Women’s Activism and New Media in the Arab World

In the Arab world, a region undergoing distressing setbacks in social movements and the painful defeats that emanate from counterrevolution, the issues of activism and gender are important, not least where these issues intersect with the question of media and mediation. Insights into the material realities, dependencies, and possibilities of the spaces and tools used by women and their organizations and a critique of the persistence of ideological paradigms around gender and democracy through technology in our disciplines require a drastic overhaul. My main aim in this review of Women’s Activism and New Media in the Arab World is not to deeply dissect what the book describes. I am more concerned about the larger issues of the publication industry and ethical norms around gender-related knowledge production.We know that “new media” is engendered by a sector ruled through a profit-based political economy. We also know that encouraging Information and Communications Technologies for Development and accepting economic development (read: free market policies) as solutions are still the guiding principles of a mind-boggling number of World Bank (WB), United Nations (UN), European Union (EU), and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports. Part of the hypothesis underwritten in these mega (UN, WB, International Monetary Fund) programs is that a gender gap is reflected by the gap caused by technology inequality known as the “digital divide.” In other words, technology and gender are part of the epistemological agenda for global governance. This means research is already a step behind and burdened on both counts. On the one hand, there is no lack of mythology about technology, advancement, and cultural change. On the other hand, the rise of the digital humanities has not only set in motion but solidified a number of assumptions about skills and access to the public sphere. It is these digital tools that help women reach the global stage. These are, of course, also important, but they become mantras once divorced from the material and ideological realms that produce them in the first place. The ideas that technology should improve women’s position and that liberal democracy should be developed as a venue for this are also key assumptions in Women’s Activism and New Media in the Arab World.Ahmed K. Al-Rawi provides an introductory account of the social and cultural status of Arab women and relies on resources from UN Women, UNICEF, and the UN Development Programme, as well as statistics about gender inequality in the Middle East and North Africa region. The methodology is heavily invested in quantitative data collected from social media outlets like Twitter (now X), Facebook, and YouTube. According to Al-Rawi, Arab women activists use social media to express their opinions and establish wider networks, influencing cultural change. Each chapter is framed by a particular form of gender politics—religious, political, social, or cultural activism—and for each case, he demonstrates how media technologies enabled positive changes and women’s empowerment. The section on how the Arab uprisings empowered women and showed more assertive demands for political equality relies heavily on data gathered from online activist groups.When we link the issue of technology or digital media (in this book, “new media”) to the objectives of helping women bridge the gap between the domestic and the public spheres or allowing activists to anonymously use online platforms safely, we arrive at an interesting intersection of online engagement. The book reminds us that media allow women to mobilize and lead social movements more flexibly than offline activism. In a number of examples, we see that digital spaces also act as platforms for women to find their agency as changemakers and locate peers and role models. Digital media indeed allow for the construction of (distributed) networks of supportive communities and the opportunity to gain confidence or learn from each other. Finally, it is certainly the case that a new area of research around hashtags can provide interesting case studies. Popular hashtags in the media discussing online gender politics include #Women2Drive, #Idrivemyself, #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen, and #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship. But this idea of networks and hashtags exposing issues or subjects (being shareable) and being heard (or visible) raises an important question. As readers of this journal know, women across the region are constantly described as suffering from invisibilities. The visibility of new platforms and spaces works well in validating digital infrastructures.As widely discussed in gender studies–related disciplines, there is a recurring tendency to reduce women’s activism to “women’s issues.” Digital campaigns are intended to empower women and spread awareness about gender-based violence (domestic abuse, honor crimes, female genital mutilation, etc.). The point is not to rehash the same (false) binaries about whether technology is a force for good or bad. In fact, this debate has been largely settled. Instead of following this line of argument, we could assess these assumptions in the required scholarly way. If economic justice, practical improvement (development), and infrastructural access (ownership) measure the new media efforts, how does Al-Rawi deconstruct and historically trace their local setup or structures of power? This brings me to the first weakness of the book.In terms of ideas and evidence, the book feels, respectively, rushed and repetitive. Though size is not the primary consideration, it seems clear that another hundred pages would have kept the book short yet given Al-Rawi crucially needed space for depth and analysis. A number of key concepts are treated as universal and standard. In her well-known study on gender and digital activism in the Middle East, Annabelle Sreberny frames activism and its relation to public contention through Chantal Mouffe’s notion of the “political.” This could have been an area to build on. In fact, in terms of feminist citational practices, the book leaves much to be desired. It is always good practice to include the work of others, especially women of color (this reviewer’s work on online/offline analysis in political contexts included). Debates about academic standards and citational ethics do not have to result in defensive reflexes when they are meant as constructive critique and collegial reminders.The second weakness of the book is the contemporary female activist subject: she is the absent presence in a book about women’s activism. The book includes many references to media examples and research by others and provides several interviews. An important base of the analysis is the focus on four frames represented by four women introduced in chapter 2. The case studies of four famous women from the Arab world are highly selective in that they include very prominent Nobel Prize winners and Arab celebrities, including the Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman, the Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi, the Egyptian feminist pioneer Nawal El Saadawi, and the Yazidi Iraqi survivor of ISIS Nadia Murad. These are all interesting figures, but they don’t speak as much to the contemporary lived reality of gender politics and activism since 2011. In the following chapters Al-Rawi introduces four nongovernmental organizations—Nasawiya, ABAAD (Resource Centre for Gender Equality), Arab Women Campaign, and Iraqi Women Rights—provides insights from interviews with their leaders, and analyzes some of their social media posts. But no conceptual glue brings these methodologies and empirical sets together. There is a broader issue of how quantitative methods allow for hopping from one topic to the next, whereas qualitative methods complicate this. One of the main goals of the book is the author’s stated objective to “close the gap in empirical research of the study on women’s activism in the Arab world” (xi). But it leaves us actually in greater need. Perhaps this is also because the attempt to provide a basic framing of it all feels a bit disjointed, as if these were different research projects conducted by different (team) members. If these were part of the book project, one would have liked to see them listed as coauthors or otherwise explicitly acknowledged

Media studies · Political activism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Socioeconomic Development in MENA