Gendered Badness and Revolutionary Enactments: Women’s Resistance in North Africa and West Asia

Two books have come out in the last three years that explore revolutions and resistance from gendered perspectives in North Africa and West Asia. Both Bad Girls of the Arab World, edited by Nadia Yaqub and Rula Quawas (2017), and Freedom without Permission, edited by Frances S. Hasso and Zakia Salime, are collections of essays that engage with the transgressions, resistance, and revolutions of women across the region. The two collections complement each other well: together they cover more than twenty “case studies” in fourteen countries in North Africa and West Asia. Reading them together is a practice in shifting between looking at women’s microresistance and women’s participation in collective organizing. Where one book focuses more on individual stories of gendered subversion of social norms and its consequences, the other tackles collective revolutionary enactments and their possibilities. In both, women face silencing, marginalization, and violence, yet...