Between Erasure and Resistance: Women’s Bodies, Memories, and Narratives under Sudan’s Fascist Islamist Regime By Tesneem Elhassan | بين المحو والمقاومة: أجساد النساء و ذكرياتهن و سردياتهن في ظل النظام الفاشي الإسلامي في السودان

This article is available in both English and العربية (Arabic) below.

“I was attached, accused of being corrupt, and there was no recognition of my role” — A Sudanese activist.

This article will examine the dialectical relationship between erasure and resistance under Sudan’s fascist Islamist regimes. It traces how women’s bodies and narratives have been weaponized and erased through state tactics such as censorship, morality laws, and propaganda—and how Sudanese women have responded by creating alternative spaces of memory and knowledge. By documenting these practices, this piece contributes to the ongoing feminist (Makawi and Hannun, 2025) struggle to reclaim women’s agency in the face of repression and war.

In Sudan, women’s lives have long been contested terrain. For decades, their bodies, memories, and narratives have been subjected to patriarchal control, Islamist ideological policing, and state repression. The current war, (CSF, 2023) which erupted in April 2023, has only deepened these oppressive dynamics.

In this moment of profound violence and displacement, women are not only disproportionately harmed but also erased from political and historical accounts. Yet, they continue to resist through acts of survival, storytelling, and collective organization.

To ground this analysis in the lived realities of women, I conducted a survey with Sudanese activists and volunteers documenting their experiences during the current war. The survey sought to capture how women navigate visibility and erasure, the pressures they face from state, militias, and societal actors, and the strategies they employ to sustain activism and community support. Questions focused on five key areas: recognition of contributions, restrictions and threats, roles and responsibilities, the influence of societal or family pressures, and resistance strategies. By incorporating these responses, the article moves beyond abstract theorization and situates its arguments within firsthand accounts, offering a more comprehensive picture of how erasure and resistance are experienced and contested in everyday life.

War as Islamist Regression

The current war is not only a rupture in Sudan’s fragile democratic transition; it also marks a violent reassertion of Islamist (Tønnessen, 2023) authoritarianism. The militias aligned with the army Ayin Network (2025) are radical Islamist actors (Ayin Network, 2025) committed to enforcing an extremist vision across the country. Their agenda goes beyond the battlefield: they seek to reshape Sudanese society along strict Islamist lines, impose rigid political and social hierarchies, and suppress dissent wherever it challenges their vision of morality. Central to this agenda is the control of gender roles. (Ispahani, 2016) women’s behavior, (Peralta, 2019) mobility, and public participation are strictly policed, framed as moral obligations, and enforced through intimidation and violence. (Abbas, 2021) They cloak their project in slogans like the “Battle of Dignity,” (Abdel Rahim, 2025) presenting the current conflict as a civilizational struggle to “restore morality” and “protect society.”

Yet embedded in this rhetoric is a deliberate erasure: women (Awad & Al Al, 2019) are cast out of public life, reduced once again to the roles of mothers, wives, and caregivers, while youth resistance—the heartbeat of Sudan’s 2019 revolution (CMI, 2025)—is vilified as chaos and moral corruption. By invoking “dignity,” the regime and its allied militias attempt to rewrite history, presenting democracy and freedom not as the aspirations of a popular uprising but as the very causes of national collapse. (Khalafallah, 2025) This narrative does not simply justify repression; it legitimizes a return to Islamist rule as the only path to stability and security. In this way, state propaganda works on two levels: erasing the lived contributions of women and youth from Sudan’s revolutionary memory and rebranding authoritarianism as salvation. What is at stake here is not just the survival of democratic gains but the survival of alternative narratives that insist Sudanese dignity lies precisely in women’s agency, youth defiance, and collective freedom.

Even at the grassroots level, most women activists feel either erased or only ambiguously acknowledged, as survey data highlights the persistence of erasure (31% reported “yes,” 37% “no,” and 31% “maybe” regarding public recognition of their activism). Survey respondents also cited causes for unrecognized work: 33.2% said war overshadows activism, 16.7% noted absence of formal recognition, another 16.7% reported working individually, 16.7% described defamation or attacks, and 16.7% cited security risks, including arrests or lack of judicial trust. 

The “maybe” responses expose a further layer of ambiguity: women described fleeting gestures of appreciation—a private thank-you or a passing mention—yet were unsure if these amounted to real recognition. This aligns with 17.6% of respondents reporting episodic or unclear forms of intimidation, such as rumors, surveillance, or withheld permits, which quietly reinforce erasure. In this ambiguity lies a deeper form of erasure—by leaving recognition indefinite, the systems that shape history effectively strip women of agency, keeping their labor uncounted and their contributions unclaimed.

Moreover, the reassertion of Islamist authoritarianism is not abstract; it is materialized through a set of coercive practices. Across areas under SAF control (Ayin Network, 2025) —both in active conflict zones (Ayin Network, 2025) and in relatively ‘safe’ regions—the state has revived older instruments of repression to force women back into narrowly defined roles. Women volunteers (UN Women, 2024) and activists are either imprisoned, threatened with imprisonment, or branded as “collaborators with the RSF,” a charge that functions both as political persecution and as a tool of social defamation. The survey confirms that repression is widespread:54.9% of respondents reported restrictions, threats, or intimidation linked to their activism, while only 27.5% reported none, and 17.6% were unsure. Women’s groups and initiatives (Noon Movement, n.d.) have been systematically undermined: some shut down entirely, others stripped of their credibility or obstructed in their work, as seen in cases across Sudanese states. Beyond closures and prosecutions, these tactics are reinforced by the constant invocation of shame and morality, designed to dissuade families from allowing their daughters to participate in activism or civic life. Among 37 reported incidents, the most common were threats or arrests (24.3%), RSF harassment (13.5%), and bureaucratic restrictions on movement and work (13.5%), along with surveillance by state security, community shaming, online harassment, sexual violence, workplace retaliation, legal defamation, and attacks on property. In this way, the tools of control extend beyond the battlefield and into the social fabric, weaponizing law, rumor, and stigma to reimpose exclusion and silence.

The reassertion of patriarchal control is enforced not only through laws but also through the machinery of Sudan’s security institutions, particularly the State Security Committees, which operate at the intersection of local governance, policing, and intelligence. These committees—revived under wartime emergency—track activists, identify so-called “threats,” and coordinate with both official and non-official channels to neutralize dissent. For women activists and volunteers, this often translates into direct intimidation and fabricated charges such as “obstructing the constitution,” “violating state sovereignty,” or even “collaboration with the RSF (Nasir, 2024).” These accusations carry the threat of imprisonment, (Radio Dabanga, n.d.) but more importantly, they carry the social penalty of being branded as “immoral” or “shameful,” labels that in a deeply patriarchal society can destroy reputations and limit women’s opportunities. This tactic is not new: even before the current war, women activists were targeted with charges ranging from “indecency” (Tønnessen & al-Nagar, 2016) to “treason,” as in the widely publicized 2018 case of a young feminist activist (Ultrasudan, n.d.) prosecuted under Sudan’s Public Order Laws. Today, the same patterns are reproduced under the guise of counterinsurgency. In conflict-affected areas such as Kadugli, women-led initiatives have been forcibly shut down or delegitimized, while in relatively safer cities, activists face surveillance, defamation, and restrictions on their gatherings. Through this mix of legal prosecution, rumor campaigns, (Salih, 2025) and institutionalized shaming, repression extends beyond the courtroom and into homes and communities, where families themselves are pressured to withdraw daughters, wives, and relatives from civic spaces out of fear for their safety and “honor.” Survey findings highlight this personal dimension of repression:45.1% of women reported that societal or family pressures had directly influenced their ability to participate in activism or volunteering, while only 25.5% said they were unaffected, and 29.4% were uncertain, reflecting the pervasive, often ambiguous nature of such pressures.

Erasure as a Systematic Project

Women’s erasure in Sudan is not incidental; it is systematic, deliberate, and ideological. Islamist regimes and patriarchal actors have long used the machinery of the state to restrict women’s roles and narratives. The infamous Public Order Laws exemplify this: they policed dress, movement, and social interaction under the pretext of “public morality.” Beyond controlling women’s everyday lives, such laws embedded the idea that women are threats to social order, their bodies are to be surveilled, and their choices are to be punished.

Moreover, censorship and propaganda reinforced this erasure, while both the state and opposition systematically excluded women from political life. (Tønnessen & Kjøstvedt, 2010) When women were present in party structures, negotiations, (Sudan Democracy Action Project, 2024) or transitional bodies, it was often only as tokens, appearing in photos or on lists without real power or decision-making authority. Official records, media, and communiques consistently minimized or ignored their contributions, and quotas, (Tønnessen, 2011) where mentioned, remained largely symbolic. State-controlled media presented women either as passive victims needing protection or as moral enforcers aligned with Islamist ideals. (Tønnessen, 2011)

In the digital age, repression adapted (Mohammed, 2025) :  women activists and civic actors faced targeted online harassment, doxxing, and defamation campaigns intended to silence critique and delegitimize their civic engagement and resistance.

The current war continues this pattern. Narratives of women as victims of displacement and sexual violence dominate international coverage, while their roles in survival strategies, peacebuilding, and political critique remain invisible. This selective framing serves both patriarchal and geopolitical interests: by reducing women to symbols of suffering, their political agency is denied. (Abdel Aziz & Alfaki, 2021) Moreover, much of the international coverage reduces women’s experiences to numbers and brief reports, offering surface-level statistics rather than grappling with the depth and complexity of the issue. Sudanese women’s own narratives, strategies, and resistances are rarely centered, leaving global audiences with a fragmented picture that strips them of agency. This neglect is compounded by a broader international disinterest in Sudan, where media attention is inconsistent, selective, and often negligent, reinforcing the very erasures that Sudanese women are resisting on the ground.

The Dialectics of Erasure and Resistance

Erasure and resistance are not separate phenomena. They are intertwined in a continuous cycle: regimes erase, women resist, repression intensifies, and resistance adapts. This dialectic defines the lived realities of Sudanese women.

For example, when the Public Order Laws (ICNL, 1998) restricted women’s ability to appear in public (BBC, n.d.) spaces during the Islamist regime of Al-Bashir and during the Sudanese revolution (SIHA, 2021); women organized informal markets and clandestine gatherings that sustained economic and social life. Moreover, the No to Oppression against Women Initiative, established in 2009, emerged as a response to the arrest of Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein and twelve other women for wearing trousers, (Sudan Tribune, n.d.) an act deemed a violation of the public order law. This initiative, along with other similar efforts, advocated to challenge the state’s narrative and promote women’s rights. (Tønnessen, 2020)

When censorship silenced critical voices, women turned to oral storytelling and, later, digital platforms to preserve and transmit their narratives. When digital harassment sought to shame activists into silence, women responded with collective online campaign(s) (Fuhrmann, 2022) that exposed state propaganda and reframed narratives of morality. Amid the current war, survey data illustrate how women’s strategies of survival and adaptation manifest in practice: the most common response was working secretly or hiding identity (22.4%), followed by working online or remotely (19.1%), and in some cases stopping or reducing activism altogether (17.2%). Others pursued flexibility and adaptation (10.3%), while smaller shares turned to individual or independent work (8.6%), self-care and healing practices (5.2%), advocacy and awareness (5.2%), persistence or resistance mindsets (5.2%), voluntary or community engagement (3.4%), and relocation to work elsewhere (3.4%). Each attempt at erasure produces new forms of resistance. (Ali, 2019) Far from being passive, women reconstitute public life (UN Women, 2023) in the very spaces where the state seeks to erase them.

Sudanese Women’s Practices of Resistance

Despite the risks, Sudanese individuals, collectives, and organizations have developed innovative ways to survive, resist, and archive. Several practices and tactics stand out:

1.   Food Supply Networks (Takaya) in Blockaded States
During urban blockades—when roads, markets, and basic services were restricted due to ongoing conflict—women sustained their communities by organizing food preparation and distribution networks. These networks were more than logistical; they were political acts of defiance, ensuring survival outside the reach and control of the state, RSF, and SAF-aligned militias. Survey data confirms the prominence of this work: food distribution accounts for 18.33% of women’s documented activities, highlighting its central role in sustaining besieged communities.

2.   Digital Storytelling Amid War

With mainstream media ignoring women’s agency, Women-led digital platforms emerged as alternative archives, such as Aazza, Banat Radio, NFM, SIHA, and Adeela. Women used encrypted channels, blogs, and social media to document experiences of displacement, sexual violence, and resistance. These platforms challenged both local and international erasures. Documentation more broadly makes up 12.5% of women’s activities, showing that archiving and storytelling are not isolated practices but a significant share of activist labor.

3.   Archiving Atrocities and Preserving Memory

In displacement camps and exile, women began documenting atrocities, testimonies, and community histories. Some created informal archives of oral histories and written accounts. These acts counter state propaganda—which seeks to erase or marginalize women’s experiences in official narratives—and preserve memory for future generations, resisting the attempt to erase women from the historical record. Here, documentation overlaps with advocacy, which constitutes 17.5% of recorded activities, revealing how memory work doubles as political resistance.

4.   Alternative Education in Displacement

When formal schooling collapsed, women established informal learning circles for children and young people in refugee and displacement camps. Teaching literacy and civic knowledge became a way of preserving intellectual life and transmitting resistance values in the absence of state institutions. Teaching and training were the single largest share of activities at 23.33%, showing that even in war, women prioritize education as a form of survival and resistance.

Other activities also emerged in survey data: psychosocial support (11.67%), protection efforts (7.5%), medical support (7.5%), and smaller but vital roles in fundraising for evacuation (0.83%) and legal support (0.83%). Together, these practices reveal the breadth of women’s strategies—ranging from immediate survival to long-term preservation of life, dignity, and resistance. These practices illustrate that resistance is not only about protest in the streets. It is also the quiet, sustained labor of survival, memory, and knowledge production under conditions of erasure.

Sudanese women’s resistance is both material and symbolic. It feeds bodies, preserves stories, and contests ideological domination. Every meal cooked in a blockade, every testimony archived, and every digital story shared is a refusal to be erased.

This resistance is also intersectional. Women navigate overlapping oppressions—patriarchal, religious, ethnic, and class-based, as well as those shaped by ability/disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity—while constructing solidarities that cut across divisions. Their resistance challenges not only state power but also the cultural and ideological frameworks that sustain it.

Crucially, reclaiming memory is itself a political act. By archiving women’s experiences (UCLA MEAP, n.d.) Sudanese women refuse to let history be written without them. Memory becomes a site of struggle: against forgetting, against distortion, against erasure.

Conclusion

Women’s exclusion in Sudan results from deliberate strategies that use law, morality, censorship, and propaganda to control bodies and narratives. Despite this, women continue to resist, adapting to each wave of repression.

Sudanese women’s practices—from sustaining food networks in blockades to building archives of memory to educating children in displacement—demonstrate that resistance is alive even under conditions of war and erasure. Their actions contest not only the immediate violence of war but also the deeper structures of patriarchal erasure.

To honor these struggles, feminist analysis must continue to document, amplify, and connect women’s narratives. Reclaiming women’s bodies, stories, and memories is not only an act of survival; it is an act of collective liberation.

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