Zed Books Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and ResistanceLessons from the Arab WorldBy Maha El Said, Lena Meari, Nicola PrattZed Books LtdCopyright © 2015 Zed BooksAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-283-4ContentsAcknowledgements, ix, INTRODUCTION Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance in the Arab World Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt, 1, PART I The Malleability of Gender and Sexuality in Revolutions and Resistance, 1 Reconstructing Gender in Post-Revolution Egypt Shereen Abouelnaga, 35, 2 Resignifying 'Sexual' Colonial Power Techniques: The Experiences of Palestinian Women Political Prisoners Lena Meari, 59, 3 A Strategic Use of Culture: Egyptian Women's Subversion and Resignification of Gender Norms Hala G. Sami, 86, PART II The Body and Resistance, 4 She Resists: Body Politics between Radical and Subaltern Maha El Said, 109, 5 Framing the Female Body: Beyond Morality and Pathology? Abeer Al-Najjar and Anoud Abusalim, 135, 6 Women's Bodies in Post-Revolution Libya: Control and Resistance Sahar Mediha Alnaas and Nicola Pratt, 155, PART III Gender and the Construction of the Secular/Islamic Binary, 7 Islamic Feminism and the Equivocation of Political Engagement: 'Fair is foul, and foul is fair' Omaima Abou-Bakr, 181, 8 Islamic and Secular Women's Activism and Discourses in Post-Uprising Tunisia Aitemad Muhanna, 205, CONCLUSION Towards New Epistemologies and Ontologies of Gender and Socio-Political Transformation in the Arab World Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt, 232, About the Contributors, 241, Index, 244, CHAPTER 1Reconstructing Gender in Post-Revolution EgyptShereen AbouelnagaIntroductionThe prefix 'post' might suggest that the revolution is over, in the sense of either having been crushed or having fulfilled its aims. I use 'post' in neither sense because I fully adopt the slogan 'the revolution continues'. The prefix means what happened after the famous 'Eighteen Days'. Egyptians also generally use the word 'revolution' to refer to the same period (25 January–11 February 2011). The title of this chapter is highly misleading in another sense. It suggests that 'reconstructing gender' has been a corollary of the revolution. Perhaps the revolution has been one of the epistemic incentives but not the only one. It seems that the huge numbers of women who took to the streets during those Eighteen Days in 2011 led the media, analysts, writers and observers to conclude that such a conspicuous presence meant that gender was being revolutionized. It is impossible not to notice the plethora of studies, articles and conferences that took the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions to be markers of the liberation of women. Surely, this is an oversimplification that does not take into consideration the mish-mash of socio-cultural complexities along with power relations. To conflate the public sphere with the streets and to assume that women were previously physically incarcerated is quite a mistaken hypothesis that keeps generating more simplistic views about the dynamics and polemics of the context. It was a revolution against the corruption and barbarity of a regime — with a special focus on the physical torture that had become systematically perpetrated by the security services — in which almost every citizen was willing to play a role regardless of gender, religion or class. Gender roles and women's rights were not listed on the agenda of protesters, in spite of a few feeble unheard voices; and, in retrospect, that was the mistake.This chapter argues that the initial formulation, or rather unfolding, of new constructs of gender appeared as a result of the incessant violations of women's rights, where the body stood as the main protagonist. That is to say, gender became a priority when the utopia of the Eighteen Days turned into a dystopia.Back to the 1990sIn order to understand and explore the malleability of gender in the current period, it is necessary to