Our Public Transcript on Gender

I said in an earlier post that Egypt scores, in the World Value Survey, highly on: religion on top (97%), idea of women staying at home because housework is gratifying more than paid work (97%), and the 70% of the youth said they would fight for their country.

So a friend of mine said that men in Egypt would fight a religious war to keep women at home. 

Our public ideas on gender is less sensitive than our discourse on identity or religion. It shows how we construct in the public sphere strongly unified ideas on gender entitlements and rights.

Let's Present a Definition that would be Shared: What are women's rights? Choice, equality, equal right to choice. But what are the choices available? Most feminists would agree that there are three R's: recognition (women have a right to be recognized—herstory, contribution to society, voice, participation—women are part of this world, not silent. They're valuable citizens of the world), re-distribution (having said that they deserve recognition, where is, then, their share of value, wealth, and rights, employment, etc.) and restitution, which is more contentious and less popular (having said that they exist, that there are writers, editors, and artists that have been narrated out of history, can we say that they merit a bigger share based on the structural inequality that they have inherited?) Restitution is contentious because of its baggage in history. The fourth R making a big splash today has been rights and contestation around rights as they are linked to any of the previous Rs. Many of the articles written with feminist intent today (written with a sensitivity to gender dynamics) fall into one of the previous R categories.

Notion of "Rights Talk" have recently been develop as tools for justice. But we didn't like these tools, feeling their hegemony and arguing that they representing someone else's reality.

Notions of Colonial Justice Comes In: The laws that define what justice is comes from different traditions and cordon off personal status laws into the realm of cultural rights/law and this emanates from colonial histories and modalities construct usually in the early part of the 20th century. This was to include the difference between men and women, the difference between public spheres, Muslims/non-Muslims, the rights of the state to use weapons of violence that non-state actors are not entitled to, and Islamic rights (which is where the Cairo Declaration on Islamic Human Rights came from, for example.)

General Food for Thought To Show Ambiguity in the Construction of Public Discourse on Women's Rights: Slavery is mentioned in the Qu'ran but it was the only one of the personal status entitlements that was not included in the personal status law and in fact thus over-turned. Muslims dropped the distinction of slave/non-slave and we no longer recognized that someone could be owned by others. But when it comes to questioning gender differentiation and gender injustice, people feel very strongly about it.

The dual reality of rights talk and cultural laws and the persistence of this duality is sometimes questioned when it comes to Islamic banking law. Islamic banking became acceptable when it became profitable. This duality has been questioned, destroyed, re-created when it comes to Islamic banking.

If there isn't an effort to demonstrate how rights are practiced on the ground, you run the risk of dispossessing people. There is inadequate connections made between the previous three thoughts: the feminist attempt to articulate the 3 (and now 4) Rs—recognition, redistribution, restitution, and rights being the first, the second notion of colonial justice that legal apparatus emanate from traditions different than the location to which they're applied, and finally the elaboration of what "justice" means and the subsequent failure to connect gender and justice together, particularly in personal status laws.

New feminist discourses have been busy articulating the notion that women are also part of community. This rights-bearing citizen-subject, which is the desire of a lot of feminist discourse, retains a certain aspect of modern myth. For a lot of women, community is not an oppressive mechanism. We need not to focus too much on the role of state and its service delivery and the international community would discipline the state if its fail because there's also a very dynamic and fluid relation between women and community. Through this framework, it might be possible to link the feminists three R's to closely inter-linked ideas of gender justice—not only for personal status laws, but other gendered forms of discriminatory legal and social practices.

So what are other academics and activists saying that have feminist intent as well but are dissatisfied with these dualities, baggage, and constraints? Legal systems have a construction of blind justice that's about rule of law, procedure, and undifferentiated and undiscriminatory for subjects of law (as claimants of justice).

Much work has been rallying to dispute this point specefically. Scholars have recently argued that subjects of law are differentiated and they're not single and undifferentiated—they are men and women and there are differences within this. These articles are making a point on women and state and feminist notions that dwell upon these issues. They're not necessarily saying it's not delivering only. They're saying the state has to be made to deliver because left to its own institutional devices it will not deliver gender justice. Its questioning the issue of neutrality when it comes to rule of law and making a very politicized point about gender in dislodging this neutral notion of gender: "if only there's rule of law and the state is delivering (functioning markets, social security, legal systems and courts, job, etc.) it won't be enough to have neutral modern institutions like rule of law; it's also not enough to say the communities aren't fair and that the state will be fair. They're saying that leaving some issues to be decided by communities by not facilitating more active participation, or voicing a support for women's rights, etc. then these states will not be able to deliver. So mix between the two and a stop to the totalistic desire to stick or reaffirm only one at the expense of another is recommended.

Some have said that the ICESCR (International Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights) is the document from which one can work to get these human rights like social security, healthcare, free education—service delivery on behalf of the state.