Gender and beyond

Women in Revolutionary Egypt: Gender and the New Geographics of Identity
Shereen Abouelnaga
Cairo-New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2016
Pp. 150

Much has been written about the 25 January Revolution and its aftermath — and women’s role therein, but Shereen Abouelnaga breaks new ground with her precise use of the concepts of gender and agency. For gender is more than sex. Rather, it refers to cultural and social traits ascribed to one according to whether one is female or male. And agency is not free choice, but acting according to one’s perceived desires or needs in a particular situation outside of a fixed, pre-assigned identity. 

Herself a participant in the eighteen days at Tahrir Square, Abouelnaga writes with first-hand knowledge. A professor of English and comparative literature at Cairo University, she sprinkles her analysis with literary references, and is especially qualified to present and analyse the new generation of female poets inspired by the revolution. Moreover, she evaluates actual events in Egypt with the help of international feminist theory, making her book cross-disciplinary, and going beyond the usual paradigms of women’s role. 

In fact, according to Abouelnaga, women were not assigned a role in the revolution, but rather “committed to a revolutionary act that was bent on demolishing the old sociopolitical structure, where men and women suffered equally, and, thus, social justice became the main demand”. Despite not participating on a women’s platform, women’s massive presence in the revolutionary process indicated “a change in the way gender was constructed and perceived”. (p. 36) 

This is one of many examples where one needs to go beyond gender to truly understand women’s agency.

Yet, female participation in the 25 January Revolution was soon followed by March 8, when women were viciously attacked while demonstrating on International Women’s Day. These unexpected assaults and subsequent developments raised a lot of questions about the extent and nature of the changes wrought by the revolution, such as the “gender paradox” — why an apparent advance in democracy was so quickly followed by the deterioration of women’s rights. Abouelnaga addresses these questions by analysing pre-2011 state policy and events, the various stages of the political process, and the art and writing generated by the revolution. To her credit, she does not have pat answers to all the issues she raises, but her analysis is key to understanding contradictory developments and how and why women have mobilised for successive, often disparate, causes.

Abouelnaga critiques Western media for focusing on violations against women while often ignoring the unprecedented agency they have been displaying since 2011. In her view, “the 25 January Revolution endowed women with the opportunity to initiate the route to agency while struggling over identity construction… If the Revolution demolished anything, it was the principle of homogeneity [of women and the population at large]; it turned out to be a mere illusory notion, propagated for a long time by the state.” (pp. 2-3) 

The book cover exemplifies protest against such stereotyping with a stencilled image of three different women and the slogan “Do not categorise me”.

A main challenge has been disentangling the women’s movement from the clutches of nationalism, state-sponsored “feminism” and Islamism — all of which try to contain women by imposing a monolithic, essentialist identity, leaving paternalism untouched. In contrast, “The new revolutionary generation has managed to negotiate new tactics of identity politics by going beyond gender, without abandoning gender.” (pp. 6-7)

The revolution also generated a new relationship between art and politics, a new type of poetry, a new language and logic. 

At first, there were not always women-specific images or gender-related issues in the new street art. “The positive side of these drawings is that they take for granted that women are equal partners in the Revolution, that they are already integrated into the fabric of the street.” (p. 46)

At a later stage, women’s collectives carried out more feminist projects, but the real change came when “the graffiti related to the virginity tests and the stripping of [women in public] employed a logic that was completely new to society. In other words, the female body is a human body, and, thus, such violations are not to be categorised as a marker of the woman’s honour but, rather, as a proof of the regime’s barbarity... all this should lead to the formation of new geographics of identity where gender is not the sole lens of reading and interpreting a brave new world” (p. 47)