Feminist Freedom in Practice: Rethinking Equality across Radical, Liberal, and Islamic Projects

This paper examines how competing political projects in Syria and Switzerland articulate and implement gender equality, and what kinds of freedom and justice they promise. Against dominant framings that cast Western Europe as inherently gender-equal and the Islamic Middle East as its patriarchal opposite, it shows how freedom and equality are politically constructed, contested, and instrumentalized across contexts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and discourse analysis, the paper explores the practices of feminist actors working under highly different, yet constraining, political conditions. In Syria, Islamic feminists reinterpret religious traditions to advance gender justice, Kurdish socialist revolutionaries frame women’s liberation as central to radical social transformation, and NGO-based actors promote developmentalist models tied to donor agendas. In Switzerland, liberal feminists emphasize equality of opportunity within a market-oriented outlook, femonationalist actors mobilize women’s rights to advance illiberal projects such as the 2021 face-covering ban, and queer and trans-inclusive feminists demand equality of outcome and recognition of difference. Bringing these diverse positions into conversation, the paper highlights how notions of freedom and equality are not abstract ideals but are translated into political practice in ways that shape women’s rights, agency, and subjectivities. It foregrounds how feminist resistance emerges not only in moments of opposition but also in ambivalence, constraint, and endurance—whether through piety, disciplined militancy, or everyday acts of negotiation. This situated perspective underscores the importance of intersectional and historically grounded approaches to understanding how women navigate overlapping structures of power, while also reimagining feminist freedom and justice beyond hegemonic and Eurocentric frameworks. By de-exceptionalizing both “Islam” and “the West,” the paper challenges binaries that frame the Middle East as oppressive and Western Europe as inherently gender-equal. It asks how feminist politics can persist when both liberal and radical projects reproduce exclusion, and what possibilities for solidarity arise when difference is not erased but recognized as a resource for reimagining feminist theories, practices, and methodologies.