Hanan Toukan’s thoughtful reading of Protesting Jordan captures the book’s main theoretical interventions and its substantive new empirical material on politics in Jordan. I particularly like how she describes the tone of the analysis becoming “more urgent” in the last four chapters; I had not thought in those terms, but it is an apt description as the state tries ever new techniques to silence dissent from among its traditional support base—constituencies whose protests it cannot violently repress. As Toukan notes as well, the aim of the book reaches far beyond Jordan and the Middle East to suggest new theoretical lenses for understanding protests and contentious politics, as well as formal state institutions—indeed, I argue that we need to consider these topics together, rather than in largely compartmentalized literatures.
I was surprised, however, by the comment that “one voice that is arguably invisible in the text is that of women” (my emphasis). Toukan notes that I do discuss women’s participation in protests, but that I fail to address what form it takes. She further states, “Women are not featured in many of the public protests” and “women have not appeared … en masse in routine protests.” Yet, Protesting Jordan shows just the opposite. It is true that women are far less prominent in protests that challenge the official narrative about state-making, but they are present at many of those events. Concerning the “form” of women in protests, I offer many detailed discussions. I show, for example, how women who were initially mixed with men at the Kalouti protests later moved to the front to directly confront the gendarmerie/riot police. Particularly when photographers are present, protesters believe that the police will be less likely to use violence when women are on the frontlines (pp. 138–43). I discuss how women in the Day Wage Labor Movement came up with the idea of mounting an overnight protest in the capital and that they outnumbered male protesters at that event. Local activists later erected a tent to shelter the female protesters overnight, a move that recognized female agency as protesters but reinforced the idea that even protesting women need protection (pp. 153–54). I show how women participate in all the labor protests and discuss the spatial dynamics and protest repertoires of women protesting over citizenship rights (p. 196) and honor crimes (pp. 126, 182, 208). I also discuss Pratt’s research on women’s activism during the mid-twentieth century (pp. 78–80). In addition, I show how when the Islamist groups mount protests, they cordon off a separate area for female protesters, maintaining that space as a male-free zone even as it moves as part of a march (p. 175). In most protests, however, women both veiled and unveiled are simply mixed among the crowds. Two photographs show women-dominated protests, one from the 1960s (p. 87) and one from the 2000s (p. 142). And although women-dominated protests are less common outside the capital, I show that they do exist, particularly in the many protests against the arrests of family and neighbors that are held outside jails (p. 181).
These forms of women’s protest might not have been readily visible to Toukan because I consciously chose to integrate women in protests throughout the analysis, rather than cluster them together in a distinct section. That choice clearly comes at the expense of highlighting these dynamics. For that reason, one of my current article projects brings the gender and spatial dynamics of protest front and center in a comparative article that extends beyond Jordan to consider protests across the globe.
As for my positionality, being a Western, white female researcher has mostly afforded me more access rather than less, because I am able to gain access to women activists and women-only protests, as well as those that are mixed or male dominated. I feel largely ignored at protests—even by the police—with the exception being government intelligence agents (mukhabarat) who take videos of protests on their phones and attempt to note the names of those present. Although many protests are indeed male dominated, my fieldwork has not felt like a male-dominated site, particularly given the large number of female activists, photographers, and journalists present at most protests. I am grateful, however, for Toukan’s invitation to think more systematically about the gender question and will do so in my coming article.
