Tension between Political Compromise and Representation: The Case of Female MPs in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

The revolutionary movement that shook up the political landscape in Tunisia in 2011 gave birth to the first legitimate Tunisian institution: The Constituent National Assembly, charged with the drafting of a new constitution for the country. This paper intends to explore the multiple challenges faced by female MP’s in general and especially in Tunisia. Following Pitkin (1967), I assume that Tunisian MP’s represent formally their constituency and their political party, and also embody symbolically their gender, age and political groups, or their region of origin. Tunisian women who had a central role in the revolutionary process (Allal, 2012) constituted a quarter of the deputies representing the different political parties in this assembly (Ammar, 2014, Kréfa, 2016). However, as pointed out by Winter (2016), the increased substantive representation of traditionally marginalized groups - in this case women – doesn’t mean that they necessarily represent the interests of the members of their group. This is particularly the case when these interests are in tension with the partisan line and the political alliances and compromises that political representatives have to make (Bellamy, 2012). As they negotiate simultaneously gender relations, partisan lines, age discrimination and regional tensions, female political representatives in Tunisia find themselves at the heart of a political and ideological struggle between progressive movements and Islamist ones that contrast two conceptions of Tunisian women: modernist for some and conservative for the others (Ben Hadj Salem, 2016). Using an intersectional analysis grid (Hill-Collins & Bilge, 2016), I will present in this paper some avenues of theoretical reflections on how female Tunisian MP’s may reconcile their different affiliations during their work as political representatives, and how they do negotiate the formal and symbolic dimensions of their representation.