Teaching gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is often marked by pedagogical, sociocultural, and political challenges. In the MENA context, the effects of authoritarian politics, conservative cultural understanding of gender relations, and neoliberal policies intersect in the classroom. Amid such a charged setting, applying a feminist pedagogy that subverts paradigms of power and preexisting socioeconomic realities in the classroom is increasingly contentious, yet even more necessary.
This essay analyzes the challenges of applying critical feminist pedagogy in a public higher education institution in Egypt. Academic institutions—especially state-funded institutions—operate under close regime scrutiny in contemporary Egypt. Teaching gender politics thus takes place under strict political surveillance that censors critical thinking, in addition to cultural biases and prevailing views of feminism and gender politics as Western constructs. The essay puts forward several strategies to overcome these challenges by employing feminist pedagogical strategies. By introducing themes from the students’ lived experiences and linking them to literary texts on feminism, instructors can demonstrate the intricate and fundamental link between the personal and the political, and intentionally “disturb” students’ thinking about gender politics in their societies and in their daily lives.
Challenges of Teaching Gender and Women’s Studies at an Egyptian Public University
The first major challenge facing instructors relates to the position and value of gender studies courses within the broader context of public higher education. The fact that there are no departments in the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University that offer gender as a major render the position of such courses as precarious and subject to constant threats of being removed from the curriculum. When they do get offered, courses on gender and women’s studies are usually taught as electives, and only in a few graduate programs in the social sciences and humanities, as outlined in the introduction to this Critical Perspectives section. While the bylaws of graduate studies stipulate that students complete a certain number of credit hours to graduate, they do not specify the areas and/or fields these credits should cover. Therefore, the inclusion of gender courses in graduate programs is often left to the intellectual and political whims of senior professors and administrators who design the core curriculum.Footnote
1
The second challenge relates to the broader political context and to the political reality that lurks outside the classroom and strongly shapes the dynamics and content of class learning. Contemporary Egypt is an increasingly authoritarian state where not only political rights and liberties are at stake, but also academic freedoms are threatened. Curriculum design is tightly controlled by the university administrations and professors’ teaching methods are subject to various types of direct and indirect state surveillance.
In addition to this broader repressive context, teachers face constraints that very likely— and often unconsciously—control and curb discussions of critical feminist discourse and debates in the classroom. As part of a feminist pedagogical tradition, the role of the instructor is to subvert the dominant rules that places theory and reality apart. Yet, this process of subversion is far from easy. The rise of chauvinism, nationalism, fundamentalism, militarization, and masculinism, and the pressure to exercise monolithic forms of subjectivity, are just a few examples of the constraining factors that interfere with the classroom’s learning dynamics.
Against this broader backdrop, a committed feminist teacher has only two options. One is to abide by existing rules and read some “soft” novels and a few poems in which “empowerment” is the theme, thus deepening the gap between theory and reality. The second, and more dangerous option, is to maneuver the constricted political and academic reality and create a robust learning environment without falling into the ambush of the authoritarian regime. Certainly, the second option allows gender studies to express and restore the political dimension on which the feminist project is based. In the following section, I present some pedagogical tools that, in my experience, may help instructors create a critical feminist classroom.
How/What to Teach? Strategies of Feminist Pedagogy
In the English Department at Cairo University, I teach two elective courses: Feminist Literature and Criticism in the master’s degree program and Gender Studies in the PhD program. In a country ruled by an unprecedented and oppressive regime that views any different voice as a threat to its own stability and power, I encourage students to practice freedom of speech and thought in the classroom through several pedagogical strategies.
First, I practice the main slogan of feminist pedagogy: teaching to subvert. If feminist pedagogy is all about subverting the paradigm of power relations, then the master’s-level class—Feminist Literature and Criticism—is the right place for doing this.Footnote
2 I discard all traditional openings in introductory classes. I resort instead to telling students the objective of the course: I am here to disturb you. Toward that end, I encourage students to see how the personal and the political are intimately connected. When the political dimension of power relations—public and private ones—is revealed in the discussions, students can link theory to their quotidian lives. Certainly, this is very risky, because sometimes I come across students who are unwilling to move beyond their own idiosyncratic opinions and worldviews to connect to broader knowledge claims. Cathryn Bailey (Reference Bailey2019, 259) noticed that such resistance is “routinely replicated in our classrooms—sometimes with disastrous results.” However, my strategy often works: I recall one student who confessed that her father had not wanted her to register for a feminist course because it would “confuse” her mind and expose her to “unwelcomed” ideas.
A second strategy that I often employ is to remind students of the reasons for studying gender in the first place. This strategy is especially useful in graduate classes, as it helps the instructor overcome the obstacle of indifference among PhD students. To that end, I start with a subtheme, “Why/How Gender Studies?” where we read, for example, Arianne Shahvisi’s “Feminism as a Moral Imperative in a Globalised World.” Shahvisi (Reference Shahvisi2015, 12) critiques the market forces that turn gender issues “into a personal matter,” thus “creating a new pseudo-feminism within which the loudest voices are those of white, middle-class feminists.” The ethical and moral imperative underlying this discourse helps students connect the readings to their realities outside the classroom. It shows them the effects of globalization and neoliberalism, repressive politics, and patriarchy on their lives. After all, theory cannot be a liberatory practice except through redressing the gap between academia and reality/activism. I take bell hooks’s strategy as my general guide. Much like other contributors to this Critical Perspectives section conclude, the feminist classroom “is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice” (hooks Reference hooks1988, 51).
My third pedagogical strategy is to contest the various forms of precarity that characterize the lives of students in Egypt. Here, I take seriously Mohanty’s (Reference Mohanty2013) advice to study the micropolitics of women’s everyday lives in marginalized communities, if we need to combat patriarchy, political repression, and economic precarity. My lead-in is to start by examining one issue in which the intersectional nature of precarity is manifested, such as sexual harassment or gender-based violence as portrayed in a literary text. The discussion usually begins with a mild condemnation of the protagonist, but throughout the course, students begin to interrogate the wider context that enable and perpetuate sexual violence against women. As noted by Žvan Elliott in this section, I address the intersection of both class and religion with gender, whether different religions or the issue of veiled/unveiled, and how they influence students’ view on the issue.
These two factors, class and religion, denominate the differences among my students. When respectfully addressed, I achieve two other important pedagogical goals: respecting and acknowledging differences without privileging certain voices over others. Addressing these problematic issues (they are not problematic in themselves but are perceived so according to normative social values) facilitates establishing several important feminist goals: first, education becomes a practice of freedom and an exercise of agency; second, teacher and students become the subject of the discussion (i.e., we are gazing at ourselves, not gazed at); and third, it links the personal and local to the political and global. These goals—even if partially achieved—restore to feminist pedagogy its political dimension and embodies it in terms of struggle and change.
My fourth strategy is to problematize the West/Arab/Muslim dichotomy in the classroom. We read Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (Reference Spivak1985) and highlight the epistemic violence carried out by the feminist readings discussed on the “colonial female subject.” However, I also remind students that creating stereotypes is sometimes instinctual. Over the years, I have noticed that students are preoccupied with the issue of the West’s stereotyping of Arab women (read: Muslim women). My reaction is to remind students of the Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s composed response when, in 2019, a Muslim audience asked her to condemn female genital mutilation. In a nondefensive tone, she responded, “So I would like, not just for you, but for everyone to know that if you want us to speak as politicians, American politicians, then you treat us as such” (The Guardian 2019). Omar’s acute awareness of the inclination to reduce “Muslim” women’s agency to specific bigoted assumptions about Islam protected her from becoming defensive.
Finally, I take syllabi design to be one tool of transgressive pedagogy. I see the syllabus as a living entity that should “talk” to students:Footnote
3
Imagine what a change has come about within feminist movements when students, most of whom are female, come to women’s studies classes and read what they are told is feminist theory only to feel that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects to “lived” realities beyond the classroom. (hooks Reference hooks1991, 5)
Hence the importance of transnational studies to practice what bell hooks (Reference hooks1994) has labeled “teaching to transgress.”
Instead of fathoming the nature of power and its structures as reflected in the texts, we analyze the forms of resistance to that power that will reveal the way it sustains and renovates itself; here, Mohanty’s essay “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” (Reference Mohanty2003) is essential. We are aware that women writers of the South (and the North) have challenged the whole paradigm (concept, act, and practice) of the traditional understanding of gender relations. But how far, then, can we incorporate texts from the South into the curriculum? And how far can we generate a transnational reading of gendered resistance? A reading that emanates from and depends on the theory of intersectionality is essential.
To avoid what Ella Shohat (Reference Shohat2001, 1270) calls “the sponge/additive approach,” the syllabus includes diverse paradigms of knowledge. It adopts the approach of co-implication/solidarity,” which requires understanding the local specificities and differences of women’s lives as well as the global ones (Mohanty Reference Mohanty2003, 522). The readings and discussions ensure that the lives and practices of women from the Global South should not be “absorbed into a homogenizing, overarching feminist master narrative,” because mere addition serves to erase differences (Shohat Reference Shohat2001, 1270). To avoid falling into this trap, students work on highlighting local experiences and voices without overlooking the global dimension. Such a strategy also means giving more attention to South-South links, whether by means of comparison or transnational tracing of gender constructs (Connell Reference Connell2015).
Conclusion
The pedagogical strategies discussed here aim to incite “anger” (à la Maya Angelou) against precarious structures and garner trust among students and instructors. By inciting anger, students can grasp how the personal and the political are intimately connected and how authoritarianism triggers a dangerous mix of sexism, hyper nationalism, and neoliberalism. Gradually, through a feminist nonhierarchical and noncentered pedagogy, I encourage students to release and express all taboo opinions in the classroom. The discussions and texts themselves become the pedagogic tools through which both the students and I develop a form of trust that allow freedom of expression and acknowledges our differences without any feelings of guilt or inhibition. It is only by creating such a safe space for students and teachers alike that the feminist classroom can turn into an actual subversive space that allows new liberated subjectivities to emerge and flourish.
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Teaching gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is often marked by pedagogical, sociocultural, and political challenges. In the MENA context, the effects of authoritarian politics, conservative cultural understanding of gender relations, and neoliberal policies intersect in the classroom. Amid such a charged setting, applying a feminist pedagogy that subverts paradigms of power and preexisting socioeconomic realities in the classroom is increasingly contentious, yet even more necessary.
This essay analyzes the challenges of applying critical feminist pedagogy in a public higher education institution in Egypt. Academic institutions—especially state-funded institutions—operate under close regime scrutiny in contemporary Egypt. Teaching gender politics thus takes place under strict political surveillance that censors critical thinking, in addition to cultural biases and prevailing views of feminism and gender politics as Western constructs. The essay puts forward several strategies to overcome these challenges by employing feminist pedagogical strategies. By introducing themes from the students’ lived experiences and linking them to literary texts on feminism, instructors can demonstrate the intricate and fundamental link between the personal and the political, and intentionally “disturb” students’ thinking about gender politics in their societies and in their daily lives.
Challenges of Teaching Gender and Women’s Studies at an Egyptian Public University
The first major challenge facing instructors relates to the position and value of gender studies courses within the broader context of public higher education. The fact that there are no departments in the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University that offer gender as a major render the position of such courses as precarious and subject to constant threats of being removed from the curriculum. When they do get offered, courses on gender and women’s studies are usually taught as electives, and only in a few graduate programs in the social sciences and humanities, as outlined in the introduction to this Critical Perspectives section. While the bylaws of graduate studies stipulate that students complete a certain number of credit hours to graduate, they do not specify the areas and/or fields these credits should cover. Therefore, the inclusion of gender courses in graduate programs is often left to the intellectual and political whims of senior professors and administrators who design the core curriculum.Footnote 1
The second challenge relates to the broader political context and to the political reality that lurks outside the classroom and strongly shapes the dynamics and content of class learning. Contemporary Egypt is an increasingly authoritarian state where not only political rights and liberties are at stake, but also academic freedoms are threatened. Curriculum design is tightly controlled by the university administrations and professors’ teaching methods are subject to various types of direct and indirect state surveillance.
In addition to this broader repressive context, teachers face constraints that very likely— and often unconsciously—control and curb discussions of critical feminist discourse and debates in the classroom. As part of a feminist pedagogical tradition, the role of the instructor is to subvert the dominant rules that places theory and reality apart. Yet, this process of subversion is far from easy. The rise of chauvinism, nationalism, fundamentalism, militarization, and masculinism, and the pressure to exercise monolithic forms of subjectivity, are just a few examples of the constraining factors that interfere with the classroom’s learning dynamics.
Against this broader backdrop, a committed feminist teacher has only two options. One is to abide by existing rules and read some “soft” novels and a few poems in which “empowerment” is the theme, thus deepening the gap between theory and reality. The second, and more dangerous option, is to maneuver the constricted political and academic reality and create a robust learning environment without falling into the ambush of the authoritarian regime. Certainly, the second option allows gender studies to express and restore the political dimension on which the feminist project is based. In the following section, I present some pedagogical tools that, in my experience, may help instructors create a critical feminist classroom.
How/What to Teach? Strategies of Feminist Pedagogy
In the English Department at Cairo University, I teach two elective courses: Feminist Literature and Criticism in the master’s degree program and Gender Studies in the PhD program. In a country ruled by an unprecedented and oppressive regime that views any different voice as a threat to its own stability and power, I encourage students to practice freedom of speech and thought in the classroom through several pedagogical strategies.
First, I practice the main slogan of feminist pedagogy: teaching to subvert. If feminist pedagogy is all about subverting the paradigm of power relations, then the master’s-level class—Feminist Literature and Criticism—is the right place for doing this.Footnote 2 I discard all traditional openings in introductory classes. I resort instead to telling students the objective of the course: I am here to disturb you. Toward that end, I encourage students to see how the personal and the political are intimately connected. When the political dimension of power relations—public and private ones—is revealed in the discussions, students can link theory to their quotidian lives. Certainly, this is very risky, because sometimes I come across students who are unwilling to move beyond their own idiosyncratic opinions and worldviews to connect to broader knowledge claims. Cathryn Bailey (Reference Bailey2019, 259) noticed that such resistance is “routinely replicated in our classrooms—sometimes with disastrous results.” However, my strategy often works: I recall one student who confessed that her father had not wanted her to register for a feminist course because it would “confuse” her mind and expose her to “unwelcomed” ideas.
A second strategy that I often employ is to remind students of the reasons for studying gender in the first place. This strategy is especially useful in graduate classes, as it helps the instructor overcome the obstacle of indifference among PhD students. To that end, I start with a subtheme, “Why/How Gender Studies?” where we read, for example, Arianne Shahvisi’s “Feminism as a Moral Imperative in a Globalised World.” Shahvisi (Reference Shahvisi2015, 12) critiques the market forces that turn gender issues “into a personal matter,” thus “creating a new pseudo-feminism within which the loudest voices are those of white, middle-class feminists.” The ethical and moral imperative underlying this discourse helps students connect the readings to their realities outside the classroom. It shows them the effects of globalization and neoliberalism, repressive politics, and patriarchy on their lives. After all, theory cannot be a liberatory practice except through redressing the gap between academia and reality/activism. I take bell hooks’s strategy as my general guide. Much like other contributors to this Critical Perspectives section conclude, the feminist classroom “is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice” (hooks Reference hooks1988, 51).
My third pedagogical strategy is to contest the various forms of precarity that characterize the lives of students in Egypt. Here, I take seriously Mohanty’s (Reference Mohanty2013) advice to study the micropolitics of women’s everyday lives in marginalized communities, if we need to combat patriarchy, political repression, and economic precarity. My lead-in is to start by examining one issue in which the intersectional nature of precarity is manifested, such as sexual harassment or gender-based violence as portrayed in a literary text. The discussion usually begins with a mild condemnation of the protagonist, but throughout the course, students begin to interrogate the wider context that enable and perpetuate sexual violence against women. As noted by Žvan Elliott in this section, I address the intersection of both class and religion with gender, whether different religions or the issue of veiled/unveiled, and how they influence students’ view on the issue.
These two factors, class and religion, denominate the differences among my students. When respectfully addressed, I achieve two other important pedagogical goals: respecting and acknowledging differences without privileging certain voices over others. Addressing these problematic issues (they are not problematic in themselves but are perceived so according to normative social values) facilitates establishing several important feminist goals: first, education becomes a practice of freedom and an exercise of agency; second, teacher and students become the subject of the discussion (i.e., we are gazing at ourselves, not gazed at); and third, it links the personal and local to the political and global. These goals—even if partially achieved—restore to feminist pedagogy its political dimension and embodies it in terms of struggle and change.
My fourth strategy is to problematize the West/Arab/Muslim dichotomy in the classroom. We read Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (Reference Spivak1985) and highlight the epistemic violence carried out by the feminist readings discussed on the “colonial female subject.” However, I also remind students that creating stereotypes is sometimes instinctual. Over the years, I have noticed that students are preoccupied with the issue of the West’s stereotyping of Arab women (read: Muslim women). My reaction is to remind students of the Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s composed response when, in 2019, a Muslim audience asked her to condemn female genital mutilation. In a nondefensive tone, she responded, “So I would like, not just for you, but for everyone to know that if you want us to speak as politicians, American politicians, then you treat us as such” (The Guardian 2019). Omar’s acute awareness of the inclination to reduce “Muslim” women’s agency to specific bigoted assumptions about Islam protected her from becoming defensive.
Finally, I take syllabi design to be one tool of transgressive pedagogy. I see the syllabus as a living entity that should “talk” to students:Footnote 3
Imagine what a change has come about within feminist movements when students, most of whom are female, come to women’s studies classes and read what they are told is feminist theory only to feel that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects to “lived” realities beyond the classroom. (hooks Reference hooks1991, 5)
Hence the importance of transnational studies to practice what bell hooks (Reference hooks1994) has labeled “teaching to transgress.”
Instead of fathoming the nature of power and its structures as reflected in the texts, we analyze the forms of resistance to that power that will reveal the way it sustains and renovates itself; here, Mohanty’s essay “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” (Reference Mohanty2003) is essential. We are aware that women writers of the South (and the North) have challenged the whole paradigm (concept, act, and practice) of the traditional understanding of gender relations. But how far, then, can we incorporate texts from the South into the curriculum? And how far can we generate a transnational reading of gendered resistance? A reading that emanates from and depends on the theory of intersectionality is essential.
To avoid what Ella Shohat (Reference Shohat2001, 1270) calls “the sponge/additive approach,” the syllabus includes diverse paradigms of knowledge. It adopts the approach of co-implication/solidarity,” which requires understanding the local specificities and differences of women’s lives as well as the global ones (Mohanty Reference Mohanty2003, 522). The readings and discussions ensure that the lives and practices of women from the Global South should not be “absorbed into a homogenizing, overarching feminist master narrative,” because mere addition serves to erase differences (Shohat Reference Shohat2001, 1270). To avoid falling into this trap, students work on highlighting local experiences and voices without overlooking the global dimension. Such a strategy also means giving more attention to South-South links, whether by means of comparison or transnational tracing of gender constructs (Connell Reference Connell2015).
Conclusion
The pedagogical strategies discussed here aim to incite “anger” (à la Maya Angelou) against precarious structures and garner trust among students and instructors. By inciting anger, students can grasp how the personal and the political are intimately connected and how authoritarianism triggers a dangerous mix of sexism, hyper nationalism, and neoliberalism. Gradually, through a feminist nonhierarchical and noncentered pedagogy, I encourage students to release and express all taboo opinions in the classroom. The discussions and texts themselves become the pedagogic tools through which both the students and I develop a form of trust that allow freedom of expression and acknowledges our differences without any feelings of guilt or inhibition. It is only by creating such a safe space for students and teachers alike that the feminist classroom can turn into an actual subversive space that allows new liberated subjectivities to emerge and flourish.