BARGAINING WITH PATRIARCHY: GENDER, VOICE AND SPATIAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

• Author: Jaber, Nabila
• Position: Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women's Groups in the Middle East - Review

Dawn Chatty and Annika Rabo, Editors. Organizing Women: Formal and Informal Women's Groups in the Middle East. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 1997. 236 pages + index. Paper $19.50.

THIS EDITED BOOK IS A COLLECTION of essays first presented at a workshop in June 1995 at the Centre for Cross-cultural Research on Women, University of Oxford, UK. To begin with, the book title, "Organizing Women", I thought, is very suggestive in terms of advancing a recognition of women's political subjectivity in the construction of their particular imagined community. Practices of social networks and group formations are posited as critical strategies of empowerment for women, which in turn enable them to exploit the political moment to speak out and to speak on behalf of women of similar concerns. (This is particularly observed in feminist organizations in Lebanon, Tunisia and Egypt). Equally important is to consider as the editors observe "what happens when women in the Middle East try to organize themselves?" Most revealing is the event that prompted the workshop, resulting from a lived frustrating experience encountered by a group of pastoral women in Oman who were refused government permission to org anize themselves independently, despite their success story in participating in income-generating activities. Women, in this instance, in the name of protectionism, were denied an autonomous public voice/space in negotiating their gender-specific needs, outside the boundary of domesticity. This event raises two interrelated issues: opportunities and constraints. It links economic opportunities with development as much as it highlights the limits of participating in development projects under a traditional regime of patriarchal ruling, where both public and private patriarchies retain utmost legitimacy over women. This is not to deny that controversial notions of traditional gender roles in society vis-a-vis their place on the scale of equality discourse remain central, yet critical, in the discursive positioning of women. These questions of opportunities and constraints/obstacles are captured throughout the readings, along with the dilemma faced by women when seeking a public space of their own (women only g roup) without becoming a place for men's use.

First let me situate the context and framework of the articles included here and then give a brief account in terms of thematic focus and general arguments. The book is comprised of 10 articles that cover a wide range of regional and geographical locations in the region of Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Effectively these studies are located in Arabic-speaking countries, including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Morocco, with the exception of Senegal. While such groupings of countries amount to highlight the representation of the category, Arab Middle Eastern women, Chatty and Rabo, in their introductory chapter, rightly problematize the use of the term given its historical colonial overtone in representing women of the Middle East--voiceless victims who are mired in tradition...