Janet Afary, Religious Studies
Roger Friedland, Religious Studies
Maria Charles, Sociology
Private Lives-Public Politics: Gender Relations and Gender Ideologies in Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian Countries
Massive increases in women’s public-sphere entry, including schools, universities, the workplace, and the cybersphere – have coincided with equally dramatic transformation in women’s intimate lives in many Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian countries (MENASA). This changing context has been a theater for the rise of political religion and the intensification of struggles over women’s rights in the public and private spheres. The Private Lives-Public Politics project (“Project”) is already providing new insights into gender relations and gender ideologies in MENASA societies. Using Facebook banner advertisements and anonymous survey responses, we have accessed information about the intimate lives of young adults from across the social spectrum in seven Muslim-majority countries. Through web-based surveys in 2012 and 2017, the Project has engaged more than 60,000 young Muslims in Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey on critically important and rarely-explored topics pertaining to intimate lives and gender politics and practices – with the goal of informing and improving interventions to empower the region’s women and girls. In its next phase, the Project will build upon these pilot surveys to collaboratively develop and deploy a third web-based survey instrument – intended to inform policy makers, NGOs, and academics in the region and support their efforts to bring about positive social change. This path-breaking survey initiative, with its extraordinary response rates, presents an unprecedented opportunity to explore the dynamic interplay among intimacy, equity, empowerment, and the cyber lives of women and men in a still dramatically under-researched region.
Findings from this study were published in Gender & Society as “Complicating Patriarchy: Gender Beliefs of Muslim Facebook Users in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.”