“Man är man och kvinna är kvinna”. : En fallstudie om Top-down State feminism och genusnormer i Tunisien.

Sammanfattning: In comparison with other Muslim Arabic countries, Tunisia have attained a unique and successful progress when it comes to women’s rights and gender equality. According to researchers, the progress of women’s rights in Tunisia is due to a policy of top down State feminism that the country has adapted since the independence from the French colonialism 1956. Researchers have mainly focused on investigating the diverse factors that contributed to this progress and on tracing the causal mechanism behind the unique women’s legal rights in Tunisia. Nevertheless, there are few studies that carefully examined gender norms in Tunisian society and its relation to the adopted top down State feminism. The goal of this thesis is to analyse how gender norm are described in Tunisians legal texts and compare it to how young educated citizens in Tunisia relate to gender norms, as well to see if there are any eventual potential progress regarding gender equality in the future in Tunisia. This thesis is based on text analysis of law texts and qualitative group interviews. This thesis has no high explanatory ambitions, but it seeks to illustrate the various potential explanations for the differences and similarities between how gender norms are constructed in law texts and among young educated citizens in Tunisia. Also, this thesis seeks to obtain an idea about how these differences and similarities can be understood. This was done with the help of the data collected from the group interviews and also using theories about State feminism and the relation between the state and gender norms. The analysis of law texts shows that the Tunisian state draws a rigorous line between the public and the private sphere. The Tunisian state expresses a progressive view regarding gender norms on the public sphere but a conservative one when it comes to the private sphere. The interviewees’ views regarding gender norms in the public and the private sphere can be divided into two main categories depending on how they argument for their point of view: “Progressive” and “Conservative”. Thus, differences and similarities between how gender norms are expressed in law texts and by the participants in this study and how those can be understood, depends on which ideologies and mindsets the participants have concerning gender norms. Thus, the cultural and religious heritage as well as the social current circumstances can be assumed to be one of the most crucial factors that affects the progress of gender norms and equality in the public sphere likewise the private sphere in the case of Tunisia.