Tunisia's public University of Manouba will be introducing the country's first master's program in gender studies, university professor and prominent feminist Dalenda Largueche told Huffington Post Maghreb in a recent interview.
The research-oriented program, which Largueche will lead, is set to be available this fall. The history professor told HuffPost Maghreb that it was a project long in the works. Before the revolution, she had intended to open a Women's Studies program at the university, but the government had agreed to a professional master's program–geared for those wanting to go for a more practical track.
It was a failure, partly due to its wrong direction (Largueche had wanted to get government permission for a research-oriented program). The program was shut down in 2009.
According to Largueche, the newly inaugurated gender studies program, which will be titled "Gender, society, and culture," will endeavor to bring feminist thinkers and activists from around the country under a unified curriculum. This interdisciplinary program will tackle the issue of gender in order to teach its students to understand the difference between sex and gender, and how rooting gender within scientific discourse is a fundamentally patriarchal practice that is being perpetuated and mitigated into practices of power within knowledge production in different disciplines.
This rigorous program was launched in collaboration with the Tunisian Ministry of Women, with Largueche pressing that her intention was to "contribute to changing the Tunisian mentality." The professor said being permitted to run this program was a critical first step to do so.
University of Manouba's Gender, Society, and Culture program isn't the first of its kind in the Middle East. Birzeit University in Ramallah offers a Gender and Development Studies master program while the Lebanese American University established the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World in 1973 but only launched the master's degree in Women and Gender Studies in Fall 2014.
