States of Ambivalence: Feminist Activism, Law, and Social Media in Post‐revolution Tunisia

ABSTRACT Since its inception in the 1990s, the global movement against gender violence has had an uneasy relationship with power. Scholarship on the topic has emphasized the movement's involvement in dubious alliances with nonliberatory agendas, such as the carceral state or military interventions, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, its pursuit of autonomy through self‐organization. Anti–gender violence organizing in postdictatorship Tunisia tells a somewhat different story. Neither fully aligning with nor completely eschewing the state, feminists operated primarily through ambivalence. In this article, I examine the trajectory, tactics, and effects of feminist activists during the transition to democracy as they both resisted and collaborated with the state. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tunisia and a digital ethnography, I examine feminist political action in two contrasting sites—the courts and social media—to theorize the notion of ambivalent interpellations . I argue that anti–gender violence activism in Tunisia exemplifies a particular configuration of state‐citizen relationship that is not adequately captured by the binary of domination/resistance. An ethnographic attunement to ambivalence as a political orientation brings into sharp view the duality of the state: the state as violence and the state as protection .