Women in Revolutionary Egypt

Shereen Abouelnaga

Description

A compelling inquiry into the remaking of gender and sexuality in post-Mubarak Egypt
The 25 January 2011 uprising and the unprecedented dissent and discord to which it gave rise shattered the notion of homogeneity that had characterized state representations of Egypt and Egyptians since 1952. It allowed for the eruption of identities along multiple lines, including class, ideology, culture, and religion, long suppressed by state control. Concomitantly a profusion of women's voices arose to further challenge the state-managed feminism that had sought to define and carefully circumscribe women's social and civic roles in Egypt.
Women in Revolutionary Egypt takes the uprising as the point of departure for an exploration of how gender in post-Mubarak Egypt came to be rethought, reimagined, and contested. It examines key areas of tension between national and gender identities, including gender empowerment through art and literature, particularly graffiti and poetry, the disciplining of the body, and the politics of history and memory.
Shereen Abouelnaga argues that this new cartography of women's struggle has to be read in a context that takes into consideration the micropolitics of everyday life as well as the larger processes that work to separate the personal from the political. She shows how a new generation of women is resisting, both discursively and visually, the notion of a fixed or 'authentic' notion of Egyptian womanhood in spite of prevailing social structures and in face of all gendered politics of imagined nation.

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617977299
• Langue: English

Extrait

Women in Revolutionary Egypt
Women in Revolutionary Egypt
Gender and the New Geographics of Identity
Shereen Abouelnaga
The American University in Cairo Press Cairo New York
This electronic edition published in 2016 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright 2016 by Shereen Abouelnaga
Protected under the Berne Convention
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 977 416 747 8
eISBN 978 161 797 729 9
Version 1
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies and eaten alive.
—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Whose Spring?
1. Is There Gender in This Revolution?
The Road to 2011
State Feminism: What Is It Good For?
The Marriage of Nationalism and Gender
Women’s Agency
The New Geographics of Identity
Beyond Gender
2. Gender and the New Text
New Generation and New World
The New Transversal Text
The Visual
The Eye of the Beholder
The Iconic
The New National
3. The New Subversive Poetic Voices
Sara Allam: Kisses and Loneliness
Marwa Abu Daif: Mother and Military
Sabrin Mahran: Breaking the Law
Sara Abdeen: On the Edge
“Without Huge Losses”
4. Multiple Patriarchies and One Body
A Utopian and Modern Moment
Fragile Bodies
It Is All about the Body
Islamic Bodies
Why Do They Hate Us?
5. The Politics of Memory
The Rise of Memory
Trauma of the 25 January Revolution
Documentations of Memory in Social Media
Gendered Memory after the Eighteen Days
Shattering the Silence of the Body
Historical Memory
Then What?

Notes
PREFACE
T he increase in the tendency to read the position of Egyptian women in isolation from as big an event as the Revolution was reason enough to make me write this book. On one side, the Western media—in all its forms—worked on highlighting the violations of women’s rights and bodies; on the other side, it totally ignored the wider sociopolitical context that is replete with protesting voices and sharp consciousness. This vision led to the portrayal of Egyptian women as victims and implied a naïve attitude toward women. Similar to the Revolution, which has been challenged by its countermovement, the narrative of women was sidelined by its own counter that appeals more to minds that still believe the white man’s burden exists. The way women have been exercising and performing their agency is unprecedented. This has not gone unnoticed by scholars of the region, and Egyptian academia is to be credited for having realized that at a very early stage. As the new geographics of identity has prevailed to enrich gender with other elements, the academic scene has kept up with developments. This book, however, does not assign itself the role of reading what happened since the eruption of mass protests in 2011; understanding the past opens potential possibilities of new forms of agency in the future. It is important, then, to fathom the meaning of agency this book employs.
I am indebted to the feminist minds that have challenged the social and political norms, and I have questioned the canonical theoretical principles. I am also indebted to all the feminist activists and scholars I have known and who never hesitated to transfer their experience. However, my main inspiration has been Susan Stanford Friedman’s book, Mappings. Friedman’s project of going beyond gender has informed my book and allowed several exits from theoretical impasses. It has also helped me understand situations that seemed totally incomprehensible, because they did not correspond to the expected or what ‘should be.’ The high fluidity of the political scene has called for a constant change of subject positioning, a fact that had been totally foggy and nebulous for me and others as well. Any change of positioning seemed to call for vilification and condemnation. Amid the disappointments of the revolutionary trajectory, Friedman’s theory worked like a deus ex machina. Identity is ipso facto flexible, fluid, and changeable, but amalgamating feminism, multiculturalism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, literary studies, and cultural studies for the purpose of reading the new geographics was the real inspiration. My thanks are also due to the American University in Cairo Press, especially Neil Hewison, whose trust enabled me to start the project, and Nadia Naqib, whose patience and support helped me finish. I must also express my deep gratitude to my editor and first reader, Caitlin Hawkins.
INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SPRING?
And when we speak we are afraid
Our words will not be heard
Nor welcomed
But when we are silent
We are still afraid
So it is better to speak
Remembering
We were never meant to survive
From A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge

“Gender, gender everywhere, and not a space to win.” Starting from March 2011, I kept almost humming this line in parody of Coleridge’s famous line in his Romantic nineteenth-century poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . Unconsciously, I started humming it after the shameful virginity tests perpetrated by the military, but wasn’t that too early? Perhaps, and perhaps not. I view this incident as a warning sign that worse incidents were bound to follow. The arguments and logicalities that ensued were disappointing and shocking, and they meant that the gender battle had erupted. The analysis of that incident was confined to whether it happened or not, emphasizing how authority (the military at that time) tends to oppress women. In the case of Samira Ibrahim, a victim of the virginity tests, nobody ever raised the issue of her origin (Upper Egypt), her age, her class, and her veil. These were essential factors that should have been taken into consideration to understand how gender—as a main component—will seek real agency. They were factors that, in the past, should have worked against the victim; paradoxically and fortunately, they worked for her. Without the Revolution, nobody could have sued the authorities. One wonders how between January and March 2011 society was capable of breaking the fear barriers.
The transformation of the sociopolitical scene was a corollary of the Revolution. It was neither positive nor negative transformation; just transformation—a substantial change and a conspicuous shift toward the readiness to confront. The scene was overpopulated with voices and actors whose main concern was to designate and fix what came to be called ‘Egyptian identity.’ The appearance of the identity discourse signified a crisis that was political, intellectual, ideological, and societal. In addition to going back to the obsolete definition of identity as fixed, stable, and unchangeable, gender was taken to be a marker of identity. This explains why the former Mubarak regime was so concerned with controlling and legitimizing a certain system of gender—one that consolidates the power of the patriarch, in his multifarious manifestations, especially the father figure. Consequently, women’s agency was hindered, and women were forced politically and discursively to conform to a monolithic ‘modern’ image that has shielded all the sociopolitical and cultural differences and problems.
How the 25 January Revolution endowed women with the opportunity to initiate the route to agency while struggling over identity construction is the main concern of this book. I want to examine the emergence of women’s agency in the post–25 January moment, and, in order to do that, we have to trace many ideas back in time. The history of certain ideas could, in turn, trigger the history of gender. For example, the history and trajectory of nationalism in Egypt since the beginning of the twentieth century is, in my view, the history of the women’s movement. Authoritarian regimes always find an excuse by which to control the people’s choices, to limit their practice of agency, to shrink their space of appearance, and to channel their anger through false causes. Women, on the other side, usually pay double the price as subjects and as women. The power of the central state and its system has always been so tight that the Revolution never managed to demolish them. Yet, every power carries within it the regimen of resistance. If the Revolution demolished anything, it was the principle of homogeneity; it turned out to be a mere illusory notion, propagated for a long time by the state. The Revolution has allowed for the eruption of differences previously silenced and suppressed through the incessant celebration of homogeneity through the state-run media. The Revolution marked the appearance of a real diversity on several levels: ideological, cultural, religious, educational, class-based, and gender-oriented. The revolutionary act has functioned as a political and cultural shock that effected subversions in a previously solid national gendered discourse. Nonetheless, the refrain remains, “gender, gender everywhere, and not a space to win.”
The mise-en-scène of Tahrir Square revealed the fact that there are several constructs of gender; simultaneously, rethinking gender was a necessity. In this sens