Translating Gender Sensitivity: Feminist Activism, Human Rights, and the Police in Post‐Revolution Tunisia

ABSTRACT This article examines the circulation and adoption of human rights discourses and practices in Tunisia following the Arab Spring revolution, which toppled a dictatorship that had built its legitimacy upon a myth of progressive women's rights. Drawing on participant‐observation in training workshops for the police on a new law to combat violence against women, I ask: How do Tunisian feminist activists and the police grapple with the complexities of the novel regime of rights that is constituted through multiple scales of governance, competing moral and legal frameworks, and incommensurable forms of expertise? I argue that translating gender sensitivity into local bureaucratic practices entailed the cultivation of new affective dispositions through which battered women become recognizable as victims. The sensitivity training brought into sharp relief the paradox of victimhood wherein the attempt to recast gendered vulnerability as grounds for rights rather than the target of compassion reinscribed the masculinist logic of the state and raised anxieties about the lingering afterlife of the dictatorship. Drawing on the literature on human rights and affective governance, I shed light on a crucial yet understudied dimension of the circulation of human rights discourses: the mobilization of affect that is entailed in vernacularizing universal discourses into local practices.