Qalat al-Rawiya: Gender-Sensitive Storytelling

Fairytales are an important element of popular culture and extremely influential on human consciousness. They simultaneously reflect social beliefs and actions and underscore these convictions in the process of their constant reproduction and wide dissemination. WMF is aware of the impact fairytales and popular stories have in reproducing and emphasizing various gender-related issues such as gender-roles and aspects of women’s representation in popular culture and folk tradition. To address these cultural constructs, the WMF is producing and disseminating alternative cultural material, namely gender-sensitive fairytales and feminist stories. These texts seek to challenge prevalent representations of women as well as empower women through positive and active role models presented in stories and fairyrales.

In order to explore issues linked to history and gender as reflected in popular, everyday culture, WMF’s Gender-Sensitive Fairytales and Feminist Stories project has adopted a two-tiered approach focusing on both folk literature in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and the classical text of A Thousand and One Nights. Members of the Gender-Sensitive Fairytales and Feminist Stories began organizing full-day workshops on rewriting fairytales that were held twice a month throughout 1998. The first meeting “Rewriting Arab Tales from a Gender-Sensitive Perspective: Preliminary Experiments”, was held 2-3 March, 1998 and brought together a diverse group of Egyptian women working in the fields of literary criticism, creative writing, social and cultural history and theatre, to analyze and rewrite fairytales from a gender-sensitive perspective.

In addition to rewriting “source” texts, several researchers began producing their own gender-sensitive stories and feminist texts. Over the years WMF has organized many storytelling evenings of the rewritten versions to disseminate these cultural products to a wider audience. These events — like the ones held at the Bayt al-Harawi and the Greater Cairo Library — attracted diverse groups of Egyptian scholars, activists and children. The WMF has also been invited to hold story telling events in various venues and in different countries, such as the Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Mohammed al-Khalifa Culture and Research Center in Bahrain and the Cairo Opera House (2003), the Townhouse Gallery (2002), the American University in Cairo (2000, 2001) and the Spanish Cultural Institute (1999).

WMF has published a training manual on how to use, and conduct story writing workshops for consciousness raising on gender issues in schools.

WMF has published two volumes of collected stories which developed out of these fairytale writing workshops; Qalat al-rawiyyaat… ma lam taqulhu Shahrzad and Qalat al-rawiyya, as well as a series of children's stories.