Mona Eltahawy is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution. Recently, she joined Yasmine El Rashidi, the author of Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt and a Cullman fellow, for an event at LIVE from the NYPL. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library, we're proud to present Eltahawy and El Rashidi discussing white feminism, the privilege to protest, and claiming one's voice.

El Rashidi spoke about one of the greatest challenges of her career, finding and claiming her voice as a writer:

"This is the struggle of every single day. It's speaking out about these things that you know, and I think that people take [it] for granted here. In Mona's case, you've managed to find this space. It took years to be able to write these things. We've talked about this, how for a long time you masked things or you stood behind the columns that you used to write, and I think something that comes from that is that those voices and those stories, they have to come from us. And there are very few people who have managed, I think there have been efforts, to break that barrier and to start to speak out and to find your voice and to claim it has been a huge, huge challenge."

Eltahawy discussed the way she has been positioned in media portrayals that treat feminisms of the middle east and North Africa as monoliths. She contrasted this with the way in which white feminists are allowed room for complexity in their viewpoints:

"I would always be asked, 'If what you were saying is so accurate and so necessary, how come so many feminists in the region disagree with you?' I hate that question so much because what it implicitly says is, what is implied here, is that just because we're all brown and we're from the middle east and North Africa and we're Muslim or from a similar cultural, religious background, we all have to agree. You know, white feminists never get asked this. No one puts Gloria Steinem and then puts someone who opposes her, and says, 'Well how come she disagrees with you?' So you know, white feminism, white feminists get so much space to disagree and be complicated and be nuanced, and we're all supposed to be these photocopies of each other, and so if I say something and it upsets someone from where I come from, it must be total shit and not true because the women in the region don't agree. But you know, if I ever write something and people agree with it on the spot, I will feel like a failure, because it's not my job as a writer to feel good about themselves."

Eltahawy spoke of the way in which people in positions of privilege ought to fight harder because the freedom to protest is itself a privilege, particularly when tied to biopower:

"I was going to a protest almost every week, and we would go to downtown Cairo and again it would be just a hundred of us and we'd be pointing at people, saying, 'Join us. Join us.' And of course they didn't join us because these are people that have two or three jobs, who cannot afford to join a protest after which they will be arrested because if they are arrested and disappeared, their families will starve. So not only are they terrified of the regime, but they're terrified of the thought of 'what if something happens to me?' That brings out the whole idea of privilege and how I believe if you have privilege, you're obliged to fight ten times harder than those who don't because I don't have a family I have to take care of. So I can take the risk of going to a protest and getting my arms broken and getting sexually assaulted and obviously it's not just me because my parents almost died from the worry thinking I'd been killed. But I'm child-free by choice and to be child-free by choice is in and of itself for women from where we come from, a huge privilege."

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