Les articulations de l'arabité et du genre à travers les chaines d'équivalence : le cas de Uprising of Women in the Arab World
This master’s thesis is concerned with the aftermath of the popular protests that have emerged in light of the « Arab Spring ». It addresses these issues by means of an analysis of the  « Uprising of Women in the Arab World », a Facebook page that deals with women’s rights in the « arab world ». From a critical discursive standpoint, the research attempts to grasp the dynamics of this feminist collective through the lens of arabity and gender. On the one hand, the notion of arabity refers to a common belonging to the « arab world » that stems from the production of common religious and linguistic signifiers. On the other hand, gender refers to a privileged language used to signify power relations (Scott, 1988). I examine the intersections of gender and arabity through the concept of articulation (Hall, 1980) considered as the non-necessary assemblage of different production practices and hegemonic forces of a particular epoch that constitute a discourse. I use this concept of articulation to explore the intersections of different discourses through and by which gender and arabity are produced in the UWAW page. These articulations are analysed through the concept of chains of equivalence (Laclau, 2008), a concept that designates the aggregation of competing claims based on relations of equivalence and relations of difference. The latter are produced through the affirmation of the claims ‘particularity, while the former are constituted through the display of the claims' communalities.  This research is guided by the following research proposal: UWAW can be understood as a discursive space constituted by chains of equivalence where articulations of arabity and gender are materialized through relations of difference and relations of equivalence. This proposal is explored through a critical discourse analysis of three of the campaigns that took place on the UWAW in 2014. Focusing on these campaigns as discursive spaces where competing and heterogeneous statements emerge, I examine how the production of meaning is both impacted and informed by the competing knowledges brought to the fore by UWAW.   The analysis suggests that arabity is configured differently in each campaign. It is homogenized and universalized in « Do You Know », cleaved in « Israel Apartheid Week » and framed in civic terms in Je ne resterai pas silencieuse. Gender appears to be much more stable as it operated, for the most part, as a universalizing force throughout the campaigns.
Articulation Arab world Arabity Gender Articulation Chain of equivalence Discursive spaces