Women, Gender, and the Iraqi Uprising: Inequality, Space, and Feminist Prospects (In Arabic)

This study attempts to explore the meaning, content and importance of women's participation in the October Uprising by providing insights that help explain and analyze the complex conditions of women in Iraq and analyze the social, economic and political context and its repercussions on their lives, including gender disparities. The study relies on a group of field and analytical research conducted by the two researchers to investigate the situation of women in Iraq and in various fields, in addition to field research that dealt with the participation of women in the October protests. It is based on available quantitative and qualitative data to analyze the differences between the sexes. Instead of dealing with the concept of inequalities in a limited sense (i.e., as differences between women and men), this study uses an approach that relies on relational feminist theory - or intersectionality - with a focus on the social history of women and the feminist political economy because of the latter's ability to provide an understanding of the nature of the complex relationship between structures. Social, political, and economic power, resources, access to it, and the person responsible for it, as well as his ability to highlight gender inequalities as one of the reasons that provided for the involvement of women, especially from the young generation, in the protest act, even if he was not the driving force behind this act. In addition to feminist political economy and the common dimension, this research uses the concept of (space production) by Henri Lefebvre in analyzing the protests and their gender dimension. We will employ this concept to emphasize the fact that space is a product of a society that is experienced, conceived and perceived together. According to the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, the social space is socially produced and constructed, and cannot be reduced to its physical construction, nor to economic production, but rather it is developed through a social, material and mental dynamic, which is the fruit of collective values and representations that are experienced, imagined and understood. Lefevre also theorized the concept of marginal social spaces of impossibility, in which revolutionary social imaginations and utopias emerge from people's spontaneous actions rather than through a conscious plan. Henri Lefevre argued that it is not the revolutionary movement that produces space but the discontinuity of the spaces themselves that creates something different and a substitute for the dominant force. The public space is the place for negotiation of the values, ideologies and norms that form the "social contract" of a society. The occupation of space itself allows the individuals who participate in it to contribute to the formation and negotiation of this contract