Abstract :
Over the course of Arab revolutions, many individual and collective phenomena and behaviours emerged, proving the importance of sex and gender in the concretization of the concepts of authority, and the methods of addressing them in both the public and the private spaces. Among such occurrences are the exacerbation of physical and symbolic violence against women, the frequency of violence, rape, trafficking, and child marriages, all of which have increased to the beat of religious fatwas and new laws that oppose women’s citizenship and humanity. The rise to power of Islamic movements has nurtured and further fuelled these phenomena, unveiling the extent towhich these currents rely on gender and women as a cornerstone for their discourse. Political Islam, in all its currents, constituted an extremist expression of phenomena and behaviours disseminated throughout Arab societies, prior to the revolutions. These phenomena are ingrained in the inherited cultural frameworks, and have for many decades contained the violence resulting from the inherent ideological and sentimental contradictions both in the unconscious and in social representations.
