Podiumsdiskussion

Sadly Lilia Labidi could not come to our lecture. That is why we had an interesting discussion panel for the last session of our lecture with Cilja Harders, Nora Lafi, Heba Amr Hussein (all ZMO) and Ulrike Schultz (FU) as moderator.
The theme was mainly the women's perspective to the so called “arab spring” in Tunisia and Egypt.
Nora Lafi started with a statement about her impressions on her journeys to Egypt in 2011 and Tunisia in 2012. She made the point that while from Egypt she came back sadly because of the development in gender issues and women rights, she returned with a good feeling from Tunisia. It is important to study why there is such a difference between these to countries where in both state-led feminism had been a quiet big issue.
Cilja Harders warned about judging singular incidents or processes without contextualizing it. She gave the example of the French revolution where there had not been an improvement of women rights ether, but which is not labelled as a “lost revolution”. So while Europeans do not care about every detail of the famous revolution in their context, they keep judging everything what is not proceeding as they wish as a backlash.
Heba Amr Hussein first spoke about an analysis she took part in about feminism discourse in the media of Tunisia and Egypt. While before the “arab apring” there had been some prominent efforts to put gender issues on the agenda, mainly state-led, after the toppling of Ben-Ali and Mubarak the issue mostly disappeared from public media agenda. Still it had different impact on each society like Nora Lafi described.