Women, Protest and Backlash: Igniting Feminist Mobilization in Sudan

Building on scholarship on women's bodies and uprisings in other Arab world (e.g., Hafez 2014, 2019; Singerman 2013; Alnaas and Pratt 2015; Pratt 2020) and conflict and gender scholarship (e.g., Kreft 2019; Berry 2015), the article suggest that backlash against women protestors has ignited different forms of feminist mobilization in Sudan. Women were at the forefront of the popular uprising which overthrew Sudan’s dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. The way that women occupied the streets challenged deeply embedded ideas of appropriate gender roles. Women’s bodies were targeted by security and military actors through sexual and gender-based violence to push women back into the private sphere “where they belong”. And with that they were also calling on Sudanese families to protect their daughters, wives and sisters’ honour by keeping them away from danger. The female body thus became a “political battlefield” By being targeted by gendered violence, protestors were labelled as and forcefully turned into women protestors. Based on original interviews conducted with female protestors, we suggest that this targeted backlash against women as a group ignited waves of feminist mobilization in the country. Although largely sidelined from formal politics, young feminist found other spaces, online and offline, to organize away from established political elites in parties and social movements, including the older generation of women’s rights activists. In the aftermath of what has been labelled the December revolution and until the recent military coup, new women’s groups and new activists have entered the political scene. A feminist manifesto has been launched, and Sudan’s first women’s march against sexual and gender-based violence was organized. From being a concept associated with the West and widely rejected by the older generation of women’s rights activists, the young generation is now mobilizing under feminist slogans and are suggesting a radical transformation of politics in the country. Compared to other similar cases in the region, backlash in the wake of popular uprising in Sudan occurred before localized expressions of feminist mobilization. As such it is the backlash that mobilized young feminists to action. By paying attention to the emergence of new feminist mobilizations, Sudan also reveals the ways in which older women’s groups too had been implicated in the patriarchal logics of governance.