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Disjunctive Synthesis: Deleuze and Arab Feminism

While feminists in the West have identified in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cause for serious attention, this has not been the case among Arab feminists. This may be due to a lack of familiarity with their work or a lack of access to their works in translation, but I believe it has more to do with a perceived lack of resonance between Deleuze’s thought and Arab feminist concerns. The first part of this essay examines the state of Arab feminisms today, identifying four main tendencies: Islamic, rights based, Foucauldian, and conservative (the latter specific to feminism in the Persian Gulf states). The second section explores just how viable and productive a disjunctive synthesis of Deleuze and Arab feminism might be at this juncture. Deleuze and Guattari formulate disjunction as the production of differences. A relationship of disjunction can produce alternative ways of perceiving, feeling, and thinking about the world. I contend that a number of Deleuzian’s insights—including his Spinozist conception of the body in terms of its affective capacities; his notions of active and passive affects, adequate and inadequate ideas, and images of thought; as 14 well as his understanding of ethology—can open up unexpected and useful feminist modalities otherwise absent or restricted by the exigencies of an Arabo-Islamic milieu. In the third and final section, I briefly outline what effects such a project can have by analyzing the particular situation of women in the Gulf state of Kuwait through the lens of a recent political incident.