Miriam Cooke

“Women and Revolution in the 21^st Century Mediterranean”

In this project, I trace the trajectory of euphoria, backlash and persistence that has marked women’s participation in the transnational Arab Spring and the Southern European revolutions. I refer to the events of 2011 until today as revolutions despite widespread academic and journalistic criticism of the word because many participants prefer the term. Naming matters. In revolutions, as in wars, norms and values are suspended “for the duration” in order to accommodate necessary breaches of what is otherwise considered appropriate. When the crisis is over, the cultural police try to restore traditional gender norms as part of a campaign to re-establish order and patriarchal control. In other words, they try to squeeze the genie back into the lamp. To declare a revolution over sanctions that process.  To describe a revolution as ongoing makes room for the abnormal and the unexpected; it opens up new possibilities.

Despite overwhelming challenges to their safety and honor, activist women have not given in to those who would keep them out of the public square. Egyptian women who have been systematically attacked and told to go home have organized themselves into organizations like Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment that encourage women to demonstrate having tried to secure the area in which protests are to take place. The Women on Walls graffiti collective pursues its work where women are most threatened; their physical presence announces to their detractors that they will not be cowed. In Tunisia, women artists have challenged the Islamist regime of the Nahda and even after they had suffered attacks they continued to create and exhibit their work. In Yemen, a veiled demonstrator declared: “We will not stay quiet. We will defend ourselves if our men can’t defend us. Tribes who ignore our calls are cowards without dignity.” They know that they were instrumental in toppling their dictator, and they have thus won the right to return to the square whenever they want. Syrian artists and writers in exile are telling the world what is happening to women inside Asad’s Syria. Even though they know that the arm of that state is long, they are persisting in their work.

I want to examine this unprecedented insistence by women that they have the same rights as men to be publicly visible and audible and thus to be full citizens. What are the local and global conditions that have made this kind of defiance and steadfastness possible? My approach is humanistic in that I pay attention to the art, writings and films that women have produced on their experiences of the past four years.

I have already given several talks on the Arab cases, and I now need to contextualize them within a Mediterranean frame. While at the TELEMME I will research the role of women in Spain’s 2011-2012 Indignados movement and the 2010-2012 Indignant Citizens Movement of Greece in order to compare what appear to be similar events in the European countries of the Mediterranean. It is not only the time of their occurrence that links these Mediterranean uprisings but also their insistence on the restoration of dignity (karama). I am particularly interested to work with Randi Deguilhem whose work on Syrian women since 2011 will be invaluable to my project. I would like to work in the MMSH médiathèque to explore its oral archives. I would be happy to give talks within the GenderMed network on my research on revolution in the contemporary Mediterranean.