Tunisian Women’s Literature and the Critique of Authority: Sources, Contexts, and the Tunisian “Arab Spring”

Abstract

Using life stories, this chapter highlights Tunisian women’s agency before and after the revolution. Given the lack of written documents—memoirs, autobiographies, and so on—related to the early history of women’s movements in Tunisia, the experiences of the first Tunisian women to go to school at the beginning of the twentieth century and those women who were the first to practice professions that had been dominated by men are important for understanding when, how, and why they were active—or were not active—in political struggles. The chapter demonstrates that following the so-called Arab Spring, a new online literature became accessible to a broad public, including the new phenomenon of political cartoons produced by women and a renewed interest in zajal—poetry and oral jousting in the everyday language of the people—where women zajal poets speak their verses in public.