Ten years ago, as protests erupted in Tunisia and similar movements sprung up across the MENA region, women defied the expected odds and took to the streets alongside men to echo calls for freedom, dignity, civil rights and, above all, political reform.
Allying these concerns to their fundamental demands for equality and respect for their rights as women, they shrugged off attributed identities espousing ‘docility’ and ‘passivity’ to publicly stake their claim as active political agents.
Despite the real concerns about retaliations, crackdowns and threats of sexual violence against them, women activists persevered undeterred.
Using online platforms and new technologies to disseminate messages and denounce government and police malpractice, Tunisian and Egyptian women (like their counterparts across the region) rallied to push these burgeoning movements on the ground forward: Lina Ben Mhenni’s ‘Tunisian Girl’ blog, Asmaa Mahfouz’s viral online videos, Amira Yahyaoui’s tweets and posts from exile in France, ‘Facebook Girl’ Esraa Abdel Fattah’s cyber activism… The list is long.
A rollercoaster of a decade later, women in the region experienced various highs (the introduction of the 2017 Law on Eliminating Violence against women in Tunisia for instance) and severe lows (reignited campaigns against women human rights defenders in Egypt).
Tracing the legacy of women’s activism during the uprisings is a complicated process and there is still some way to go. But while the past year has shown the endemic nature of violence against women worldwide, there is also a growing interconnection between women’s movements in the MENA, online spaces and new forms of protest. To paraphrase the academic Amel Grami, we went from an army of “militant academics” to popular women’s movements such as Assault Police, EnaZeda or the Collectif Chaml. The digital activism of young women organised in ever-growing collectives is contributing to the growth of transnational feminist networks. The latter keep at the centre of the debate the crucial women’s rights issues that have been defended on the streets and in the squares in 2011.