Description
In the wake of a string of femicides across Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria in 2022, we saw gender activists mobilising online. This social media mobilisation took many forms, from telling the stories of the specific murdered women, to calling for a regional women’s strike on July 6th, 2022. Images of the victims were frequently placed alongside each other, captions listed the women’s names in combination, references were made to ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘our women’ in the collective, strike organisers utilised the slogan “Taḍāmun ‘abir lilḥadūd” (Solidarity across borders). These acts cultivated a sense that these murders were part of a broader gendered struggle. This paper explores how regional solidarities were constructed through a multi-modal analysis of social media content from across the Middle East & North Africa, complemented by interviews with activists themselves. Challenging orientalist perspectives of a fixed and homogenous region, I will explore how different activists approach regional solidarity differently, continually constructing and reconstructing the borders through their use of language and issue framing.
