Women of the Midan

The Untold Stories of Egypt's Revolutionaries

Sherine Hafez

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253040626
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An exploration of gender, the Arab Spring, and women's experiences of revolution, including firsthand accounts. In Women of the Midan, Sherine Hafez demonstrates how women were a central part of revolutionary process of the Arab Spring. Women not only protested in the streets of Cairo, they demanded democracy, social justice, and renegotiation of a variety of sociocultural structures. Women's resistance to state control, Islamism, neoliberal market changes, the military establishment, and patriarchal systems forged new paths of dissent and transformation. Through firsthand accounts of women who participated in the revolution, Hafez illustrates how the gendered body signifies collective action and the revolutionary narrative. Using the concept of rememory, Hafez shows how the body is inseparably linked to the trauma of the revolutionary struggle. While delving into the complex weave of public space, government control, masculinity, and religious and cultural norms, Hafez sheds light on women's relationship to the state in the Arab world today and how the state, in turn, shapes individuals and marks gendered bodies.

1 Telling the Stories of Revolutionary Women

Scenes from an Uprising, Cairo 2011

Scene One

She stood—barely five feet in height—with her feet planted squarely on the ground, facing what seemed to be an endless dark blur of amn markazy security men in their black uniforms and helmets. Her face was framed in a bright hijab that accentuated her youthful features. She could not have been more than seventeen years of age. Yet her voice bellowed powerfully out across Tahrir Square without a microphone for all to hear. As she called out short, rhythmic couplets to the crowd, they answered back, repeating word for word the slogans she chose to shout:

Huwwa Mubarak 3ayiz iḣ? (repeated twice)

What does Mubarak want?

Kul’ ša3b yibus rigliḣ? (repeated twice)

All the people to kiss his feet?

Then, staring straight into the eyes of the security forces cordoning off the street, she raised her arm in the air with her index finger pointed upward and shook it from side to side as she continued:

Laa ya! Mubarak! Miš ḥanbus.

No! Mubarak! We won’t kiss [your feet].

Bukra 3lik bil gazma’n dus!

Tomorrow, we will step on you with our shoes!

Scene Two

A small crowd of women and a few male supporters took to Tahrir Square on March 8, 2011, to commemorate International Women’s Day and reaffirm women’s commitment to the revolution. As the group stood in the middle of the square, it seemed as if the turnout was less than expected. A few minutes of waiting for others to join soon confirmed the reality that the thousands of women who were part of the uprising preferred to stay home that day, despite the various efforts to mobilize them. Instead, there was another group who showed up, their voices audible even from a distance as they approached. Could it be possible? the women thought to themselves. Are they really chanting for women to fall and for the revolution to live? Almost immediately their questions were answered; about a thousand men showed up, with a few carrying signs ridiculing the women’s march. They went directly for the small crowd of women gathered at the center of the square. Crude illustrations of men drooling at women, signs ordering women to go home, verses from the Quran that were strategically chosen to accuse women of neglecting their duties and obligations as females, seemed almost alien in Tahrir Square, which had just witnessed one of the most vocal movements in the country for freedom and democracy. As the exchanges between the two groups turned confrontational, it became apparent that the male-led group was bent on stopping the women’s march.

A young sheikh, wearing the traditional gibba wa kuftan, was carried on the shoulders of men in the antiwomen march. The “sheikh” held pages from the Quran in his outstretched hand, thus invoking religious doctrine as the ultimate authority against the female turnout. Only minutes after they appeared, the men encircled and isolated the small groups of women who were in Tahrir calling for solidarity and quickly started to grope at them. A few male supporters who rallied with the women’s march were physically assaulted. “The same men who invoked Islam and brought the sheikh sexually harassed us!” cried one of the women in the march.

Scene Three

It was a very cold night in Tahrir a few days after the 25th [of January] but we were determined to occupy the square no matter what. We had no idea how to go about setting up camp or organizing the place. None of us knew anything about that. Us women had never done anything like this before. Some had sleeping bags, others just a blanket, and most of us had nothing at all—having decided to do this [camp out] at the last minute. Many of our Muslim brothers were there, they told us what to do. They set up the campground, making beds for those who did not have anything, putting up makeshift tents from bed sheets and clothing. They organized us into rows, designated areas of the square, even made out schedules for us so some slept while others kept vigil. They treated us all the same, never taking notice of who was veiled or not. They slept next to us on the ground and refused to leave even when their commanders recalled them back. We were exhausted and beaten and if it weren’t for them we would not have pulled this off.

—Sanaa, an activist woman from Tahrir describing the early days of encampment in the square

Recentering the Gender Narrative

Despite women having participated alongside with men in the pivotal days of revolution in 2011, neither media coverage nor academic scholarship afforded them equal attention. Accounts and analysis of revolution remain androcentric at best, analyzing the events from a patriarchal vantage point that privileges the male gaze and normalizes masculine politics. As a rough example, in the most extensive bibliographic list on the Arab uprisings published by the Project on Middle East Political Science (2015) only sixteen articles referred to gender in their titles, and twenty-six referred to women, with a total of forty-two entries out of 888 articles, amounting to only a fraction of the total. I take this one example as a relative indicator of the dearth in scholarly articles dealing with women and gender-related issues and the marginal importance afforded them in the literature on the Arab uprisings.

Language describing the uprisings points to the normalization of the male gender in all aspects of the revolution. Public discourse, magazines, and journals show little effort to be gender inclusive when describing the protestors. Even when mentioning the demonstrators who were killed, males are the only ones mentioned. Feminist Nawal El Saadawi (2013) writes in Al-Masry Al-Youm,

Why have the names of the shahydat (pl. female martyrs) of the revolution of January 2011 fallen from the dominant power’s deliberations?

Is it because they are women?

Or because they are poor and their names are not known?

Is it necessary for the shahyda (sing. female martyr) or shahyd (sing. male martyr) to be of the upper class or a member in the parties that compete over government or a friend of a notable journalist or of a media pundit who owns a satellite channel?

Is there cheap Egyptian blood that the sand soaks up only to be forgotten by the nation and history?

The nation is not concerned with the blood that is spilt for its sake with the exception of the valuable blood of those who own history and government and weapons and the media. (Translated from Arabic)

El Saadawi points to the intersectionality of invisibility in Egypt. What does it mean to be an Egyptian with “cheap blood”? Class, connections, socioeconomic status, and most of all gender mark the revolutionary subject—even in the most visceral fight to save the nation—as cheap. The nation too, according to her, caters to those who “own history” because the nation itself is framed in androcentric terms by those in power. The fight for the nation, therefore, is also the fight to redefine it. And those who lost their lives—women, men, the poor, the forgotten, and those whose blood is considered cheap—forge the path to reclaiming what belongs to the people.

Writing a gendered account of revolution humbly follows in the path forged by its martyrs and those who persist against coerced forgetting. Relying on what I will call “rememory” and the centering of gendered corporeality at its midst, this account endeavors to reclaim the revolution’s historiography from the custodial grip of mainstream politics. It is not simply about restoring women to revolutionary memory; nor is it about the glorification of women as exceptional though it is about rethinking the gendered framework of revolutionary historiography, troubling the normative androcentric lens and subverting the dominance of those who “own history” to expose revolution’s underbelly—its lived experience with all its messiness, joys, and tribulations. Through women’s “rememory” of revolution, a deliberate retelling of these events animates gendered bodies, affording them a re-experience. Rememory thus opens the doors to what is visceral, to the corporeal archive of revolution, and this is how these women rewrite revolution.

While a predominant focus on women has its own ramifications, the epistemic privileging of masculine politics results in an incomplete and skewed interpretation of events. Clearly, women’s experiences may differ from men’s, but they may also parallel them. Therefore, accounting for how these differences evolve and impact the course of the uprisings is crucial to understanding these events. Like their male counterparts, many women spent nights in the midan, some alone, others with their children huddled against them for warmth. They marched and shouted the slogans of revolution, thawra thawra hatta an-nasr; thawra fi Tunis thawra fi Masr (revolution, revolution till victory, revolution in Tunisia, revolution in Egypt); il sha3b yurid isqat il nizam (the people demand the overthrow of government). They stood fearlessly on the front lines while the state pummeled them with tear gas bombs, and many, despite government repression, continue to this day to work toward the realization of the revolution’s aims, 3ish, hurriya, 3adala igtima3iyya (bread, freedom and social justice). Yet, in the accounts of the first eighteen days of the revolution and the subsequent months and years that followed, women remained only a marginal group that was referenced for color—all too common in public discourse and unfortunately in academic discourse as well. When women were not written out of the record, their inclusion in revolution lore served particular agendas, be they militaristic, Islamist, or western orientalist.

Subverting the “Glocal” Hegemonic Lens

Feminists have long since challenged the androcentric bias of knowledge production (Anderson 2004, Fricker 2009, Haraway 1988, Harding 1996, Hooks 1994, Moraga & Anzaldua 1983) yet dominant local and global discourses unfailingly frame women’s sociopolitical backgrounds in ways that rationalize systems of control. In conventional representations of Middle Eastern women, this androcentric logic continues to be exacerbated by a history of colonialism, oil war agendas, and the neoliberal capitalism of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s development imperatives. Persistent images of women from the developing regions of the world as monolithic, and disempowered; victimized by culture and religion still have currency today. Aside from a few notable exceptions (Abu-Lughod 2013, Al Ali & Pratt 2009), feminist analyses are sorely needed that take into account Euro-American military interventions in the Middle East and how neoliberal forces sustain a rhetoric that rationalizes specific social and economic transformations. There are various paths a feminist trajectory may take when concerned with the fluid dynamics of power. One way to do so is to focus on issues of subjectivity and subject formation, in which case context and history are of particular significance for tracing their embeddedness within metanarratives of modernity, postcoloniality, nationalism, and neoliberal economic shifts. By taking into account the processes that shape human subjectivity and desire, our trajectory can at once deal with context, cultural relativity, and knowledge production, while paying equal attention to the formation of selves and persons whose desires and motivations lie at the nexus of larger discourses of modern history. Chandra Mohanty (2003) tasks the scholar of gender in postcolonialist and Muslim majority countries in particular with the challenge of undoing the dichotomous positioning of Muslim women vis-à-vis western women. To Mohanty, debunking homogenizing efforts that lump all women of the developing world into one large, oppressed collective are of paramount concern. To do so, she contextualizes the struggle of women everywhere—but particularly those from the global south underscoring their specificity by means of intersectional approaches.

To “tell women’s stories,” (Abu-Lughod 2013), it is necessary to address these discursive tropes in knowledge production about “the other” woman (here understood as the third world, Arab, Middle Eastern woman). Revolutionary women’s rememories produce a counternarrative to the dominant universalizing and androcentric coverage of western media and local official discourses about the revolution, its participants, and its spectators. However, narrating these accounts of ordinary yet extraordinary women’s lives cannot be a task of direct translation; nor does it purport to be more than reconstructive, imaginative, and incomplete. After all, rememorying is necessarily dependent on one’s imaginative powers and ability to resurrect embodied past events. Nevertheless, in narrating these accounts, I am attentive to how discourse reproduces power and power relations; that knowledge production is not arbitrary, and that documenting lived experience is a praxis that is necessarily both ethical and grounded in a critique of knowledge. This research agenda, I believe, is closely related to what the ethnographic process in this contemporary, increasingly globalized world must contend with—an awareness that field research is ultimately intertwined with power dynamics embedded in issues of cultural representation. To begin examining these issues, the next section will analyze the framing of the Arab uprisings within the western media lens shaping events according to the grand narratives governing global conceptions of center and periphery. What news and events find their way into the international media and why? Who get to be the players, the heroes and the villains in these representations?

Shaping Revolutionaries and Revolutions

While the Arab uprisings came about as a result of complex social, political, and economic circumstances, various competing powers vied to control how these events came to be represented. Given the current concerted effort in some Arab countries such as Egypt to erase the memory of revolt, it is of particular importance to start here—with a discussion of the discursive assertions of power over how the uprisings are represented. While the uprisings initially attracted a significant amount of attention, there are fewer and fewer references today to these events in the media and public discourse, other than to point to the disruption and chaos the uprisings unleashed on the region. Local and western media reflect conflicting yet sometimes converging interests in controlling how the struggle for local freedom and sovereignty are represented. In the material that follows, I trace how these interests frame gender politics in the revolts.

Gender is often evoked as a marker of civilizational progress, as a barometer that tests the level of progressive politics taking shape in the Arab world or as a symbol of tradition, nationalism, and cultural and religious authenticity. Principal examples of cases cited to support processes of culture-centric, Orientalizing epistemologies include the case of Samira Ibrahim versus the military, which exposed virgin testing; the case of the protestor now dubbed “the girl in the blue bra” and the sexual harassment and assault on women in Cairo’s streets. Emotionally and politically charged, these cases therefore highlight core issues that define how the lines of gender are drawn, the powers that vie to control the dissenting body, and how resistance takes shape in the face of oppressive regimes. Media coverage of the Arab uprisings exposes these themes of power and resistance spotlighting the ways they intersect with women’s bodies.

A few news outlets observed that women took to the streets “in droves.” The emphasis, however, was placed on the marvel of a so-called unprecedented phenomenon of women’s political participation in a region often described as beset with a conservative and backward gender ideology that denies women “voice.” As reports of this “feminist” participation of Arab women gained some momentum, the general public was pulled into the discursive web of an age-old Orientalist pattern. A pattern that paints all women in Muslim-majority and Middle Eastern societies with one brush, dehistorisizes them, purports them to be generally oppressed, and sees only a feminist western trajectory for the liberation of dispossessed others. While such hegemonic constructs are all too common in the media they are often echoed in academia uncritically reinforcing western political interests in the region.

Locally, however, the media in Egypt representing state interests, questioned the integrity of the revolutionaries and particularly women, often impugned their motives, and described them as women of loose morals. This multiple appropriation on both global and local levels recalls the “double colonization” that scholars such as Chandra Mohanty (2003) describe in their work. The “double” refers to the simultaneous labeling by “glocal” hegemonic discourses. Women in politicized areas of the world (countries that play a key role in global/western politics) are on one hand often cast in the role of the dispossessed by international interest groups, while on the other as the inauthentic westernized other by local patriarchal power. These dichotomous discourses result in further complicating and undermining women’s efforts in the public sphere (Hoodfar 2001). Often women’s groups have to go to great lengths to mobilize because they must navigate the perceptions that come with this paradoxical positioning.

The events that began with the uprising in Tunisia in December 2010 succumbed—as has much of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) historiography—not only to the hegemonic discursive western lens but also to local distortions of the patriarchal privileged elite. While scholars after Edward Said (1981) laid out the genealogical processes of Orientalizing European knowledge production that shaped how the MENA and Muslim-majority countries are viewed, a more contemporaneous analysis of these processes is still needed. This is exemplified by the disconnect that emerged between the events unfolding on the Arab ground during the uprising and their representation in news and media coverage. This divide in knowledge production prompts a more serious look at the constructs of knowledge that are the product of cultural translation (Hawas 2012) and those that are nurtured by embedded discourses of O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline: Recentering Gender in Revolution
• Introduction
• 1. Telling the Stories of Revolutionary Women
• 2. Gender and Corporeality in Egypt: A History
• 3. Gender, Class, and Revolt in Neoliberal Cairo
• 4. The Lived Experience of Women’s Struggle
• 5. Bodies That Protest
• 6. The Specter of Gender Violence
• 7. Taking Resistance Virtually: Corporeality and Sexual Taboos
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author