Gender Equality Machineries in Jordan: Tools of the State, Critical Actors, or Both?

As the robust scholarship on state feminism and gender equality machineries (GEMs) has established, these institutions are critical for improving the status of women. Ideally, GEMs ensure that regular attention is paid to gender equality in government decision-making processes and they concretize pathways whereby women’s civil society actors can influence governance practices. Of course, not all GEMs meet this ideal. Indeed, an enduring feature of state feminist institutions in the Middle East and North Africa is that the state uses women’s machineries to advance its own interests or as a tool of genderwashing, in which they highlight their gender equality institutions in an effort to distract from authoritarian practices. Moreover, state feminism in illiberal regimes is often at odds with autonomous feminist organizations and movements and can undermine broader efforts aimed at radical gender justice. Against this backdrop, an unlikely success story emerges: femocrats – the feminist bureaucrats working in GEMs – in Jordan have managed to advocate for progressive policies and support feminist campaigns even within a state engaging in genderwashing. Through a case study of the Jordanian National Commission for Women, I demonstrate how femocrats have some agency to pursue campaigns on violence against women while still being constrained in other areas, especially those like Family Law which are entangled in doctrinal politics. The analysis adds nuance to the scholarship on state feminism and autocratic genderwashing by demonstrating how state feminist institutions might simultaneously serve as tools of the state and as critical actors and catalysts for change.