The Art of Abstraction: Feminist Theorizing of Heteropatriarchal Counter-Politics in the SWANA Region

Since the early 2010s, at least two waves of Arab uprisings have swept across the SWANA region, from Egypt and Tunisia to Iraq and Lebanon. These waves have opened new political opportunities for both pro-feminist and anti-feminist forces to advance their agendas. Recent developments show that counter-emancipatory heteropatriarchal actors are increasingly recuperating arguments from the global anti-gender repertoire. This paper examines how feminist scholarship has conceptualized heteropatriarchal counter-politics in the SWANA region in the post-Arab Uprisings era. The aim is to develop a self-reflective practice – and its conceptual means – within feminist knowledge production in times of heteropatriarchal counter-politics. The main corpus of analysis consists of academic research published since 2011. The analysis proceeds in two steps. In the first, the paper develops an analytic of three interrelated but distinct processes of abstraction: theoretical, genealogical, and structural. Genealogical abstraction captures the historical and contemporaneous sedimentation of key concepts such as “state (anti)feminism”, “patriarchal restoration”, and “anti-gender backlash”, revealing both continuities and ruptures in feminist theorizing within this layered field. Structural abstraction refers to the pressures of the “global knowledge economy” (Connell, 2007), which privileges particular epistemic styles and shapes the visibility, legitimacy, and conditions of feminist academic labor. Theoretical abstraction involves the conceptual operations through which feminist scholars isolate, connect, and interpret social phenomena. While differing in origin and institutionality, these three abstraction processes intersect in their effects: they simultaneously enable and constrain feminist theorizing. In the second step, the paper moves from mapping these abstraction processes and their interactions to examining whether current modalities of theorizing enable certain forms of insight while delimiting others. It brings together Richard Swedberg’s (2014) discussion of the “art of theory” with intersectionality as a feminist methodology of “asking the other question” (Matsuda, 1991). The paper argues that conceptualizing heteropatriarchal counter-politics entails necessary but historically over-determined processes of theoretical abstraction that, while enabling nuanced understanding, also expose the limits of making intersectional and dialectical contributions.