Written by Nana Abuelsoud
Twenty five years have passed since the landmark ICPD (international conference on population and development) in Cairo in September of 1994. Same city where feminists are still struggling to strengthen links between out-of-stock contraception pills and reproductive rights.
Every April, feminists from all over the world huddle together for the commission on population and development (CPD) in New York to keep governments in check on their commitments to the ICPD program of action. We sip coffee while we share negotiations updates and strategize around regional blocs, and to spill out collective reactions while making lists of member states blocking our way. The Holy See rarely surprises us! We also group states putting forward progressive language around sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR), as we cheer for south countries led by feminist women, and countries reborn in revolutions. Some of us suspect the authenticity of those diplomatic motions. We question states parading their progressiveness over our bodies by calling themselves Feminist. But we know it by heart; no state centers justice in its agenda. We spend days mapping official disagreements on wordings, such as reproductive rights and weakening synonyms pushed by some states, such as maternal and health. These are not lexical preferences; they carry a historical backlash on feminist gains from twenty something years ago.
Terms previously adopted by member states are referred to as ‘Agreed Language,’ on which feminists rely heavily to push further against regressive drafts of newer agendas in policy platforms. Throughout the years, overly-distracting and multiplying battlefronts, simultaneously with the rise of the right, private sector grabbing seats at policy-making tables, and the total shutdown of civic spaces to civil society and feminist groups. Left some of us defending those UN spaces and that language as the only gain there to guard.
Feminists who steered ICPD tell stories of how Cairo’s agreed language, referring to reproductive rights among other terms, came to life. Reproductive Rights was adopted as a result of past midnight exhaustion in negotiations, they say. Word associations with Cairo goes beyond geography, it resonates profoundly for feminists at advocacy spaces at the national, regional, and international levels. Some of Cairo’s agreed language were startling the first time I came across them. How is it possible it is the same city, where reproductive rights, sexuality, abortion, and adolescent sexuality sound alien?
It became imperative to follow ICPD and Cairo when I was chatting with an older feminist. Her eyes beamed when she was remembering Cairo with all its gains and losses. How feminists organized then and prepared to win over previous losses in the following year in Beijing. She asked me if I knew so and so who are fierce Egyptian women she met there. I recognized only their names. The realization of what was missing for the feminist movement in Egypt was overwhelming; Egyptian feminists abandoned those spaces without leaving the doors ajar for the ones yet to come. There is no intergenerational feminist knowledge and tools sharing. How do you count waves of a feminist movement in amnesia?
We pose some of these questions in Cairo 94. Our new living publication starts with a reflection piece on the author’s journey in reviewing literature on ICPD, where we track international conferences that led to it. Along with an abbreviated narration of Egyptian feminist history in the desk-review led by Marina Samir. This page will be updated later this year with writings collecting memories of feminist figures who steered conversations in Cairo at the time.
1. Breaking the cycle
2. Cairo 94 (desk-review)
