Hidden feminism is feminism: Arab women's interplay with authorities

Abstract

This article develops the concept of hidden feminism to challenge two dominant assumptions that often shape feminist analyses of activism in the Arab world: first, that feminism must be publicly named to count as feminist politics; and second, that feminist agency is best measured through overt protest and visibility. These assumptions, while influential in visibility-centered scholarship, can obscure the strategically calibrated practices through which women contest patriarchal authority under authoritarian and deeply moralized political conditions. Drawing on debates on everyday resistance, patriarchal bargains, and feminist politics of (in)visibility, the article theorizes hidden feminism as a subset of feminist praxis defined by four cumulative criteria: feminist intentionality, strategic management of visibility, orientation toward structural or normative change, and cumulative transformative potential. Historically, it shows that Arab feminist politics have long combined overt mobilization with less legible strategies, interpretive, institutional, legal, and infrastructural, whose visibility is managed in response to risk and legitimacy. Empirically, the article examines Saudi Arabia through semi-structured interviews conducted in 2025 with feminists and activists across ideological and professional backgrounds. The findings map a continuum of feminist strategies, from interpretive struggles over religious authority and institutionally embedded reform to NGO-based infrastructures and legal professionalization, while also identifying boundary cases where empowerment coexists with conservative gender differentiation. By foregrounding hidden feminism as feminism, without collapsing all gendered practices into resistance, the article contributes a conceptually precise framework for analyzing feminist politics under constraint and for rethinking how feminist agency is recognized across contexts.