which centered the question of misogyny within contemporary Arab politics. Upon this happening, the internet basically blew up, with all sorts of responses from total agreement, to racist agreement, to anti-racist objection, to feminist objection, to misogynistic rejection.
Myself, I found the article to succumb to what I refer to when teaching these issues as "moving walkway syndrome": you start making a statement based from one morally defensible position advocating for social justice, and all of a sudden the walkway is moving under your feet. Every advocate for feminist social change in the Muslim or Arab world finds herself on this walkway at some point--you argue against an ahistorical reading of a particular practice, and suddenly people say you're condoning "honor crimes," you point out that real injustices exist and people say you're condoning invasion and colonization (or agree with you that it's the only solution). I don't think El Tahawy navigates this moving walkway very deftly, but, you know, it's not easy.
The two best deeply critical responses I've seen have been by Jadaliyya and by Mona Kareem, but the one I really want to share right now is My Dad Loves Me, by Jenan Moussa, because it captures one part of the complicated nature of patriarchy and misogyny in the world. (And note I say "the world"--I think this applies in a great number of circumstances, including mine here in the US.) While policies and social norms constrain girls' and women's lives in unjustifiable ways, many young women find that the men in their lives are important bulwarks and support systems, and often their biggest cheerleaders. Hate is not (necessarily) the source of misogyny, even if that is the root of the word; there's a reason that patriarchy, when we use it to describe these issues, draws from the idea of a protective father. There is love all mixed up in this, even if it's a sort of love we might want to reject, or argue against.
(This post brought to you by finals week, and therefore my desperate desire to avoid the massive amounts of grading I have to finish...)
Myself, I found the article to succumb to what I refer to when teaching these issues as "moving walkway syndrome": you start making a statement based from one morally defensible position advocating for social justice, and all of a sudden the walkway is moving under your feet. Every advocate for feminist social change in the Muslim or Arab world finds herself on this walkway at some point--you argue against an ahistorical reading of a particular practice, and suddenly people say you're condoning "honor crimes," you point out that real injustices exist and people say you're condoning invasion and colonization (or agree with you that it's the only solution). I don't think El Tahawy navigates this moving walkway very deftly, but, you know, it's not easy.
The two best deeply critical responses I've seen have been by Jadaliyya and by Mona Kareem, but the one I really want to share right now is My Dad Loves Me, by Jenan Moussa, because it captures one part of the complicated nature of patriarchy and misogyny in the world. (And note I say "the world"--I think this applies in a great number of circumstances, including mine here in the US.) While policies and social norms constrain girls' and women's lives in unjustifiable ways, many young women find that the men in their lives are important bulwarks and support systems, and often their biggest cheerleaders. Hate is not (necessarily) the source of misogyny, even if that is the root of the word; there's a reason that patriarchy, when we use it to describe these issues, draws from the idea of a protective father. There is love all mixed up in this, even if it's a sort of love we might want to reject, or argue against.
(This post brought to you by finals week, and therefore my desperate desire to avoid the massive amounts of grading I have to finish...)