‘Solidarity Across Borders’: Online gender activism and the construction of a Middle East and North African regional public space

Overview

Academic discourse frequently speaks of a gender violence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), suggesting a distinctive gender violence that is tied to a geographic location. Within the framework of a digital ethnography, this research examines whether gender activists operating in digital spaces themselves conceptualise and mobilise around their struggle using a regional lens, combining observations, a multimodal analyses of social media content, and interviews with 20 digital activists to do so. Challenging orientalist narratives, I centre the ontological agency of these (predominantly) young, (predominantly) women digital activists from and within the region in defining, contesting, and (re)producing the MENA within their resistance to gender violence. This timely intervention comes after a string of feminicides in June/July 2022 led to calls for a regional Women’s General Strike going viral across social media platforms. Following the strike’s slogan, تضامن عابر للحدود (Solidarity Across Borders), this research explores the potentialities and limitations of regional solidarities as a vehicle for building feminist public spaces. Contributing to debates within transnational feminist research regarding activism’s multiple spatialities, I examine how strike participants, through their framings of regional gender-based violence and the networks and identities built around said framings, navigate sameness and difference in dynamic and sometimes divisive ways. Within the strike context, we see a fragile regional public being formed that simultaneously challenges and reproduces narratives of gender violence in the MENA in ways that demonstrate both the salience of regionality and the importance of including activist voices in our regional constructions.