Description
In this paper, I pull the veil of silence on acts of resistance to laws governing gendered violence in Egypt and Lebanon. Feminist legal activism is a modality of resistance that involves litigation in the courthouse and complementary public campaigning. The paper argues that laws governing gendered violence offer a site for feminist legal activists to engage with the state in a discursive interaction over the boundaries of women’s gendered citizenship and its influence on women’s material lives.
The methodology is central to the paper's academic inquiry. This paper is an ethnography of archive material: litigation documents harvested from human rights organisations and litigation clinics, as well as oral narratives collected from feminist legal activism. Purposefully, the paper evolves into an archive to highlight the collective nature of feminist legal activism and the diversity of its membership: a character that appears central to shaping its mechanics and discourse. This archive fills a gap in the current academic debate on feminist constitution of the law: how it is made, reformed, and implemented in court.
The paper compares the modalities by which the state reproduces its relationship with gendered citizens following a major event like the Arab Spring through heavy legal involvement in areas of gendered violence. The paper informs current academic debates on post-uprising state building in these two case studies.
