“Al-shaʿb yurid isqat al-nizam!” (“The people want the fall of the regime!”) became one of the rallying cries of the uprisings that spread throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) in the early 2010s in what became popularly known as the “Arab Spring.” Taking as the center of analysis the notion of nizam, which in Arabic means “regime” as well as “order” and “system” (Hasso and Salime 2016), the course examines the political, economic, and social transformations that these mobilizations sparked, facilitated, but also foreclosed, with regard to the ordering of gender and sexuality in the region.

Straying from mainstream considerations of the “Arab Spring” as time bound (and, in many cases, failed, as denoted by the popularization of the expression “Arab Winter” in the years that followed), the course builds upon Nasser Abourahme and May Jayyusi’s (2011) notion of “revolution as process” to situate these forms of collective action within a longer historical period with yet indeterminate results.

Drawing upon readings from different disciplines, the course eschews top-down analyses of the revolts focused on power centers and sheds light onto bottom-up processes of political and social transformation in the margins. To that end, it takes a comparative approach to the study of a diversity of struggles related to issues of gender and sexuality in the region, from collective organizing against sexual violence in public space, to activism for LGBTQI+ rights, from mobilizations to improve women’s situation in personal status codes and citizenship laws to the creation of online communities for social change. The course adopts an intersectional perspective that is attentive to the ways in which gender and sexuality interact with other axes of domination (such as class, religion/sect, rural origin, etc.).

During the semester, students will analyze a case study of their choice and present the results of their research in in-class group presentations, a midterm report, and a final paper.

Assessment

The course uses a continuous evaluation method. During the semester, students will be evaluated based on four types of assessment (see breakdown of grades below):

1. Class participation (10%)

2. In-class group presentation (20%)

3. Midterm case study report (30%)

4. Final research paper (40%)