Indiana University Press Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt's Revolutionaries (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)

Review Women of the Midan sheds new light on what really happened on the streets of Cairo during the Egyptian Uprising, from the women's perspective. This study would be of much interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, the Social Sciences, and Feminist and Cultural Studies. ― Arab Studies Quarterly Product Description 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 that repressed and disciplined them. 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. Review Sherine Hafez's Women of the Midan is a brilliant excavation of gender, the body, corporeality, resistance, revolution, religion, power, and the state. She weaves together momentous historic dynamics of Arab Spring through the embodied messy ordinariness and extraordinariness of the rememories of rich and poor, educated and uneducated, rural and urban, Muslim and Christian women who are Egyptian. A tour de force. -- Suad Joseph, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, UC Davis, and editor of Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Culture From the Author Sherine Hafez is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Womens Islamic Movements and editor (with Susan Slyomovics) of Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium. About the Author Sherine Hafez is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women's Islamic Movements and editor (with Susan Slyomovics) of Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium.