Page 138 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

7. The women’s NGO movement refers to women activists organized in women’s
committees as well as in women’s research and resource NGOs, such as WCLAC (see note
5, above). For the erosion of women’s mass-based activism and the shift toward “formal
politics” after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, see Johnson and Kuttab
2001, 26ff.
8. Whereas the main focus of Women in the Sun is violence against women, the ¤lm
also includes a considerable number of scenes where proposals for a Palestinian family
law are publicly debated. This chapter only deals with the sections concerning family law
debates; I do not discuss the contribution of the ¤lm to public debate more generally.
Women in the Sun opened at the Popular Arts Center in Ramallah in 1998, and has also
been widely shown abroad (at events such as the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco in
1999, the Amnesty International Film Festival in Amsterdam in 2001, and at various
other festivals in Jordan, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, and elsewhere). In an
interview al-Zobaidi stated: “This is really a ¤lm for local audiences. I don’t care about
foreign audiences, let me say that in capital letters. I wish I could afford to make 50,000
copies and send them out for ¤ve shekels each so that this ¤lm can reach every Pales-
tinian household” (Palestine Report 1998). I am grateful to Subhi al-Zobaidi for provid-
ing me with a copy of the ¤lm and for allowing me to include stills from this ¤lm to
illustrate this chapter.
9. In the interview mentioned in note 8 above, al-Zobaidi expressed his support for
the Women Parliament and was critical of the Islamists. In fact, the NGO that was in-
strumental in organizing these debates was also one of the sponsors of his ¤lm.
10. For similar lines of argumentation, see also the various contributions to Abu-
Lughod’s edited volume 1998.
11. Some of this is visible in the new genres of writing that developed, such as books
containing rules of etiquette to serve as a guide for women on how to interact prop-
erly with unrelated men, rules that were based on new notions of modern womanhood
(Najmabadi 1993).
12. As Leila Ahmed (1982, 531) had already argued some twenty years ago: “to be-
lieve that segregated societies are by de¤nition more oppressive to women, or that women
secluded from the company of men are women deprived, is only to allow ourselves to be
servilely obedient to the constructs of men, Western or Middle Eastern.”
13. It is interesting to compare this to Habermas’s account of the emergence of the
modern public sphere with the salons of bourgeois homes as one of its loci, that is, the
salon as a meeting place for male intellectuals. In a critique of Habermas, Landes (in
Fraser 1992, 113) highlights how this new republican public sphere in France developed
in opposition to an existing more woman-friendly salon culture.
14. In urban Yemen, women have a system of afternoon visits (at one another’s
houses) called tafrita, which are structurally similarly to male qat chews. Yet whereas the
latter, even if they are held at home, are generally recognized as part of the public sphere,
women’s tafritas have hardly been recognized as such (Meneley 1996; Vom Bruck 1997).
Also, in settings where gender segregation is less central to social organization, such as
in the city of Nablus on the West Bank, in the 1980s forms of a semi-autonomous female
public sphere still operated through the monthly istiqbâl (reception), organized visiting
circles with each participant having one ¤xed date a month set aside to receive the others
at her home.
15. The rapid growth of education (Eickelman 1992) and of a variety of media,
such as popular ¤ction (Huq 1999), commercial television (Öncü 1995), cassette tapes

Representing Family Law Debates in Palestine 127