ACTIVATING THE GENDER LOCAL Transnational Ideologies and ?Women's Culture? in Northern Sudan

Abstract

In an era of privileging the transnational at the expense of local practices, what can be said about the state of Middle East and North African (MENA) gender and women's studies? Some of the tensions of this paper reflect the ambivalence of MENA women's studies toward modernist and postmodernist/postcolonial stances and methods, especially the attempt to link local ethnographies and transnational practices. In previous research I have been arguing for recognition of the political transformative potential of localized practices and the need for a grounding of the transnational and international in the local and the personal. I am especially interested in linking the sexual and intimate with the transnational. My study of gender and sexuality in Muslim northern Sudan underscores the coexistence of two transnational institutions: the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) and its affiliated Sudanese Women's Union (SWU); and the Islamist state as represented by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and its past and current incarnations (the Muslim Brotherhood [Ikhwan] and the Popular National Congress, respectively). These two sociopolitical institutions, the SCP and the NIF, are seemingly poles apart on the Sudanese political spectrum and in their relationships with women. The SCP is commonly characterized as progressive, secular, gender egalitarian, and modernist; the NIF as conservative, religious, oppressive to women, and traditionalist. In fact, both are modernist movements; neither is secular; neither is gender egalitarian. In