Women and Memory Forum

The Women and Memory Forum (WMF) is an Egyptian research organization consisting of researchers and activists dedicated to the production of specialized knowledge in the field of gender and women’s studies. Our aims are to strengthen women’s rights movements, raise awareness, and empower women in the Arab world. We seek to address what we perceive as the key obstacles confronting Arab women. These obstacles include scarce alternative cultural and political knowledge about women in history and contemporary society and about hegemonic discourses that undercut women’s rights and aspirations. We also see ourselves as an integral part of a feminist transnational movement seeking more equitable and just societies. The WMF began in 1995 as an idea among a small group of researchers and developed into an organization that invited more members to participate, in the process expanding our scope and interests.

WMF researchers and activists work on projects linked to member interests and expertise. Our first projects focused on rereading Arab cultural history from a gender-sensitive perspective: highlighting the roles of women pioneers by republishing their work and organizing remembrance conferences, rewriting folk tales from a feminist perspective, and revisiting the role of women in the premodern history of Muslim societies and in the Islamic tradition. Current WMF activities include the Women and Memory Library and Documentation Center, a specialized resource center on gender and women’s issues in the Arab region; the oral history Archive of Women’s Voices, which documents pioneer women’s life stories and women’s experiences in the Egyptian public sphere after 2011; Translating Gender, where we produce readers of translated seminal texts on gender in different disciplines; and the Gender Education Program, a series of gender training workshops that offers students and activists specialized theoretical training in gender studies.

Which knowledge? Peoples in the Arab region at the beginning of the twentieth century were battling colonialism and struggling for national liberation and modernization. We face somewhat different challenges at the beginning of the twenty-first century, although as was the case one hundred years ago, resistance to neocolonialism and the cultural hegemony of the North continue to complicate approaches to women’s issues. Until now women’s rights agendas have been politically manipulated to justify neocolonial interventions, and until now women’s rights defenders have been suspect and forced to constantly defend themselves against allegations of misrepresenting their cultures. We need to produce and disseminate research that introduces new ways to face our present challenges. For example, we need more applied research on critiques of modernity and grand historical narratives. We also need to further explore in our national scenes alternative histories and their implications for marginalized groups and indigenous social movements. Limited indigenous analysis on these matters helps explain the confusion and rigid opinions that often reign in discussions of decolonization, the postcolonial nation-state, and what it means to be Egypt or an Egyptian. The extremist conservative and the extremist modernist currents produce a continuous action-reaction pendulum movement in the society. The conservatives uncritically seek to re-create an imagined past. The modernists, in contrast, continue to subscribe unreservedly to modernization theory and the European Enlightenment paradigm. While often understood to exist in opposition to each other, both currents tend to be ahistorical and lacking in context in their perspectives on cultural identity, indigenous social development, and reform. In different ways proponents of both currents often produce discourses and practices that marginalize and exclude women from public space and cut women off from our cultural roots and organic social characters. WMF researchers and activists address these challenges by analyzing postcolonial feminist movements, decolonization and national identity projects, and the treatment of marginalized social groups in other global South societies. All of the above matters have become more pressing and complicated with the grave challenges that face the Arab world in the aftermath of the revolutionary wave that shook the region in 2011.

Women and Memory Forum

www.wmf.org.eg

August 21, 2014