Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State.

• Author: Fadlalla, Amal Hassan
• Position: Review

Sondra Hale. Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Hardcover, 294 pp., glossary, index

FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGISTS HAVE COME a long way in challenging previous models of "women and state" that reduced the histories and experiences of non-western women to mere state repression. Ethnographies from different cultures show that state gender ideologies are not accepted silently. Instead they are continuously contested, negotiated, and often manipulated by women and men to strategically serve their own social and political ends. Sondra Hale's book is a remarkable example of a contemporary feminist attempt to revisit old theories and methodologies dealing with women and state politics.

Drawing on several field trips during the 1960s and 1980s, and continuous dialogues with elite women and men in northern Sudan, Hale examines the shifts in socio-economic processes and the complexities of the dynamics underlying the interplay of state power, party politics, and gender ideologies in the country. Focusing on two major political parties, the secular Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) and the religious National Islamic Front (NIF), the author scrutinizes the policies and strategies through which the two parties appropriate indigenous gender meanings to mobilize women to serve "male-controlled" political institutions. Such positioning of women, Hale argues, has its foundation in the state politics of the post-independence Sudan and the debate among both liberal and radical sections of the Sudanese elite over the proper social place of women and their role as central figures in protecting family values and thus reproducing an authentic national culture.

In this regard, the author questions the success of political parties and revolutionary movements in addressing women's emancipatory projects. She argues that women's own "feminist interests" were suppressed under the banner of a general struggle. In connection to this, Hale shows how a Marxist-Leninist approach embodied by the SCP had to face challenges to its own existence in an Islamic society dominated by religious affiliations. Thus both the party and its feminist branch, the Women's Union (WU), had to strategize to assert their legitimacy at the expense of addressing major issues related to women's sexuality and their private-public participation.

The perception of women as bearers and guardians of tradition impacted the attitudes of progressive...