Bargaining With Patriarchy: Gender, Voice And Spatial Development In The Middle East - Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women's Groups in the Middle East - Review

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2001 by Nabila Jaber

Dawn Chatty and Annika Rabo, Editors. Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women's Groups in the Middle East. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 1997. 236 pages index. Paper $19.50.

THIS EDITED BOOK IS A COLLECTION of essays first presented at a workshop in June 1995 at the Centre for Cross-cultural Research on Women, University of Oxford, UK. To begin with, the book title, "Organizing Women", I thought, is very suggestive in terms of advancing a recognition of women's political subjectivity in the construction of their particular imagined community. Practices of social networks and group formations are posited as critical strategies of empowerment for women, which in turn enable them to exploit the political moment to speak out and to speak on behalf of women of similar concerns. (This is particularly observed in feminist organizations in Lebanon, Tunisia and Egypt). Equally important is to consider as the editors observe "what happens when women in the Middle East try to organize themselves?" Most revealing is the event that prompted the workshop, resulting from a lived frustrating experience encountered by a group of pastoral women in Oman who were refused government permission to org anize themselves independently, despite their success story in participating in income-generating activities. Women, in this instance, in the name of protectionism, were denied an autonomous public voice/space in negotiating their gender-specific needs, outside the boundary of domesticity. This event raises two interrelated issues: opportunities and constraints. It links economic opportunities with development as much as it highlights the limits of participating in development projects under a traditional regime of patriarchal ruling, where both public and private patriarchies retain utmost legitimacy over women. This is not to deny that controversial notions of traditional gender roles in society vis-a-vis their place on the scale of equality discourse remain central, yet critical, in the discursive positioning of women. These questions of opportunities and constraints/obstacles are captured throughout the readings, along with the dilemma faced by women when seeking a public space of their own (women only g roup) without becoming a place for men's use.

First let me situate the context and framework of the articles included here and then give a brief account in terms of thematic focus and general arguments. The book is comprised of 10 articles that cover a wide range of regional and geographical locations in the region of Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Effectively these studies are located in Arabic-speaking countries, including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Morocco, with the exception of Senegal. While such groupings of countries amount to highlight the representation of the category, Arab Middle Eastern women, Chatty and Rabo, in their introductory chapter, rightly problematize the use of the term given its historical colonial overtone in representing women of the Middle East--voiceless victims who are mired in tradition and passivity. In addition, the fallacy of homogenization in using such term is highlighted by the authors as they draw attention to the existing vast differences not only in religious identity (Islam and Christi an) but also in existing cultural practices both between regions and within countries.

An important area on which the book is focused is the project of "modernity" and developmentalism. This includes themes of civil societies, the question of gender equality, nationalism, Islam and identity, and most of all, the (repressive) style of nation-building. These issues are considered in a number of articles and addressed in the context of recent and new development of women's groups. Broadly speaking, the articles can be divided into two fields of study: anthropology and sociology. The anthropological studies draw extensively on ethnographic fieldwork and provide rich detailed accounts of localized practices of women's activism. These are manifested in a ritualized form that follow a kinship model of networking and generally take extra domestic orientations. In fact, the readings force us to rethink the dichotomies of private/public world in a more fluid and interactive relationships. This is shown, for example, in Seteney Shami's ethnography of Palestinian women's domestic activism in Amman beyond the public/private divide, followed by Eva Rosander's accounts of different practices of kinship work among women's groups in Africa (Morocco and Senegal). Likewise, Suad Joseph's case study concerns itself with the Christian Women's League in Lebanon and critically addresses the reproduction of hierarchical practices of patronage/clientele relationships among women/feminists. What is refreshing about these studies can be seen in attending to the play of women's agency in reproducing and/or modifying kinship ties, against the commonly assumed notions of passivity and subservience. As Nancy Landisfarne remarks in her concluding chapter that women, like men, also seek to maintain the very symbolic practices of hierarchy in terms of status, prestige and power.