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Gender and Difference in the Arab World - Coggle Diagram

- - - - - Black Maghrebi Binary
        
        o Constructed as oppositional categories
        
        o Post-independence: defined as Arab+Muslim (exc. Blacks)
        
        § Black constructed as foreign -> associated with servitude
        
        - Black Maghrebi women experience double exclusion.
        
        o Abdelhamid is racialized as Black in Maghrebi feminist spaces and as Maghrebi in Black feminist spaces—revealing how race and gender simultaneously marginalize her identity.
        
        - Feminist movements replicate racial hierarchies.
        
        o Maghrebi feminist groups in France overlook anti-Blackness within their own communities, while Black feminist groups overlook the specificity of Black Maghrebi women’s experiences.
        
        - Racialization produces a caste-like class hierarchy.
        
        o Black Tunisians and sub-Saharan migrants are treated as socially inferior, tied to histories of enslavement that continue to shape economic marginalization.
        
        - Blackness determines access to political and economic power.
        
        o Black Tunisians rarely hold political leadership roles or stable jobs; sub-Saharan migrants face precarious legal status and exploitative labor conditions.
        
        - Diaspora racialization in France maps onto class inequalities.
        
        o As a Black Maghrebi immigrant, Abdelhamid experiences economic precarity, stigma for her accent, and exclusion from elite activist spaces dominated by more privileged groups.
  - - - - Racism in Tunisia is embedded into institutions, such as representation, education, employment, etc. and lived daily through everyday life
        
        - Law 50 is the first official acknowledgement of racism in Tunisia but it does not address the daily racism that is still faced
        
        - Black women face sexualized racism
        
        - Law ignores racism in domestic and personal relationships
        
        - Black families are disproportionately poor, limiting access to social mobility and opportunities
        
        - Law 50 recognizes disability as a factor that increases vulnerability and has doubling penalties in those cases
        
        - Similar to racism, disability is acknowledged formally but not addressed in everyday practice
  - - - - Racism against Black Tunisians is systemic, rooted in history, everyday behavior, language, and social hierarchies inherited from slavery
        
        o Concentrated in lower socioeconomic positions
        
        - Racism still present even with laws against it
        
        o Although it is widely denied, this can make Black Tunisians socially invisible and excluded from representation
        
        - Black women face double or triple discrimination: gender, race, and class
        
        - Mainstream Tunisian feminist spaces marginalize Black women
        
        - Victims of racism lack financial resources to pursue legal action
        
        - Racism functions as a disabling force from how it restricts mobility, dignity, safety, and access for Black Tunisians
        
        - Similar to disability, racial marginalization is treated as a private problem rather than a structural issue in society
        
        “Today black women suffer a triple discrimination in Tunisia… as economically and socially disadvantaged persons, as women and finally as black-skinned people.”
  - - - - Focuses on racialized enslavement in Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire
        
        - Even after emancipation, enslavement still impacted groups of people and their identities in society
        
        o Remained racially and economically marginalized, limiting class mobility
        
        - Middle Eastern slavery is often excluded from global narratives of racial slavery
        
        - Enslaved women often performed intimate domestic and caregiving labor, enforcing gender roles
        
        - Men vs women enslavement: gendered access to education, mobility, and public speech
        
        - Elites depended on enslaved peoples to maintain status and wealth
        
        - Racialized people were treated as expendable and inferior
        
        - The system of slavery restricted people’s mobility and autonomy
  - - - - The veil becomes a central symbol through which colonial power attempts to dominate Algerian society
        
        o Women are targeted and made to seem like French are “liberating” them
        
        - Women actively transform meaning of the veil by both wearing and removing it to resist colonial powers
        
        - Algerian men made to appear barbaric and women in need of saving
        
        - Veiled women made to seem like their society is backwards and are lacking certain freedoms/rights
        
        - Women are both sexualized and dehumanized, linking racial domination with sexual aggression
        
        “Unveiling this woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her resistance, making her available for adventure.”
- - - - Disability is socially and politically constructed -> tie into every category
      - Defined Ableism as discrimination favoring able-bodied/minded people (links to racism, sexism, capitalism)
      - Claims that disability studies connect with feminism, race, queer studies because they all challenge power and inclusion
      - Race has historically been justified through disability rhetoric.
      - Black people were claimed to have “inferior intellect” to legitimize enslavement and segregation—showing how racial categories depend on ableist ideas of defectiveness
      - Access to care, rights, and accommodations is classed.
      - Wealthier people can buy accessibility, treatment, and social support, while poor disabled people are more likely to be institutionalized, criminalized, or erased.
      - Disabled women experience gendered ableism.
      - Women with disabilities are desexualized, infantilized, or denied autonomy, in contrast to the hyper sexualization often imposed on nondisabled women.
      - “We cannot understand how gender and sexuality operate… without understanding the rhetorical and material role of (dis)ability as a mutually constitutive system of oppression.”
  - - - Osama Tanous, “The Dilemmas of Practicing Humanitarian Medicine in Gaza”
      - In Gaza, disability is structurally produced by siege and occupation, not isolate injury or illness
        
        Humanitarian aid cannot cause very treatable, slow, ongoing illnesses, such as diabetes, heart conditions, etc.
        
        Disability access to healthcare becomes political
        
        Female patients often framed as “innocent victims”, making women’s suffering more legible compared to men
        
        Palestinians bodies seen as disposable, with their illnesses treated as background conditions compared to the ongoing crisis and occupation
        
        Occupier (Israel) vs Occupied (Palestine)
        
        Palestine vs Israel doctors
        
        Poverty, lack of mobility, and lack of opportunity leads to no access to healthcare or any type of help
        
        “The continuing Israeli siege and de-development of Gaza make the prevention, treatment and management of these chronic diseases much harder and causes avoidable death and disability.”
- - - - - “Unskilled” is not a description of ability but rather a class category used to dehumanize workers
        
        - Workers’ political status is tied entirely to their economic function
        
        o class = immigration status = legal status.
        
        - The kafala system creates a formally legalized underclass with no exit, no mobility, no protest rights.
        
        o Supervisors control wages, medical care, mobility, and living conditions — class domination at all levels.
        
        - Media images portray anonymous, brown/Black workers in overalls, reinforcing racial stereotypes of disposability.
        
        - Male workers are taking on more maternal roles from their kinship system
        
        o Called “uncle” or “big brother” teaching their “sons” or “little brothers”
        
        - Deportation of sick or injured workers prevents recognition of workplace disability
        
        - Managers blame workers’ injuries on “lack of skill,” shifting attention away from unsafe conditions and disability because of structural neglect.
        
        - Sleep deprivation and 16-hour shifts create conditions for physical and cognitive breakdown — again, disability is a classed outcome.
        
        “They were not describing agility–or lack thereof–but instead were shunting their workers into a subordinate political category, divesting workers of their political personhood and redefining them as labor inputs that were disposable and readily replaceable.”
    - - Fida Adely, “Education Women for Development: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and the Problem with Women’s Choices”
        
        - AHDR treats middle-class, wage-earning careers as the ideal outcome of women’s education
        
        - Women’s education is judged by its “return” to the economy, versus the other benefits it can give to women such as stability, marriage security, or social mobility
        
        - Broad regional statistics can flatten or erase women in poverty, rural areas, etc.
        
        - Women’s “choices” framed as failure if they do not enter male-dominated fields for waged-labor
        
        - Domestic work, mainly done by women, are excluded from definitions of empowerment
        
        - Report assumes that all women should aspire to have the same outcomes career wise, which ultimately takes away the choice from women of how they want to live their lives
  - - - - The kafala system produces permanent underclass of migrant workers who entire lives are controlled by their employers
        
        - Hiring migrant domestic workers becomes a mark of status an upward mobility for Lebanon’s postwar middle class
        
        - The term Srilankiyye transforms nationality into a racialized class position equivalent to “domestic servant” regardless of origin
        
        - The kafala system creates racialized social separateness, where African and Asian women are permanently positioned as inferior workers
        
        - Postwar economic growth relies on racism and exploitation of people deemed as “lesser”
        
        - Women leave their own homes and families to sustain middle class households, which reinforces global inequalities in care work