Introduction

Abstract

Histories of gender in the modern Middle East and North Africa have flourished in the last three decades, fueled in part by JMEWS. Yet much of this work is circumscribed by the nation-state, which remains the primary framing for discussions of women’s activism and gender-based reform. Existing scholarship includes glimpses of women collaborating across national, regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries but rarely foregrounds these transnational connections or emphasizes how formative transnational spaces and conversations were in shaping gender norms. This roundtable brings together the work of gender historians whose research collectively ranges from Morocco to Afghanistan, and traces a variety of connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Its five short essays highlight modes of movement, organizing, and exchange across borders, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We demonstrate the many ways in which women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice, often shaping gender norms in the process. But should all modes of cross-border collaboration be described as “transnational”?One area of debate that the roundtable addresses is whether “transnationalism” is the best analytic mode for studying women’s activism across local and international borders. While thinking entirely beyond the national has its own historiographical value (Ludden 2003), transnationalism as a methodological approach begins with the nation, then demands that scholars think above and below it in ways that have the potential to challenge its solidity and salience as a category of analysis. Pursuing a transnational approach, we acknowledge the nation as a salient political unit while refusing to be confined within it, whether in linguistic, spatial, or ideological terms. Another key concept running through these essays is “transnational feminism,” which foregrounds feminist cross-border collaborations in the name of disrupting systems of power (Mohanty 2013). During the colonial era, many feminists in the Middle East and North Africa engaged in transnational organizing in opposition to colonialism. More recently, transnational feminist organizing in the Middle East and North Africa has been anticapitalist, prodemocracy, and has often sought to end US military occupation in the region.This roundtable also touches on questions of what counts as “transnational” activism and the scales on which it operates. Our essays reveal how micro and macro transnational feminist organizing contributed to reshaping gender norms in the wider Middle East. Marya Hannun’s work reconstructs a web of feminist organizing that connected Afghan women with women from Cairo to Bombay. Nova Robinson’s piece reveals how Syrian women collaborated with US and Swiss feminists to try to secure representation from the “East” on the League of Nations’ Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women. Anny Gaul’s research demonstrates that multiple generations of Moroccan women activists engaged with ideas and movements circulating through the Middle East and beyond as they advocated for liberation. Focusing on these models of exchange and activism encourages new spatial frameworks for understanding women’s organizing. Lucia Carminati’s essay addresses such frameworks by asking how the inherent transnational nature of certain spaces, like the Suez Canal, impacts gendered subjectivities and histories in unique ways. Finally, Gülşah Torunoğlu’s essay addresses the promises and limitations of transnationalism as a method of analysis, and discusses “relational comparison” as an alternative analytic lens through which to scrutinize the interconnected feminist networks in the Middle East prior to the 1920s.In addition to highlighting the circuits and exchanges of people and ideas, this collection of essays in conversation with one another demonstrates how a transnational approach can push gender history in the Middle East and North Africa in exciting new directions. Questions that animate this roundtable include: In what ways did feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa transcend the nation and even the region during the interwar period, a time when the nation-state emerged as the default vehicle through which patriarchy was wielded and contested? What were the geographic limits of these connections? How does the fact that women of a certain class around the world had more in common with one another than they did with those who shared their national frames shape our writing of women’s history? How do these divisions endure in the present debates around global feminist movements? Our essays do not definitively answer these questions. However, we suggest that a denationalized analysis of feminism can give us a clearer picture of women’s movements and subjectivities in the early twentieth century, within and beyond national contexts. We hope that our collective exploration about the potential benefits and challenges of transnational analysis sparks further debate and inquiry.