Institute of Development Studies

Empowering women through fairytales and folk stories

Tessa Lewin – 11 July 2008 

Fairytales are an important element of popular culture and extremely influential on human consciousness. They reflect and reinforce social beliefs and behaviour. The Women and Memory Forum (WMF) – one of IDS’ partners in the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Consortium – are exploring how Arabic folk tales represent stereotypes of women.

The culmination of the project was a performance by six members of the WMF for the Arab Hub of the Women’s Empowerment RPC, held in Cairo on 15 June 2008. One of the storytellers, Hadia Hasaballah, from Sudan came to read her own stories, and many of the young women who had participated in the Egyptian workshop came to the show to see their work performed. The storytelling night was performed to a score specially commissioned for the show by Iman Salah, an Egyptian musician and composer and directed by Caroleen Khalil.

The stories in the performance were selected from workshops run at Ahfad University in Sudan, Birzeit University in Palestine and in Cairo. Participants varied from country to country, but many had some experience of writing before the workshop and some had already been published. Participants read and analysed Arabic folk tales from a feminist perspective and discussed to what extent the stories represented negative stereotypes of women. The workshops looked at both folk literature in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and the classical text 1001 Nights. Participants then wrote their own contemporary versions of these stories, which were in turn critiqued by the group.

Fairytales and popular stories play a big role in reproducing and emphasising gender-related issues, including gender-roles and how women are represented in popular culture and folk tradition. The WMF is producing and disseminating alternative cultural material to address these constructs, including gender-sensitive fairytales and feminist stories. These texts challenge how women are represented and empower them through positive role models.

The WMF plan to produce an edited volume of the stories and are working with the Women’s Empowerment RPC on an animation based on the performance. The Arab Hub of the RPC have also been running a series of workshops with WMF to facilitate debate about women’s empowerment with activists, academics, and analysts in Arabic .

This project represents one of a number of RPC projects that aim to produce and disseminate new cultural artefacts portraying alternative images of women. The Cairo performance was part of the RPC’s commitment to action research, which tries to promote change and to integrate the process of capacity building with its research and communication activities.

Tessa Lewin is Communication Officer for the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC

Image: Sahar el-Mougy performing in Cairo by Tessa Lewin