Description
This panel offers insights into feminist and queer perspectives on gendered struggles in the Middle East and North Africa. It does so through a range of important interventions on and innovative contributions to radical and feminist methodology, theory and research ethics procedures. Looking across Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Kuwait, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq, the five speakers draw on a broad spectrum of contemporary case studies, investigating the gendered dynamics of intimate relationships, online spaces, transnational solidarities, conflict research and litigation processes. Challenging the boundaries between scholarship and activism, these papers fundamentally question the traditional dichotomies between researcher and the researched and, consequently, articulate a vision of future gender research that is grounded in critical and creative approaches and immanent ethics. In doing so, we open up understandings of ‘resistance’ to foreground as knowledge sources the experiences of both young women and ourselves as researchers.
