The Shape of Arab Feminism on Facebook

Abstract

Much has been said about the influence of Western culture on social movements worldwide, and this claimed influence has caused some to accuse Arabic feminism of being merely an alien import to the Arab world. New waves of feminism have arisen as a reaction to the claimed prevalent western culture. Global Feminism argues that women worldwide experience similar subjugation in many social constructs because many cultures are based on a patriarchal past, but other waves reject the concept of a universal womens experience and stresses the significance of diversity in women s experiences and see their activities as transnational rather than global. Others expect that the confrontation of secular and Islamist paradigms will dominate. Social Media has global reach, and there are signs that Facebook pages are used by feminists worldwide to boost their social and political activism. Facebook gives public pages' owners the ability to associate their pages with pages with similar ideologies. This provides a global space where feminist pages are clustered and exposes clues about their patterns of influence. By crawling Arabic feminist pages over Facebook, this paper builds a dataset that can be analysed using social network analysis tools and reveals the map of influence between Arabic feminist network and the western, transnational, and Global feminist networks. The map shows that Arabic womens pages are clustered in two segments: Arab feminism, and Sect feminism. The later consists of pages which distance themselves from associating with secular feminism pages whether they are Arabic or not, and in contrary to the former, they are less likely to restrict themselves with national Identity.