Gender Dictionary: traveling concepts and local usages in Lebanon

قاموس الجندر: مفاهيم متنقّلة واستعمالاتها المحلية في لبنان

“Feminism” is an umbrella-term for an array of global social movements and schools of thought with significant political impact since the early 19th century. Historically, different feminist movements have been shaped by (and shaped) political ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and recently, Islamism. These multiple feminisms converged around agendas for action against gender oppression, for gender equality and increasingly nowadays, sexual liberation.

From the perspective of social movements, a significant development in the past two decades is the global spread of the Anglo-American version of liberal feminism through international organizations such as the UN, and its institutionalization through NGOization (see NGOization). At the same time, autonomous or semi-autonomous feminist movements that are based on more radical or local critiques, have also witnessed a certain level of globalized travel in the past few decades(1), including for example women’s fights against war and for indigenous rights (see Social Justice). Further, deconstructivist approaches as well as post-colonial and intersectional perspectives have increased in visibility within feminism as an intellectual current in the past twenty years. While European and American academic and militant feminists have cultivated significant transnational connections, the frequent divergence between scholarly work and grassroots realities and struggles (at least in settings where gender and feminist studies are highly institutionalized) cannot be ignored.

A canonized way of narrating the history of modern feminism in Europe and the United States is also to divide it into three waves: the “first wave” spans the end of 19th to the middle of the 20th, the “second wave” unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s and the “third wave” began in the 1990s until nowadays. In the 1960s, distinct movements and feminist theories were born out of competing opinions about the manifestations of oppression and discrimination as well as about the best ways to address them. According to this meta-narrative, the main currents were: liberal feminism (claiming that gender inequality is based on cultural beliefs and social constructs that are easy to change), Marxist feminism (linking capitalism and women’s oppression), radical feminism and lesbian feminism. Radical feminism critiques the violence of male domination through familial structures and control on sexuality, and lesbian feminism is seen to have brought in an analysis of heterosexuality as a tool of patriarchy used to dominate women and queer persons (see patriarchy).

In Lebanon, the history of feminist movements can be – and has been – described also using the wave categorization, but includes four stages (or “waves”(2). The four periods were influenced by the legacy of post-colonialism, decolonization, and also characterized by organizational transformations. The “first wave” was tied with the national struggle for independence in 1943 and concentrated on claims for women’s political rights as well as questions of national identity. The second generation of feminists expressed their ideas and demands within an emerging Arab left, and thus within the broader socialist movements in the 1960s(3). The third wave emerged in a post-civil war era and in a rapidly NGOized context(4). The Conference on Women’s Rights in Beijing in 1995 was a key event for introducing gender activism vocabulary to the civil society and its multiplying organizations.

The feminist movement that shaped the most recent, fourth, wave in Lebanon tackled the social role of gender, the struggle against male oppression and patriarchy, and is rooted in local LGBT activism(5) (see LGBT). These groups, activists, and NGOs raised issues that were not addressed previously such as questions of sexual identity, bodily rights, women’s right to pass on their nationality, but also domestic violence and abuse of female domestic workers (see Work, Sex and Bodily Rights). These movements also stressed the need to relate more to local contexts and drew heavily on postcolonial feminism, as well as academic debates on gender and sexuality (see Sexuality).

In general, historians have attempted to add a more complex view of the waves system of categorization. They argued that in “first wave” feminism, the movements were concerned with obtaining basic political rights for women; while the “second wave” were more radical and demanded gender equality and women’s liberation; and “third wave” feminism placed identity (sexual, racial, social class) at the center of gender struggle, in a context of post-colonial and neoliberal globalized societies. In addition, historians such as Linda Nicholson critiqued the metaphor of the “wave” arguing that it is “historically misleading and not helpful politically” because it imposes a false homogeneity within “waves”, thereby obscuring forms of activism occurring “between waves”(6). This critique can also be applied to classifications of feminist activism in Lebanon, especially for the period of the civil war. In general, the waves approach can be critiqued for universalizing a US-centric chronology and model of women’s activism. In this way, most of the 20th century grassroots women’s activism and militancy occurring under the banner of anti-colonial movements, from Palestine to Nicaragua to Rojava, ends up discarded since it does not fit neatly into the three wave classification(7). Postcolonial and intersectional(8) approaches have been some of the key conceptual and methodological interventions in academic feminism and feminist activist practice (see Intersectionality). “Doing” postcolonial feminism entails including ethnicity, race and an awareness of colonial pasts and postcolonial contexts in feminist knowledge production. In this sense, feminist approaches have been a central foundation to postcolonial theory. They aim to highlight the effect of colonialism and racism, and ultimately to end an imperialist, universalizing concept of sisterhood among women. Postcolonial academic feminism has also exposed the inability of white middle class feminism to properly hear the experiences of women living in postcolonial environments(9). For example, in her article on the topic, Chandra Talpade Mohanty pointed to the transformation of so-called ‘Third World’ women within feminist discourses into “objects” of representation, which enables European and North American feminists to turn themselves into self-representing “subjects”, clearly maintaining unequal power relations(10).

Another critique to mainstream North American and European feminism has been posed through Islamic feminism. First discussed by Iranian intellectuals in the 1990s, this form of women’s activism has been branded by Stephanie Latte Abdallah as a “post-ideological” movement(11). Valentine Moghadam has argued that it represents an indigenous inflection of feminism, able to counter cultural relativist arguments which deemed the criticism of certain inequitable gender practices as a foreign imposition, but also capable of affirming the benign character of practices such as veiling, often discussed by secular feminists as a discriminative practice(12). In the U.S. context, “post-feminism” is a theoretical and activist position gaining a growing interest. According to Misha Kavka, post-feminism denotes an abandonment of women and even gender as privileged categories of feminist scholarship while producing knowledge that is informed by previous “feminist waves”, and doing so in a way that “redefines universalism itself”(13).

Feminist activism in Lebanon – whether through NGOs, underground or above ground queer and feminist groups, or through public protests – continues especially in the wake of the Arab revolt and the subsequent political conditions. Various calls for the end to the patriarchal-sectarian system persist, for example through the most recent organizing of a feminist bloc as part of the protests taking place against corruption and the garbage crisis in Beirut. The bloc is not only bringing to light how the corrupted sectarian system is inherently based on patriarchal discrimination – evident for example in the group’s adoption of slogans such as “the patriarchal system is a killer” – but is also challenging sexual harassment and violence against women within the garbage crisis movement itself and its street protests(14).