Feminisms and the Mobilisation of Law in Gulf Countries

Abstract: Current literature have tended to analyze feminist activisms in MENA almost exclusively from the point of view of their effect on social change broadly defined, reemphasising the reifications of women as victims by sharia laws, the veil and repressive cultural and political systems. In addition, scholars have often directed their attention to visible forms of feminist activism including protesting in revolutionary countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, among others, and have marginalised feminisms in stable countries. In this context, GulfFeminisms project is groundbreaking in three ways. First, it examines the under-studied domains of the genealogies of feminisms, and the mobilisation of the law in the three Gulf States of Saudi Arabia, Oman and United Arab Emirates. Women’s rights in all the three countries are interpretatively, but differently, operationalized under Sharia law, abridging women’s freedom to fully participate in decision-making processes at the national level. While established scholarship has provided valuable studies of how patriarchal religious and political authorities use legal and religious frameworks to repress feminists, maintain gendered inequalities and restrict women’s rights. This project shifts the established scholarly perspective by examining how feminisms in the gulf are self-motivated political movements that mobilise laws, including Sharia, to operationalise women’s agencies and practices within private and public spheres and to generate political change. Second, GulfFeminisms offers an original and leading perspective on feminisms in MENA as a practice promoting positive social and political change. Third, to analyse the relation of feminisms and the mobilising of the law, GulfFeminisms combines the multidisciplinary, novel, comparative analytical framework of Feminist Comparative Policy theory (FCP), and Epstein and Martin’s (2004) approaches to qualitative and quantitative empirical law research.