Body Performance and the Engagement within the City: Women Artists Reframing Gender Roles in Amman

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on women artists in the capital of Jordan, Amman, and particularly on their cultural practices as an expression of creative agency. Analyzing the work of visual artist and performer Samah Hijawi and of the co-founders of the art program Spring Sessions, Toleen Touq and Noura al-Khawsaneh, allows us to see the engagement in the city as the reframing of gender roles in neoliberal contemporary patriarchal societies. Their resistance to the codified norms affecting the female presence in public and in the field of cultural management is expressed and experimented with in the visual arts, within the contemporary cultural scene of Amman, the geography of the city and the political commitment, often in informal domains rather than in institutionalized contexts. Women’s creative agency in Amman challenges the status of the State’s monitorial and surveillance system within their city and their country. Artistic itineraries, performances, collective practices, urban cartographies, personal stories, individual or shared initiatives and artworks are portrayed in this article as one of the different modalities of creative agency that re-signifies feminisms today in the Middle East.