Translating Gender Sensitivity
Feminist Activism, Human Rights, and the Police in Post-Revolution Tunisia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2290996 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Osman Galal (0009-0003-7110-9345, New York University New York USA) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1081-6976 • E-ISSN: 1555-2934 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/plar.70009 |
| OpenAlex | W4409440945 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 23 |
This article examines the circulation and adoption of human rights discourses and practices in Tunisia following the Arab Spring revolution, which toppled a dictatorship that had built its legitimacy upon a myth of progressive women's rights. Drawing on participant-observation in training workshops for the police on a new law to combat violence against women, I ask: How do Tunisian feminist activists and the police grapple with the complexities of the novel regime of rights that is constituted through multiple scales of governance, competing moral and legal frameworks, and incommensurable forms of expertise? I argue that translating gender sensitivity into local bureaucratic practices entailed the cultivation of new affective dispositions through which battered women become recognizable as victims. The sensitivity training brought into sharp relief the paradox of victimhood wherein the attempt to recast gendered vulnerability as grounds for rights rather than the target of compassion reinscribed the masculinist logic of the state and raised anxieties about the lingering afterlife of the dictatorship. Drawing on the literature on human rights and affective governance, I shed light on a crucial yet understudied dimension of the circulation of human rights discourses: the mobilization of affect that is entailed in vernacularizing universal discourses into local practices
Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender
The Making of the Tunisian Revolution
Casualties of Care
Governance Feminism
Prisoners of Freedom
The Management of Hate
Red Tape
The Nature of Transnational Alliances in Women’s Associations in the Maghreb
Finding Words for Sexual Harassment in Egypt
Finding the “Humanity” in Human Rights
La Femme’ Before and After the Tunisian Uprising
"State Feminism"? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China
Occupational Hazards
Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism
The Burden of Intimate Partner Violence
On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy
The paradoxical victim
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |