Women of the Midan

1. While there are many books on the Egyptian revolution and the Arab Spring movement, this work focuses on the testimonies of women revolutionaries, the social and political discourses about women that circulated during the revolution, and the often-brutal encounter women faced during the uprising.

2. It is a timely look how women respond to the state and how the state responds to and shapes individuals.

3. The author is a well-established scholar in anthropology whose work focuses on women in Middle Eastern and Muslim majority cultures.

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.

Acknowledgments

Recentering Gender in Revolution: Timeline 2011 to 2015

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