Os movimentos de mulheres e o feminismo de Estado no Egito nos séculos XX e XXI

Abstract

Egyptian governments have built a progressive discourse on women's rights since the 1950s, but they all have ended up being guided by political practices that fall under state feminism. Women, on the other hand, stood out for articulating their movements and building agendas in search of expanding their rights, especially from the 20th century onwards. The question that guided this dissertation was: How did women's movements and state feminism coexist in Egypt, from the 20th century onwards? The main objective is to evaluate the factors that drive women's movements and governments in Egypt from Nasser to Sisi, in parallel, throughout the mentioned period. Thus, we will investigate the emergence of feminism and women's movements in Egypt; we will explore the emergence and consolidation of State feminism in the governments of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970), Anwar El Sadat (1970-1981), Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011) and Abdel Fattah El-Sisi (2014-2019); and we will analyze the factors that allow us to investigate how women's demands and Egyptian government policies coexist. The research is descriptive and exploratory. A collection and analysis of the bibliographical productions of intellectuals involved with the topic of women in Egypt was carried out, as well as an in-depth interview with an Egyptian woman. We will use Postcolonial Feminism, as it presents us with an anti-essentialist view of gender that understands it based on criteria such as contexts, discourses and/or academic productions outside the Anglo-Saxon axis. We justify this research by the need to make visible the agendas and organization of women in Egypt. Furthermore, gender and feminist studies in International Relations, with special attention to the Middle East and North Africa, are still investigated from a limited perspective in Brazil, and here, we intend to contribute to the discussions. From our interpretation, we conclude that women's movements and State feminism in Egypt coexist based on each other's interdependence, oscillating between harmony and conflict, since governments alternated between guaranteeing the rights requested by women, and repressing their articulations.