The 6th International Conference of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA)

Arab Women and Global Change

3 - 5 January 2002, Cairo Library
Cairo, Egypt

During the last quarter of the 20th Century the world has witnessed an increasing economic, political, military and cultural hegemony exercised by a minority of super capitalist circles represented in transnational companies. The aim of this powerful minority is to subordinate the interests of the vast majority of the peoples of the world to the exigencies of their world market, leading to the economic and cultural phenomenon, which has come to be known as capitalist globalization. The result of this process has been the rapid polarization of wealth in the hands of a small minority of people and nations. Thus, poverty has increased all over the world.

Women, it goes without saying, are affected more than other sectors by globalization. This is very evident in the Arab countries where antagonism to women's rights has grown during the past years encouraged by pseudo-modernization in some sectors of society, by the increasing influence of fundamentalist movements and conservative religious thinking, and by the media which have served to create a false consciousness and false perceptions of women's rights, roles, and problems. This has happened in the name of religion, authenticity, identity, tradition, motherhood, morality, the essentiality of women's nature, and other similar arguments in all countries of the world, even those considered to be much more advanced in many ways.
This situation requires a reappraisal, a re-understanding and a rereading of the circumstances and reality in which women have to struggle and live. We need to investigate what we can do to face the economic, political, and cultural backlash, which has affected women's lives all over the world. We need to present a clear and new vision of women's role and position in society, how to unite efforts, how to cooperate with other sectors of society, and most important, how to build up solidarity locally, nationally, regionally, and internationally.

Within this framework, we invite 20-minute papers from a variety of disciplines and approaches on the following themes:

1) Feminization of poverty as seen in the context of globalization.
2) North-South dialogue: how do we translate our similarities and differences to build up solidarity? Can we understand each other's agenda? What should we 'dialogue' about? Are there true bases for a dialogue?
3) Creativity and dissidence: is Western feminist criticism different from Arab feminist criticism? Do we have different epistemologies due to our different agendas? Who is the feminist reader? Writer? Are feminist critics dissidents or marginalized?
4) FGM and MGM: perspectives and strategies for elimination of such practices.

In feminist solidarity,

Nawal al Sa'dawi
President of AWSA