Engendering Men: A Collaborative Review of Evidence on Men and Boys in Social Change and Gender Equality

edited by Jerker Edstrom, Alexa Hassink, Thea Shahrokh and Erin Stern, September 2015.
http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/123456789/7059/EMERGE.pdf?sequence=1

Preface

Designed to help answer the question, ‘what works best when it comes to engaging men and
boys for gender equality?’, this evidence review critically assesses trends and shifts in
related social norms and structures over the past 20 years, successful policies and
programmes and implications for best practice, and future directions for promoting men’s and boys’ support for gender equality across a variety of priority thematic areas.

Each of the [nine] chapters reviews the changes that have taken place in the past 20
years across one thematic area, and the roles played by formal and informal institutions and
policies in these changes. This framework is used to set the broader context for the
discussion, which subsequently looks at specific programmes and policies supporting
changes in gender relations, including those that focus on women and girls, as well as those
that are not specifically aimed at gender equality.

Finally, implications, questions and priorities for learning, gaps in evidence and knowledge
are highlighted. The goal is to move beyond a narrow individualistic programmatic focus and
attempt to achieve a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between laws, policies and institutional practices in achieving gender equality and the most effective pathways for sustainable change that take into account individual, community and
structural factors. The chapters cover themes as follows:

1.  Introduction: Framing the evidence and shifting social norms
2.  Poverty, work and employment
3.  Fatherhood, unpaid care and the care economy
4.  Education
5.  Sexual health and rights
6.  Health and wellbeing
7.  Sexual and gender-based violence
8.  Conflict, security and peace-building
9.  Public and political participation

This evidence review is part of a two-year learning and evidence project, EMERGE – or ‘Engendering Men: Evidence on Routes to Gender Equality’ – being undertaken by the
Institute of Development Studies, Promundo-US and Sonke Gender Justice between
January 2014 and January 2016, with funding from the UK Department for International
Development (DFID). The evidence review, combined with other project elements, aims to
cultivate stronger leadership for working with boys and men to promote gender equality, by
gathering, interrelating, analysing and strategically disseminating evidence and lessons in
targeted and accessible formats for improved learning, policy and practice.

Chapter abstracts

Chapter 1  Introduction - Framing the evidence and shifting social norms
What are social and gender norms and how do they change? What are some of the broad trends that drive and constrain progress towards gender equality? More than 20 years have passed since men’s roles, responsibilities and potential contributions were first recognised as a critical component in the fight to achieve gender equality. While globally during this time, values in support of gender equality and women’s empowerment have been trending upwards, full gender equality is still far from realised. Harmful gender norms remain entrenched in many cultures across the world. Changing the way men accept and live gender equality in their own lives is part of a broader social and political process of change.

This chapter explores the broader processes that drive and constrain change across education, health, caregiving, political and economic participation and more. It explores how long-standing gender norms and expectations are informed and reinforced by social groups and institutions, and embedded in social and power relations. It provides context as to how
large social, political and economic forces drive change at both the societal and individual
levels, and outlines promising interventions, gaps and blind spots, and recommendations for
the future of the field.

Chapter 2  Poverty, work and employment
Globalisation and macroeconomic policy over the past 30 years have increased women’s
participation in formal and informal paid work, whilst their responsibilities in unpaid domestic work have not been significantly reduced. Many other gendered economic inequalities remain (such as in pay, land rights and inheritance) and there is a mismatch between increases in women’s economic assets and other expressions of empowerment including decision-making and participation in public and political life. Evidence shows a range of roles for men in women’s economic empowerment from obstructive through to supportive, and it highlights the importance of understanding contextual and cultural notions of gender and masculinity for economic change. Experiences of engaging men in programmes for women’s economic empowerment, predominantly through microcredit, show positive outcomes in women’s psychological wellbeing, household relations and economic empowerment. The significance of specific strategies for working with men however is less well understood.

Future research should explore policy and programme responses that take into account men
and gender relations at greater scale. There is also a need for more research on men and
masculinities in ‘power’, ‘at work’ and ‘in policy’, and to unpack the relationship between
gender equality and national and international models for economic development.

Chapter 3  Fatherhood, unpaid care and the care economy
How have social and gender norms around fatherhood, caregiving and unpaid work shifted in
the past 20 years? How do men’s roles as caregivers impact gender equality more broadly?
With women now representing 40 per cent of the paid workforce, men have also begun to
play a larger role in care work. However, there is still much to be done. Women are still
spending one to three more hours each day on housework and two to ten times as much
time on caring for a child or older person than men. To advance gender equality, the burden
of care work on women must be alleviated and redistributed equally between men and
women.

This chapter will provide an overview of some of the broad shifts in unpaid care work and men’s caregiving at the international, national, local and individual levels. It will look at successful and promising policies that seek to create systemic shifts in the care work dynamic, including paid, non-transferable paternity leave, and other policies tailored to informal work economies. Finally, it will provide programmatic strategies that have been successful in engaging men to shift gender norms around fatherhood, caregiving and balancing the care divide.

Chapter 4  Education
What is the transformative function of education to challenge patriarchal power relations
learned and reproduced in school settings? This chapter explores recent trends and shifts in
gender and education, reviews educational sector efforts, teacher trainings, curriculums and
policies that have sought to or have evidence of transforming gender inequalities and harmful
gender norms in schools. The chapter also considers strategies to engage parents and
community members within the education system for gender-transformative efforts and
pedagogical approaches that adopt a more gender-equitable teaching–learning experience.

How young people and teachers construct their gendered identities in schools and how forms
of school violence are deeply rooted in unequal gender relations and constraints, including
heternormativity, are explored. Limitations of the emphasis on numerical equity in schools for achieving gender transformation and justice are unpacked. There is a particular dearth of in depth longitudinal studies to assess how educational interventions influence the gendered
experiences of students, teacher and educational outcomes, and how gender equality
educational work with boys influences girls’ empowerment. More research is also needed on
how addressing violence can keep boys and girls in schools, on boys’ gendered experiences
at schools including violence and bullying, and on the gender-related conditions that
encourage this and/or hinder responses.

Chapter 5  Sexual health and rights
What are the most effective and promising approaches to transform norms of masculinity that have been found to influence men’s sexual attitudes and behaviours, including their utilisation of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services?

This chapter reviews recent trends around the promotion of men’s sexual health and rights in ways that advance gender equality and support the SRH of girls and women, and how institutions, including political, religious, and health systems, have influenced these shifts. Key areas of concern for promoting men’s sexual health and rights are how to promote and ensure the sustainability of long-term attitude and behaviour change regarding men’s sexual health, which require more large-scale, long-term evaluations. For both men and women, there is a limited understanding of how sexuality intersects with SRH, and more grounded, ethnographic research on men’s SRH is required to better understand the cultural, social, and economic drivers behind men’s SRH, and the diversity of men’s sexual identities, practices, and relations. Such insights are critical for related policy, programming, and structural interventions. Prioritising quality, equality, and accountability for men’s sexual health to meet their own, as well as the SRH needs and rights of girls and women, is warranted.

Chapter 6  Health and wellbeing
What are the most promising and effective ways to challenge dominant constructions of
masculinity, such as notions of invulnerability and the promotion of risk-taking, which
influence men’s poor health and excess mortality? This chapter explores gendered disparities in health and wellbeing, including the complexity and diversity of men’s health in relation to women and girls, and how these are influenced by relational, institutional and structural factors. A review of institutions and policies that have supported and/or hindered men’s health and wellbeing including access to health care is offered, and how they can best respond to the ways that social, economic and political dynamics encourage men to compromise their health and public health more broadly.

The current stock of knowledge in the area of men’s health provides a limited basis for meeting men’s health needs, and for comprehensively evaluating programmatic and structural interventions to improve men’s health. Further evidence is needed to assess how efforts to improve men’s health behaviours and gender attitudes influence women’s health and wellbeing, using a gender relational approach.

Chapter 7  Sexual and gender-based violence
Three reasons to focus on men in sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) include that:
perpetrators of violence are overwhelmingly men and boys; constructions of masculinity work across individual to societal levels, driving gendered violence, and; violence is also of concern to men and boys. The evidence reviewed in this chapter reveals a series of key
findings, including that a focus on attitudes alone neglects the structural violence and
institutional inequalities which are shaping SGBV. Programmes explicitly addressing norms,
behaviours, and relations associated with ideals of manhood can indeed be gender
transformative, but with important caveats. For example, men and boys should not be treated
as a homogenous group, and programming must not reinforce binaries between men and
women. Strategies need to address harmful masculinities rather than merely behaviours or
attitudes. This requires engaging both men and women to challenge deeply held beliefs at
the personal level, and connecting specific programmes with enabling processes of wider
social change. Such enabling strategies should address the underlying drivers of violence,
including socio-economic inequalities and institutionalised discrimination. Future research
should include exploration of gendered power differences intersecting with other inequalities,
whilst context-specific longitudinal research on transitions to adulthood should be developed
alongside long-term programme evaluations.

Chapter 8  Conflict, security and peace-building
How do experiences of conflict and peace-building affect men and women differently? What
can be done to ensure that after conflict, communities establish sustainable peace and codify
gender equality? Violent conflict can have devastating emotional, physical and economic
impacts on the lives of all of those involved. With the understanding that men and women
face death and displacement, violence, economic failures and health in distinctly gendered
ways, the ways in which individuals, groups, policymakers and governments have approached and analysed conflict over the past 20 years has evolved greatly. This has brought increased attention to women’s and men’s varied experiences during and post conflict, including roles of violence perpetration, victimisation and peace-building. This chapter presents some of the broad shifts in the past 20 years with regard to trends in conflict and peace-building and their influence on gender roles and dynamics. It presents examples of policy solutions, including those to eradicate sexual violence in conflict by labelling and prosecuting it as a war crime and those promoting women’s participation in peace-building. It also presents programmatic strategies to engage men thoughtfully for gender-equitable outcomes in conflict, peace-building and post-conflict through their various roles as perpetrators, victims, leaders, and agents of change.

Chapter 9  Public and political participation
How can men’s control and domination of political and public spaces be transformed?
Quotas have improved women’s numerical representation in politics in most countries, but
this does not seem to radically shift patriarchal norms within institutions of power. Women’s
inclusion in social movements has often been instrumental or opportunistic, sometimes
reproducing gendered power imbalances. Men have reacted in different ways to women’s
increased public and political participation. Whilst men’s different material interests appear to
influence their support for or resistance to women’s participation, men can also gain from
equality due to relational and collective interests.

Evidence on effective strategies for men’s engagement in gender-equal public participation is sparse, but examples include: strategies in formal political institutions; strategies for women’s equal participation in wider social justice movements; and pro-feminist activism emerging from men’s engagement in addressing gender-based violence in community-based initiatives. However, there is a major gap in programming with men in support of women’s political empowerment, going beyond current programmes focused on interpersonal issues. There is a lack of evidence on effective approaches for increasing men’s active support for and engagement in women’s public participation, and we need better evidence on how institutions and their gender cultures can be reformed.


Full report: http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/123456789/7059/EMERGE.pdf?sequence=1

Gender and the Revolutions: Critique Interrupted

by Norma Claire Moruzzi

published originally in Middle East Report 268, Fall 2013.

• How is gender related to revolutions? 
• What is the connection between “gender” and women or, for that matter, between gender and women and men?
• If gender is generally understood to be the social construction of sexual difference, what explains the differences in gendered identities across cultures or over time?
• And in thinking about gender, how can observers avoid the naturalization of the familiar, or the demonization of gender relations that seem foreign?

These questions were posed in dramatic fashion by the political and social changes in the Middle East that were initiated with the “Arab revolutions” starting in the spring of 2011. A revolution (as opposed to a coup) is a long process rather than a distinct event, with its roots stretching backward into pre-revolutionary conditions and its effects carried forward beyond formal political changes to the state.

Women were involved in the Arab revolutions, in all their aspects, and women’s rights as a feature of citizens’ rights have been central to the democratic mobilizations against corrupt and autocratic regimes. Yet all too often the gendered aspects of political struggles in the region have been reduced to the volatile symbolism of “the veil” and the question, “How do they treat their women?”

The three examples below present a corrective to such simplistic reductions and show how gender as a category is fundamental to the analysis of contemporary political dynamics and democratization. These cases not only display the actions of women and men as subjects, but also foster inquiry into how the social structures of identity and authority shape the possibilities for the actions of individuals. Gender shapes politics. But politics also influences gender, and political change can make available or limit different constructions of being a woman or a man in a changing society.

The basic relationship between gender and politics is  important to remember  because analysts so often segregate “women’s issues” from others and consider gender dynamics irrelevant to local conditions and social change. Similarly, gender is all too easily reduced to women, rather than functioning as an inclusive category of analysis of how social roles (and ideas of masculinity and femininity) are constructed by individuals and institutions that are also shaped by them. [1] An exclusive focus on women tends to neglect the extent to which women are actively engaged in other integrated social movements (including grassroots activism that may not explicitly focus on gender) or to ignore the extent to which women are absent from political mobilizations (including “youth” protests that are overwhelmingly male).

The model of women patiently suffering or heroically resisting a universal and unchanging patriarchy may have been pushed back in many parts of the world to accommodate a more specific and dynamic analysis, but it fits all too well with the habits of neo-Orientalist interpretation. This limited intellectual framework is inadequate for serious research into contemporary women’s lives, gender relations or politics, whether formally or informally enacted, and whether in the Middle East or elsewhere.

Women and Islam

In 2011, Leila Ahmed added A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America to her groundbreaking scholarship on gender politics in the Muslim world. Her Women and Gender in Islam (1993) is still the most important general history on the subject, and her memoir A Border Passage (2000) helped establish Muslim women’s claim to the documentation of their own experience. (It is hard now to remember that, even in the 1990s, scholars bemoaned the cultural obstacles prohibiting audiences from hearing women’s autobiographical voice.) The timing of the new book was especially fortuitous. It appeared in print just as the Arab revolts were unfolding. The events of the spring of 2011, from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen and beyond, took almost everyone by surprise. But Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolution was not about the unexpected mobilizations in the streets. Instead, it was apparently yet another contribution to the extensive scholarship on the cultural, political and social meanings of the veil.

As Ahmed herself established in Women and Gender, it was only in the nineteenth century that veiling became such a contested symbol of Islam as a religion and a culture. At the nexus of imperialism and nationalism, the veil became variously the representation of women, culture, oppression, liberation, piety, tradition and fanaticism. Though contradictory, these understandings of veiling cast its meaning as fixed and absolute.

Research has consistently shown, however, that both the form and the meaning of veiling as a practice change over time and place. Nonetheless, “the veil” is accessible shorthand for almost any gender issue related to the Middle East and Islam, and Ahmed’s book was well positioned to capture the attention of general readers. The book, indeed, is a sociological and ethnographic study of contemporary veiling in Egypt and the United States, especially among a new generation of educated, activist Muslim women whose choice to cover their heads is part of their integration into public life. More unexpectedly, the book is also a history of the development of political Islam in response to modern political and economic conditions in Egypt and the region, and the more recent emergence of a publicly engaged Muslim immigrant identity in the US. Situating the renewal of women’s veiling practices carefully in political history, Ahmed allows gender to function as part of an intersectional analysis, rather than an essentialism.

Instead of focusing exclusively on women, Ahmed explores the modern political history of Egypt, and both men’s and women’s reactions to a century of state repression and decades of neoliberal economic policies justified as top-down modernization. The Society of Muslim Brothers, an organization with an almost entirely male leadership, became the most important association in opposition to the Egyptian government. The Brothers advanced a cultural critique from the right that prioritized a distinct Islamic identity as the recognizable sign of popular mobilization and communitarian (but not egalitarian) solidarity.

Ahmed’s careful interdisciplinary analysis illuminates the generational tensions that have come into play in Egypt since the fall of Husni Mubarak: a veteran oppositional organization with little democratic experience among its male established leadership; a youthful cohort of democratic activists, men and women, veiled and unveiled, with little formal organization; an unreformed security apparatus willing to ally with any political formation that will give it legitimacy without challenging its entrenched authoritarian and economic privileges.

In a parallel analysis, Ahmed examines the emergence of a Muslim population in the US for whom political mobilization around Muslim community issues, identity and social justice coexists with a home-grown commitment to democratic pluralism associated with the realities of American minority politics. For many American Muslim women, especially second-generation immigrants, veiling is a self-consciously visible adoption of the hyphenated, hybrid identity common to the US immigrant experience. For these women, participation in Islamic organizations offers both a community of activism and an ideology of fraternal civic equality, the gender politics of which have become open to dispute through women’s involvement and challenge. The comparative framework makes clear that popular trends -- in veiling or in politics -- move in multiple directions. Neither veiling nor democracy is essential to any society or location.

Ahmed’s integration of the analysis of gender and (Islamist) politics exemplifies the refusal to isolate these categories or to segregate the issues of women’s rights in countries in which most citizens have few rights. Hence the quietly radical challenge within the covers of Ahmed’s book, and its relevance to the study of revolution, democratization and gender politics in the Middle East today. But while Ahmed’s work provides a comprehensive overview of the history and sociology of contemporary Egyptian and American women’s veiling, the following examples provide more intimate analyses of the body politics of gendered political experience, examining how gender (as a category of socially constructed sexual difference) is thoroughly integrated within structures of formal and informal power relations in key events of the Arab uprisings. These examples also help locate the current limits to the democratic project that is in process in so many places in the region.

Gender and Politics

The notorious tragedy of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation is a case in point. The Tunisian street vendor’s action prompted the mass national protests that brought down the Ben Ali government, and then spread like wildfire to other states in the region with similar problems of elite corruption, crony capitalism, economic stagnation and arbitrary governance. But Bouazizi did not set himself on fire simply because he was denied the right to make a living; he set himself on fire because a woman allegedly slapped him in the face.

Bouazizi worked diligently in the informal economy in order to support his widowed mother, disabled paternal uncle (who was also his stepfather) and younger siblings. He was occasionally harassed by local officials; street vending may or may not have been legal in Sidi Bouzid, and the municipal inspectors wore uniforms similar to those of the police. Certainly, peddling was one of the few available economic opportunities for an unskilled young man like Bouazizi in a town with an unemployment rate estimated at 30 percent, and municipal inspector Faida Hamdi claimed she had been “tolerating” Bouazizi working in the same location for some time.

On December 17, 2010, they had an altercation. Bouazizi’s family has stated that Hamdi slapped and spat on Bouazizi, that her two male colleagues kicked and beat him before they confiscated his goods, and that they insulted his dead father. Hamdi’s family denies she mistreated Bouazizi, although she confiscated his goods as part of “doing her job.” Hamdi herself has stated that she did not mistreat Bouazizi, and that she had never spoken to him before the incident. She claimed that she had a new order to clear vendors from that area, and when she tried to confiscate his goods he struggled with her, and she called for the police.

What exactly happened between the 45 year-old woman and the 26 year-old man may never be precisely known. Eyewitnesse accounts differ, and witnesses to a confrontation between a uniformed agent of a venal and violent state and an itinerant street vendor may not have found it expedient to recall details. But aside from the disputed facts, the story of their encounter, and its shifting account of local gendered identities and politics, is itself significant. Virtuous (honest and hard-working) masculinity publicly humbled by a feminine manifestation of corrupt state power -- this was the tale that set off the protests that eventually brought down the Tunisian government and sparked the Arab revolts.

According to this narrative, Bouazizi burned himself alive because he had been struck by a woman, who only happened to be a representative of an abusive state apparatus. In authoritarian Tunisia, the harassment of working-class, backwater provincials by government officials was almost to be expected, and therefore not particularly demeaning. There is solidarity in class oppression. But the affront to Bouazizi’s sovereign masculinity stripped away the meager dignity it had afforded him, and when the state refused to acknowledge his claim to reparations (the return of his goods), he made a public protest of his own self-destruction. His act, and the state-sponsored abuse that had prompted it, were recognized as having pushed him beyond the limits of his endurance.

Faida Hamdi was arrested, released, arrested again (on orders from President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali) and released again (after Ben Ali was deposed). She was able to tell her story: When she confronted Bouazizi, he had grabbed at her breasts. Public opinion turned. Now the story of a gratuitous insult to masculine dignity was balanced by a story of an improper affront to feminine modesty. [2] Virtuous (modest and conscientious) femininity defending itself from a masculine sexual assault -- this was the tale that facilitated the uneasy post-revolutionary reconciliation of antagonistic national actors.

Hamdi returned to work as a municipal inspector, in the civilian clothes that replaced the uniforms of the previous regime, and the varying gender politics of the Bouazizi-Hamdi incident were subsumed within the general questions of formal electoral representation and power sharing between the new government and expectant citizens.

The limits of top-down state feminism under authoritarian regimes are exemplified by the Hamdi-Bouazizi encounter. Before the democratic revolution of 2011, Tunisia may have been a repressive police state with little room for political participation by either men or women, but it did provide for women’s relative juridical equality. The policewoman who slaps the hapless poor man was part of a state policy of incorporating some women into an authoritarian state; thus the vendor was persecuted by a corrupt and imperious security apparatus in which women could (as agents of this state) have positions of power.

Precisely because Ben Ali’s Tunisia was not a democratic society (the state did not empower its people, only its agents), women’s individual empowerment as state agents did not necessarily contribute to more egalitarian social relations, and patriarchal norms could coexist with the individualized advancement of women. Hence the man was doubly humiliated by the state’s repression, provided in the guise of a woman (as a formal state actor) belittling him in a social form (the slap).

But after the formal democratic transition, the vilified state agent is redeemed and reincorporated within the social polity by being recategorized as a modest woman. Her actions are reinterpreted: She is no longer seen to have acted as a (female) state agent, but as a proper (feminine) social subject. Just as Bouazizi asserted his compromised masculine dignity as the last signifier of his claim to respect from the state (as an appropriate political subject), Hamdi proffered her righteous feminine honor as her claim for inclusion within the new state as an appropriate social subject (and of her rejection of transgressive gender politics). Yet nothing in this shifting balance of gendered protest and obligation has much of anything to do with democratic agency, emancipation or equality.

Gender and the State

Perhaps especially in the Middle East, there is a well-established tradition of authoritarian governments incorporating women as equal political subjects through state-sponsored policies of secular modernization, but no one as participatory political citizens. [3] Programs of juridical gender equality in states in which no ordinary citizen has political power risk disrupting the conventional existing hierarchies of status (masculinity and femininity included) without offering compensatory collective opportunities (rather than individual token competitive advancement.) From the 1970s on, the secular modernization projects also adopted a neoliberal embrace of capitalist “wealth creation” that often means increasing economic inequality, with competitive advancement for an elite few, and increasing immiseration (justified on an individualized basis) for most. This shift means that the stabilities of class identity are also disrupted by an ideology of individual competitive achievement, again without offering a goal of collective emancipation or equality.

Patriarchal norms, often legally enforced, have frequently been invoked by liberal capitalism to maintain social order alongside the unregulated freedoms of the market. The ideology of unfettered economic freedom has provoked a corollary ideology of desirable social controls; despite possible libertarian experiments, modern capitalist social orders have mostly privileged the family as an idealized site of naturalized obligation for all concerned. But patriarchy also involves the domination of men; it is a system of hierarchical order for everyone, gendered but also aged, classed and raced. Status is inflected by position relative to the familial model of the singular patriarch, and although patriarchy provides rigidly limited social identities, the position of any individual within the hierarchical structure is essentially dynamic. One is not born but becomes a patriarch.

Within a patriarchal system, men are as firmly tied into a binary identity as women are: The equivalent to women’s entrapment in the duality of the mother/whore opposition is men’s confinement to the roles of protector and patriarch or victimizer and criminal. The actions of an individual in relation to members of the opposite sex will be interpreted differently according to their location inside or outside the boundaries of family affiliation: Patriarchy is not simply a form of domination, but a system of social reproduction. Within the family, a woman is a mother or a possible mother-to-be; outside the family, a woman is a possible whore. Within the family, a man is a protector or a possible patriarch; outside the family, a man is a possible libertine or a thug. It is the familial affiliation that makes the difference.

Patriarichal order is not limited to kinship relations; it can be extended to the subject population of the patriarchal state. [4] Token advancement for some women can exist under the auspices of the patriarchal state. The fundamental threat to patriarchal order (in the state or in the family) is not the power of some (women) loyalists, but democratic participation and demands for civic equality. Citizens making those demands risk placing themselves outside the bounds of the patriarchal state’s familial protectorate and becoming identified as possible threats to the political family. Outside the defining boundaries of affiliation, any woman can be a whore, any man a terrorist.

If in 2011 Egypt’s Tahrir Square became the positive international symbol of the ability of peaceful mass protest to bring down a dictator, by 2013 it has also become the site of the patriarchal political order’s most symbolic defensive retaliation. The multiple, public and increasingly violent sexual harassments and assaults in and around the square have followed a remarkably similar pattern: A woman is systematically separated from her companions; she is surrounded by a mass of men pulling at her clothes, groping and penetrating her with their hands; her assailants intentionally confuse her and possible rescuers by shouting that they are rescuing her or protecting her. [5]  Similar attacks occurred under the Mubarak regime, and were recognized by activist groups to have been carried out by criminals known as baltagiyya and sponsored by the state security forces. Women protesters were the subject of targeted, coordinated, sexualized attacks that were intended to drive them out of contested public spaces, as one victim recalled an officer saying, “so you would stop taking part in demonstrations again.” [6]  State enforcers punished women for challenging the proper order of the patriarchal state, and that punishment was implicitly acknowledged to be proper to the state (men who challenged the order were punished differently). Some men claim they were paid as part of shadowy baltagiyya gangs to assault women protesters under the Mubarak regime, and that they are similarly being paid and recruited since the revolution. [7]

The main difference between the Mubarak-era attacks and the post-revolutionary attacks seems to be in the rhetoric of the attackers. In the midst of an assault, while tearing off a woman’s clothes and grabbing her body, a man will tell her, “Do not be afraid, I’m protecting you,” or “You are like my sister.” [8] This phrase confuses the victim: She cannot distinguish actual anti-harassment activists with benevolent intentions from those perpetrating the attack. But it also blurs the boundaries of the patriarchal order. Since when is it openly permissible for a man to grope his sister?  The clearly bounded familial and political identities of the patriarchal Egyptian state have been challenged by an unfinished revolution, but the present polity is a tense mix of democratization, factionalization and a security apparatus without remorse.

Before the Egyptian revolution, the enforcers of state authority represented the patriarchal state’s familial order. Anti-state demonstrators were outside that family boundary, and could therefore be appropriately targeted for their (sexual and political) provocation (according to the logic of patriarchal identities, women protesters had proved themselves whores.)  After the 2011 uprising, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ruled in the name of the revolution and the people. Elections were held and President Muhammad Mursi took formal power. The military withdrew from government, but the state security system (the Egyptian “deep state”) went unreformed. Targeted sexual attacks on women protesters continued, and increased in number, but their rhetoric changed: Now thugs assaulted their “sisters” even as they “protected” them. (The state-sponsored gangs do seem to “protect” women from men in the crowd who have apolitical agendas of sexual assault; several women survivors describe a small group of men attempting to extricate them from the mob, while agreeing among themselves to take her somewhere else to rape her individually.) [9]

The tension between the remnants of the patriarchal state order and the democratic claims of its citizens was impossible to reconcile, and difficult to admit within the chaos of competing factions. But it is clear who holds power. We are all democrats now, the thugs seem to be saying to their victims, we are all one family; but we are a family in which anything is permissible (for us), and you should be afraid.

Women and Men

One woman protester recounts that, on November 23, 2012, she was rescued by one of her attackers. Having come to Tahrir Square to protest the proposed new constitution, she was separated from her friends after the police started firing canisters of tear gas. Suddenly surrounded by a mob of strange men, her clothes were ripped off and she was groped and sexually assaulted as she was pushed naked into an alley off the square, then pushed past businesses that refused to open their doors, and toward a refuse dump. Desperate, she began to implore the attacker directly in front of her. Crying out that she was a mother, she told him he was “a brave and valiant man” whom she chose as protector. And he responded. Suddenly turning around, he beat at the other men with his belt, screaming “I will protect her…I will protect her,” until she was able to crawl away and find refuge at the field hospital. [10]

This woman introduces her testimony by emphasizing the familiarity of her story of assault and survival. What is exceptional is the sudden shift in patriarchal social values such that there can be a tenuous reestablishment of the patriarchal bargain. The woman entreats the man to recognize her as a mother (and not a whore); she asserts that she recognizes him as an honorable protector (and not a criminal.) The man’s acceptance of the benevolent masculine version of gendered patriarchal identities transforms his relationship to the men around him; they become threats to his status and reliability as a patriarch, as well as to the woman’s security and wellbeing.  A moment before, he was one of them, and she was outside the boundary of obligation. A moment after, and the men around are now themselves threats to the patriarchal order. In either case, there is no room for a relationship of equality. The woman escapes, but the possibilities for autonomy and citizenship, for women and for men, are as shredded as her clothes.

Democracy, Revolution and the Question of Patriarchy

So how is gender related to revolutions? If gender is the social construction of sexual difference, experienced through daily practices and conventions as well as institutional enforcement, then the relationship between gender and politics is fundamental. And it flows two ways: Neither gender nor politics is exclusive of the other, nor absolutely determinative. Gender saturates political relationships and the subjective identities of all political actors; collective political change shifts the possibilities for individual experience, including gendered expectations and realities.

Particularly during periods of revolutionary upheaval, gender norms become unstable. If the state itself is under threat, so is the family order sponsored by that state, as was posited as far back as Aristotle. In describing the origin of the polis (the self-governed city-state), the Greek philosopher argued that the first human social relationships were based on reproduction and kinship. With regard to politics, however, “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.” [11] 

Patriarchy is not unique to Muslim-majority societies, and patriarchal authoritarian states do not exist only in the Middle East. Patriarchal social values can exist within democratic societies, but they will then inevitably come under pressure as the democratic project expands and deepens, not only in state policies but within citizens’ changing gendered subjectivities. Formal elections in themselves are not sufficient for democracy, when democracy is understood not only as a system of government but also as a form of pluralist negotiation among citizens. To the extent that any group of citizens understand themselves as exclusively entitled to determine state policy for all, democracy is in question. Similarly, to the extent that the patriarchal social order is accepted as naturalized within the political framework, democracy and citizenship are incomplete.

Like revolution, democracy is a long project. And as too many historical examples show, its early local struggles are often bloody and their outcomes even hostile to the rights of many of its subjects/citizens. This might be expected, although it must not be condoned, and ought to be resisted. In many of its guises, patriarchal authority is a comforting presence, guaranteeing a sense of security for those within the familial bounds. But it is not democratic. As revolutionary struggles for equal citizenship and political participation continue, everyone would do well to remember this.

Endnotes

[1] These problems of interpretation are not confined to research on Muslim-majority societies, but are epistemological issues prevalent across women’s and gender studies. See Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
[2] New York Times, January 21, 2011; al-Sharq al-Awsat, February 2, 2011; Michael J. Totten, “The Woman Who Blew Up the Arab World,” World Affairs, May 17, 2012.
[3] See Hoda Elsadda, “Egypt: The Battle Over Hope and Morale,” Open Democracy, November 2, 2011.
[4] Social norms of honorable defense of the public good (gad‘ana) vs. bullying enforcement of arbitrary authority (baltaga) apply inside and outside the family, and to men and women. See Farha Ghannam, “Meanings and Feelings: Local Interpretations of the Use of Violence in the Egyptian Revolution,” American Ethnologist 39/1 (February 2012).
[5] Documentation can be found in “Sexual Assault and Rape in Tahrir Square and Its Vicinity: A Compendium of Sources, 2011-2013,” prepared by the Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, Nazra for Feminist Studies and the New Woman Foundation (February 2013), available online at http://www.nazra.org/en.
[6] Magda Adly, quoting a policeman’s statement regarding attacks on women during the May 25, 2005 protests, in “Sexual Assault and Rape,” p. 5.
[7] “Egypt: Sex, Mobs and Revolution,” BBC documentary, December 7, 2012.
[8] “Sexual Assault and Rape,” p. 5.
[9] Ibid., pp. 19-21, 24-26.
[10] Testimony of survivor, “Sexual Assault and Rape,” pp. 24-26.
[11] Aristotle, Politics, Book I, ch. 2, paragraph 1253a, lines 19-20.

reposted from: http://merip.org/mer/mer268/gender-revolutions 
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Women at war face sexual violence

In her new book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, Helen Benedict examines the experience of female soldiers serving in the US military in Iraq and elsewhere.

Here, in an article adapted from her book, she outlines the threat of sexual violence that women face from their fellow soldiers while on the frontline, and provides testimony from three of the women she interviewed for her book.

More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War II.

Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq. Some 600 have been wounded, and 104 have died.

Yet, even as their numbers increase, women soldiers are painfully alone.

In Iraq, women still only make up one in 10 troops, and because they are not evenly distributed, they often serve in a platoon with few other women or none at all.

This isolation, along with the military's traditional and deep-seated hostility towards women, can cause problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself - degradation and sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival.

Between 2006 and 2008, some 40 women who served in the Iraq War spoke to me of their experiences at war. Twenty-eight of them had been sexually harassed, assaulted or raped while serving.

They were not exceptions. According to several studies of the US military funded by the Department of Veteran Affairs, 30% of military women are raped while serving, 71% are sexually assaulted, and 90% are sexually harassed.

The Department of Defense acknowledges the problem, estimating in its 2009 annual report on sexual assault (issued last month) that some 90% of military sexual assaults are never reported.

The department claims that since 2005, its updated rape reporting options have created a "climate of confidentiality" that allows women to report without fear of being disbelieved, blamed, or punished, but the fact remains that most of the cases I describe in my book happened after the reforms of 2005.

CHANTELLE HENNEBERRY

Army specialist Chantelle Henneberry served in Iraq from 2005-6, with the 172nd Stryker Brigade out of Alaska. I was the only female in my platoon of 50 to 60 men. I was also the youngest, 17.

Because I was the only female, men would forget in front of me and say these terrible derogatory things about women all the time.

I had to hear these things every day. I'd have to say 'Hey!' Then they'd look at me, all surprised, and say, 'Oh we don't mean you.'

I was less scared of the mortar rounds that came in every day than I was of the men who shared my food.

One of the guys I thought was my friend tried to rape me. Two of my sergeants wouldn't stop making passes at me.

Everybody's supposed to have a battle buddy in the army, and females are supposed to have one to go to the latrines with, or to the showers - that's so you don't get raped by one of the men on your own side.

But because I was the only female there, I didn't have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife.

During my first few months in Iraq, my sergeant assaulted and harassed me so much I couldn't take it any more. So I decided to report him.

But when I turned him in, they said, 'The one common factor in all these problems is you. Don't see this as a punishment, but we're going to have you transferred.'

Then that same sergeant was promoted right away. I didn't get my promotion for six months.

They transferred me from Mosul to Rawah. There were over 1,500 men in the camp and less than 18 women, so it wasn't any better there than the first platoon I was in. I was fresh meat to the hungry men there.

I was less scared of the mortar rounds that came in every day than I was of the men who shared my food.

I never would drink late in the day, even though it was so hot, because the Port-a-Johns were so far away it was dangerous.

So I'd go for 16 hours in 140-degree heat and not drink. I just ate Skittles to keep my mouth from being too dry.

I collapsed from dehydration so often I have IV track lines from all the times they had to re-hydrate me.

MICKIELA MONTOYA

Army specialist Mickiela Montoya served in Iraq for 11 months from 2005-6, with the California National Guard. She was 19 years old. The whole time I was in Iraq I was in a daze the whole time I was there 'cause I worked nights and I was shot at every night.

Mortars were coming in - and mortars is death! When they say only men are allowed on the front lines, that's the biggest crock of shit! I was a gunner! But when I say I was in the war, nobody listens. Nobody believes I was a soldier. And you know why? Because I'm a female.

There are only three things the guys let you be if you're a girl in the military - a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. You're a bitch if you won't sleep with them. A ho if you've even got one boyfriend. A dyke if they don't like you. So you can't win.

I wasn't carrying the knife for the enemy, I was carrying it for the guys on my own side”

A lot of the men didn't want us there. One guy told me the military sends women soldiers over to give the guys eye-candy to keep them sane.

He told me in Vietnam they had prostitutes, but they don't have those in Iraq, so they have women soldiers instead.

At the end of my shift one night, I was walking back to my trailer with this guy who was supposed to be my battle buddy when he said: 'You know, if I was to rape you right now nobody could hear you scream, nobody would see you. What would you do?'

'I'd stab you.'

'You don't have a knife,' he said to me.

'Oh yes I do.'

Actually I didn't have one, but after that, I always carried one.

I practiced how to take it out of my pocket and swing it out fast. But I wasn't carrying the knife for the enemy, I was carrying it for the guys on my own side.

MARTI RIBEIRO

Air Force Sergeant Marti Ribeiro was assaulted by a fellow serviceman while she was on duty in Afghanistan in 2006. It's taken me more than a year to realise that it wasn't my fault, so I didn't tell anyone about it.

The military has a way of making females believe they brought this upon themselves. That's wrong.

There's an unwritten code of silence when it comes to sexual assault in the military.

But if this happened to me and nobody knew about it, I know it's happening to other females as well.

_____________

Adapted from The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq by Helen Benedict, just released from Beacon Press.