The lecture presents a critical overview of women's activism in Jordan and addresses its historical challenges: mainly looking at issues surrounding identity and ideological references. Al-Tal will also speak about the importance of formulating policies and political programs based on an analysis of present-day realities of Jordanian society.

Suheir Al-Tal is a writer and researcher specialised in feminist studies and human rights. She is the author of several books and publications, including "The Nationalist Movement and its Ideological Turns" and "Tarikh al-haraka al-nisa’iya al-urdunniya, 1944-2008 (The History of the Women's Movement in Jordan 1944-2008)."

The event is part of the third phase of our 2019 program at The Lab, bringing together artists and cultural practitioners that look at the production and reproduction of a hegemonic gender space, and explore tactics of subversion and negotiation. Following writer bell hooks who articulated the importance of “imagination” and its relationship to one’s ability to “move into a place of power and possibility,” the various artistic strategies concern themselves with the collective imagining of alternative futures.

From meditations on the role of myth and fiction and the simulation of buried histories, to interventions made on existing legal texts and the use of new media technologies, the multifaceted program evokes new forms of belonging that transgress normative frameworks and categories and address the intersectionality of gender, race and class. Accompanying discursive events carve up a critical space that moves beyond mainstream, neoliberal and neocolonial perspectives on gender relations, drawing instead on alternative discourses from the periphery.