The year that was 2011 – Women in public spaces

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This commentary was originally published on 6 January 2012 on iKNOW Politics, to read original click here.As we wind down from 2011 I take a few moments to reflect and look back at not just the significant events of this year but what it portends for the years to come. From the role of women in mobilizing action to what led to widespread uprising against established regimes in North Africa to the awarding of nobel peace prize to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee of Liberia; and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen women have been in news through the year.We have also seen a renewed focus on discourses that emphasize the role of technologies in securing a range of public goods including facilitating civic engagement and social participation, and providing more efficient access to government services while enabling a more participatory form of democratic involvement. In a report in May this year, the UNspecial rapporteur declared Internet had “become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.” The role of women though lauded for the ease of use of social-technologies for furthering their involvement has been surrounded by doubts and questions around continuingthe engagement as their countries move into the next phase.

The role of women in 2011 also presents a good starting point for an understanding of the conditions that makes a moment transformational. Transformative moments, come in personal life as much as in political life. They rely on reconfigurations of the assumptions of what is common knowledge and how this common knowledge is translated into known-knowns by the interactions on the web. That is to say, this year we saw as loudly and clearly as possible, women not only sounded the call that brought people to the streets in the middle east but were adept at using technology in sounding this call.Thereby reconfiguring the assumption of what was considered common knowledge about women in the middle east and women and technology. The shattering of this common knowledge was then followed bythe “new” known-knowns on the web of “Arab women as revolutionary”.

However in my opinion the power of this newly acquired understanding of known-knowns to shape contentious gender politics is only one of the numerous important factors that is needed to effect significant change in domestic politics. Both the interaction frequency (on the web) and closeness of relationship (of the actors on the web) are characteristics which influence the strength of ties created on the web and thereby determine the power and influence of these known-knowns to impact change. As has been witnessed in the subsequent move to electoral processes in Egypt and Tunisia where realization that overthrowing dictators was easier than overturning the pervasive supremacy of men was apparent in the absence of women in the Constitutional Amendment Committee. This also speaks to the short shelf life of known-knowns of the web and avoiding mistaking information for influence in domestic decision making.

Democratization takes place within a social, economic and historical context and does not necessarily entail a democratization of power relations in society at large, particularly between men and women. This of course has direct implications on the role that women can play. The inherent difficulties of building effective institutions for enabling equal democratic participation by all requires a move from mass mobilization to organizational capacities during transition. This is one of the many hurdles that women continue to face in seeking a seat at thedemocratic table.

However, putting the metaphorical ‘women’s right genie’ back in the bottle is no longer an option. The power of women in public spaces has never been more visually captured or vividly experienced by the world before as during the Arab spring. This year was an epochal period of activism which was built up because of thisgeneration’s advances in education and professions while embracing the ability of Internet to communicate, organize and publicize everywhere, instantaneously. The future for women inpublic spaces can be best summed up in the words of Larbi Ben M’Hidi in the Battle of Algiers, “It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, once we’vewon, that the real difficulties begin.”

Rethinking is hard

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By venegas under CC

I have often prided myself in my gut reactions being accurate. I think there is a science behind ones “gut” reaction or intuitive thinking. This too was my gut reaction to gut reaction, till I started poking around and found Gerd Gigerenzer, a German social psychologist, who is known for his studies on intuitive thinking. Here is a really good research piece on thinking the fast and frugal way as they call it. Obviously its a more complex argument and field of study than what I know/understand. However it does make sense when I want to rethink my gut reactions and the ability to rethink gut reactions no matter how painful they are.

In the past, I have tried to break down my process of (gut) reaction to a person, object, interaction etc. Its a fairly complicated process and often I give up as I feel insufficiently prepared to do justice to the process. But when I am forced to rethink my gut reaction then I am given an opportunity to not only understand the process but what I was “missing” in the whole equation. Now it can be quite hard to say whether it was something “missing” or an unknown that cant be really missing if its not known. Which is what happened to me when I was upset about my partner’s obsession with turning every outdoor activity into a performance improvement activity. That is to say, measure performance and seek to improve it and measure that improvement  and so on (I am sure there is a term for this but obviously I dont know). However, when the opportunity to re-evaluate my gut reactions is in front of me, I most often pounce on it. I will come back to the pouncing on it attitude as it is extremely unsettling to have to re-evaluate your own gut reactions no matter how sound and accurate they looked at the time.

This attitude of his to make it into performance measuring and improving exercise irked me great deal. That was my gut reaction. When I tried to analyze it I broke it down to the way I see doing an activity. For me most activities are for the “joy” of it and the way I define joy is not based on optimizing my performance on that activity. Of course the definition of joy for my husband is different and that is fine but irked me. This was supposed to be an activity we did jointly for the joy it brought us in doing it with each other. The moment you insert measuring performance and optimizing it, the joy was taken out of it and it became something I had to make the most of, even though he never asked me to do so. For me joy and performance measurement are divorced of each other.

We talked about it and I communicated to him my cause for frustration and why this activity no longer seemed like an activity we enjoyed doing together but became something that was aimed at being improved upon and measured. He understood my concern and suggested removing the measurement aspect from it when we did it jointly. Then I came through this piece on the said activity and it made me *completely* rethink my gut reaction.

I am generally not scared of acknowledging to anyone that I am wrong or my conclusion may not be inaccurate. But its not easy to acknowledge to myself that my gut reaction was missing something. It makes me question my own gut reactions, not just a particular one but all other ones made thus far. What if I missed something in other reactions and have wrongly believed in something or done something because of that. That fear can be quite crippling. But the fear also gives way to something else which is the other side of the way we think which is based on information we have, the information we gather, to ensure that our decisions are sound or at least informed. The uncertainty of gut reactions forces us to want to gather as much information as possible so that along with the gut reaction this information prepares us to make the *right* call.