From the Margins to Beijing: Feminist Voices Breaking Through

My feminist awakening was a process of discovery, questioning, and connecting. It began in the late eighties when I became totally independent and economically self-sufficient. It was an intense learning period but also risk-fraught, as the war in Lebanon was raging and lawlessness was the norm. 

It was also when I joined the Oxfam office in Lebanon. I had no formal degree in gender studies, and I had read and knew   of a few of the famous feminists. I knew firsthand that being a woman and a girl in our societies was difficult and oftentimes cruel. My experience, and that of peers around me, was that of subjugation, silencing, and almost complete disrespect of wishes, ambitions, and aspirations. This was further compounded by war, economic challenges, and a religious schooling system whose main aim was to thwart free thinking.

In 1988, Oxfam in Lebanon had made an explicit decision to support disabled-led social movements and move away from the institutionalization model. I was tasked with doing an evaluation of Oxfam’s work with disability groups in Lebanon and identifying impact, transformative potential, actors and leaders, and the experience of persons with disabilities to organize and mobilize.  This initial task led me to the realization that what was more challenging and oppressive than being a woman was actually being a woman with a disability. 

The disability movement in Lebanon to me was avant-garde and progressive but was also extremely patriarchal and exuded toxic and violent masculinity. This was my first hands-on understanding and engagement with intersectional forms of oppression and the deliberate erasure of the voices of women with disabilities in spaces that were supposed to empower and liberate.

Throughout that period, and in the years that followed, I continued to be an active part of a process that sought to resource local and community-led social movements whilst facilitating connections, learning, and the building of grassroots leadership. None of this work involved engaging in multilateral spaces until the civil war in Lebanon came to an end and many of us began engaging proactively with broader global horizons, be it South-South or South-North.

This coincided with the preparations for the UN IV Conference on Women, set to take place in Beijing in September 1995. The preparations for what was to become a global landmark event involved regional conferences which brought together civil society organizations (women’s rights groups and others), government representatives, and international organizations as multilaterals. 

I stepped reluctantly into the Arab States conference, which took place in Amman in November 1994, with very few expectations. Our five-star hotel in Amman was not a space that was comfortable for feminist activists, nor was the overwhelming presence of government officials and several large, well-resourced, and very vocal faith-based organisations. Within this rather oppressive dynamic, and what seemed like a very non-transparent and poorly participatory way of drafting the conference outcome document and the deliberate silencing of women’s voices from the region, progressive feminists from the Maghreb stood out.

Feminists from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia had been far more clairvoyant and had collectively formed, in the early nineties, the *Collectif Maghreb Égalité 1995*. The network was solely dedicated to action research and evidence-based campaigning for gender equality locally, regionally, and leading up to the Beijing conference in 1995.  This was a key learning spike for me, as I was able to observe and then engage directly with a group of feminist activists from the region who joined forces to reclaim multilateral spaces and to bring in their agenda for gender equality.