Resist, Disrupt, Reproduce: The Complications of Beirut's Feminist Activism Against Gendered Violence

Abstract

This study explores how feminist activists in Beirut resist, disrupt, and reproduce gendered violence in their work and daily lives. Every day, activists navigate acts of violence, their own experiences, national institutions, and global forces that uphold patriarchal, neoliberal structures and norms. These forces raise complicated dilemmas for activists in their choice of tactics, forms of organization, acceptance of funding, and building of coalitions. This thesis thus investigates activists’ tactics of resistance in personal lives and public protests, and the complicated impacts of attempting to disrupt individual acts of gendered violence and complicit legal, political, and social structures. Primary data was gathered in 2017-18 through semi-structured interviews with 14 Lebanese, Palestinian, and Ethiopian feminist activists in Beirut to understand their experiences of organizing, theorizing, and fighting the status quo of gendered violence. Findings were triangulated by document analysis of primary and secondary sources relating to feminist community organizing in Beirut, produced in Arabic and English, from 2006-2018. Collaborators spoke to experiences as individuals and members of feminist collectives, informal groups, clubs, and NGOs. The introduction includes a brief mapping of feminist movements in Beirut, based on a broader history of feminist organizing from the 20th century to present and explores conceptual frameworks of gendered violence, feminist activism and theory, and coloniality. The first chapter explores tensions around visibility in feminist activist work around gendered violence in Beirut, and the relationship of visibility to power and privilege. The second chapter explores the impacts and dilemmas of NGOization on feminist activist work and spaces in Beirut, including forms of organization, communication, and relationships. The third chapter defines various types of solidarity enacted by feminist activists, and the moments where activists are complicit in maintaining status quo structures of control, even as they aim for oppositional action. The conclusion, building on stories told throughout the thesis, reflects the many ways of “becoming” embedded within feminist activist work, and our lived disloyalty to patriarchal, capitalist, and neoliberal ways of being. Overall, the study findings complicate traditional understandings: of activism as necessarily public, of solidarity as universally beneficial, and of tensions within organizing as unproductive. Instead, it argues that successful disruption of gendered violence focuses both on social and state institutions, as well as individual behaviors and ways of being.