Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (by Nicola Pratt)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon by Nicola Pratt Sher Afgan Tareen Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon Nicola Pratt University of California Press, 2020, 224 pages In 2011, people across North Africa and the Middle East (MENA) region gathered in public spaces to denounce tyranny. The filming of a crowd gathered around the burning body of Mohammed Bouzizi, a young Tunisian man who set himself on fire in late 2010 in retaliation against the police seizing his scales for working as a street vendor without a permit, is routinely attributed for triggering the uproar. But the profile of Arab women protesters has received far more extensive coverage than the tragic death of Bouzizi might suggest. Western media accounts framed women who had gathered at Tahrir Square as pioneers in speaking out against male aggressors. According to Nicola Pratt, Arab women activists not only predate the 2010 uprisings but have also routinely both upheld and upended the geopolitical order through cultivating a feeling of "respectability." Her book Embodied Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon traces the recurrence of respectability in the geopolitics of these three countries over the course of the 20th century with particular focus on the following key moments: the late-19th and early 20th-century decolonization movement, the 1967 Six Day War (remembered as a catastrophy or a Nakba) and ensuing student-led Palestinian Movement, the proliferation of NGOs and advocacy for women's rights during the late 1980s and '90s, and lastly the restoration of military rule in the fallout after the Arab uprisings. "Respectability" is a feminine virtue that defines itself against the specter of a repressed woman living under the scrutiny of a male kin within the confines of the home. But during the early 20th century, the daughters, wives, and sisters of Arab nationalist leaders leveraged the expansion of higher education and emergence of women's clubs to cultivate respectability, thereby transforming it from a gift of the colonizer to an indigenous attribute of Al-mar'a al-jadida, "the new woman." This new woman dissolved polygamy and reformed marriage from an obligatory to an intimate relationship that avails opportunities for extending educational opportunities to the poor as well as nurturing children into civic-minded citizens. As the reproductive powers of women enveloped child-rearing into a larger project of giving birth to the nascent nation-state, the older [End Page 123] hierarchy between the colonizer and the colonized collapsed while a newer hierarchy between national/natural and foreign/unnatural women arose. The latter includes a large number of women who are ineligible to pass on their national identity to their children, due to marrying a man with a different nationality, instilling in these women a feeling of foreignness created by personal status laws. Personal status laws in Lebanon, for instance, create equality between the various sectarian groups that make up the national assembly on the basis of a consensus among its members of women's subordination to their male kin. Since the decolonization of Arab nation-states, women have continued to enact competing visions of female "respectability" amid an ongoing struggle against personal status laws. At moments of disillusionment with the existing regime, female respectability conveys disrespect for the male elders in the family. But when unrest descends into chaos, hastening calls for a return to order, female respectability restores the family and by extension the nation. During the fallout of the Arab uprisings, for instance, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi hailed the Egyptian daughter who fights for women's rights while his regime jailed female protesters and subjugated them to forced virginity tests inside the prison cells. The suspicion that they had slept with male protesters in outdoor tents not only made their bodies uncouth, but more importantly a threat to national security. By studying the geopolitics of the MENA region through the frame of female respectability, Pratt reveals that the seemingly abstract ideas such as colonialism, decolonization, neoliberalism, and martial law are in fact gendered practices waged over women's bodies. While conventional studies are replete with maps charting the influence of...