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Feminisms in Tension at the "Feminism in Crisis?" Conference

The “Feminism in Crisis? Gender and the Arab Public Sphere” conference, coconvened by Carmen Geha, Sara Mourad, and Rim Saab at the American University of Beirut, took place on January 19–20, 2018. It included keynote addresses by Nadje Al-Ali (University of London), Hoda Elsadda (Cairo University), Frances S. Hasso (DukeUniversity), Beth Baron (City University of NewYork), and Islah Jad (Birzeit University). It also included multiple panels that ran in parallel over two days. The conference organizers asked what feminism can accomplish “in the midst of the geopolitical crises sweeping the region, and between state feminism’s lip service to women’s rights on one hand and the NGOization of activism and political participation on the other.” While the conference disrupted the locality of feminist knowledge production and put feminisms in the region in conversation, it also brought to the surface different positionalities, tensions, complicities, and contestations. Some binaries were deconstructed andothers reified.The intersection of genderwith sexuality and migrationwas sidelined in favor of a focus on states, policymaking, and the political mainstream. The local relevance of knowledge production was central to discourse during the two-day conference, as participants attempted to interrogate and envision methodologies that would respond to the struggles of feminists in the region. Far from re-creating simplistic binaries of East versus West, the attention to place acknowledged the systemic power that comes with sites of knowledge production,