CELEBRATING WOMEN ARTISTS IN JORDAN: REFRAMING GENDER ROLES AS RESISTANCE

This thesis focuses on women artists in the capital of Jordan, Amman, and particularly on their cultural practices as an expression of a creative agency. These women create independent spaces, cultural initiatives, public performances and original artworks that allow the reframing of gender roles in neoliberal patriarchal societies today. Beyond labeling the emergence of a new female activism, or femtivism, as feminist or revolutionary, I suggest reading it as the reconfiguration of a new wave of feminisms in Jordan, which engages with the visual arts, the contemporary cultural scene of Amman, the geography of the city and the political commitment, often in informal domains rather than in institutionalized contexts. The analysis of artistic itineraries, performed spaces, collective practices, urban cartographies, personal stories, individual or common artworks form this feminist ethnographical research in which the researcher has engaged, drawing on a postcolonial, postexotic, transnational, intersectional approach.