Book Review: Women of the Midan
My book review of Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries, will be published soon in the Oral History Review. However, since that is only distributed to members, I wanted to share my book review here, too. This version is much longer than the condensed version that will be published. I highly recommend this book; let me know what you think in the comments!
Book Review: Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries
Introduction
Gender is satisfyingly re-centered in the history of the Egyptian revolution, in Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries. Dr. Sherine Hafez, Professor and Department Chair of Gender and Sexuality at the University of California, Riverside, theorizes the gendered corporeal body in the complex and fluid sociopolitical context of the Egyptian revolution that began on January 25, 2011. She draws on existing scholarship, in combination with close to 100 interviews she conducted with a diverse group of Egyptian women, to create an excellent book that explores gender issues across multiple disciplines without getting bogged down. Organized into a timeline, an introduction, and seven chapters, the book is accessible and appropriate both for Middle Eastern Studies experts and novices.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1 (“Telling the Stories of Revolutionary Women”) describes three brief “scenes” of the revolution, and then explores how the revolution has been previously represented; Hafez notes that media coverage and political representations of the revolution have been largely androcentric, overly simplistic, ahistorical, and paradoxical. She draws on several other theorists to support her endeavor to rethink the gendered framework of revolutionary historiography. Hafez outlines her goal to provide a more meaningful representation and analysis of the Egyptian revolution, by centering women revolutionaries’ personal accounts of their lived experiences.
Chapter 2 (“Gender and Corporeality in Egypt: A History”) traces a history of gender and corporeality in Egypt, beginning with the early nineteenth century, and up through the present. Tracing various dynamics that have contributed to setbacks from a social justice standpoint (e.g. colonialism), Hafez explores historical constraints that women have navigated to eventually arrive at the moment of revolt in Tahrir Square. Notably, women’s protest work in Egypt is not, as it is commonly believed, a wholly new phenomenon.
Chapter 3 (“Gender, Class, and Revolt in Neoliberal Cairo”) explores the link between gender, neoliberalism, and regulatory systems of the state; these interrelated systems both hinder and advance women’s empowerment. In this chapter, Hafiz shares the words of women from vastly different backgrounds, in order to present how they ended up protesting in Tahrir Square during the revolution. She hopes to emphasize the fact that the women’s struggle in the revolution was intersectional; all the women whose stories she shares have different beliefs, religions, families, economic statuses, etc. and yet they all ended up protesting together. The original success of the revolution is indeed attributed to this pervasive sense of unity across social and economic boundaries. These personal accounts are explored in more detail in Chapter 4 (“The Lived Experience of Women’s Struggle”) in order to further examine the relationship of the political process to the gendered body. Chapter 5 (“Bodies that Protest”) focuses on the negative potential of these processes, in which women’s bodies are weaponized and disciplined; topics include virginity tests, female genital mutilation/cutting, the woman in the blue bra, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Chapter 6 (“The Specter of Gender Violence”) continues the discussion of violence, but adds an exploration of public sexual harassment and abuse; queer sexuality; strategies of emasculating men; and how gender boundaries were at times transcended in Tahrir Square. Hafez applies Judith Butler’s and Michel Foucault’s well-known theories of gender and discipline (respectively) to her analysis.
Chapter 7 (“Taking Resistance Virtually: Corporeality and Sexual Taboos”) is the end of the book, and does not flow as easily from the preceding sections; it first carefully considers the highly effective campaign to homogenize society and forget the revolution, disguised by the military as a campaign to rebuild. This makes sense as a final consideration following from the rest of the book; however, the following transition to discussion of the internet, a virtual space, after a book all about corporeality, feels abrupt. The goal of examining the relationship of the virtual (i.e. the internet) to politics of forgetting and remembering, and what this relationship means for corporeal dissent and new beginnings, is admirable. Hafez however places perhaps too much faith in the internet as the site of possible future resistance for Egyptian youth. The book argues that bodies ought to be considered repositories of knowledge; what then of all the revolutionary bodies lost to violent and wrongful death, or still imprisoned? Hafez seems to draw the conclusion that the virtual space of the internet is “the one revolutionary space today that eludes the Egyptian state’s reconstructive campaign” (185). She goes into detail about Facebook groups and online forums, in particular; these are places where Egyptian women, youth, and other marginalized groups connect with one another to discuss taboo topics such as homosexuality—hence the title of the chapter. An unfortunate omission is discussion of recent disinformation campaigns, especially since they have been most rampant on Facebook, and how successful these campaigns have been at establishing or reinforcing sociopolitical boundaries, and even sparking anti-social justice movements. A discussion of the potential for online spaces to be weaponized is needed, as well as discussion of the potential for the Egyptian government to simply restrict or completely ban access to the internet, as China is well-known to do, or as Iran did in 2019, for example. Hafez sees virtual spaces such as Facebook as appealing to Egypt’s youth because it is a space they can shape, and a place they can congregate, but discussion of what is lost when “space” and connection go completely virtual, is missing. Virtual platforms as the obvious next stage of possibility for revolution is a head-scratching conclusion to end a book about corporeality.
Dr. Hafez
Hafez is Co-Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and served as President for the Association of Middle East Anthropologists. Her research focuses on Islamic movements and gender studies in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures. She is the author of The Terms of Empowerment: Islamic Women Activists in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003) which questions the applicability of western liberal conceptions of empowerment to Islamic women’s activism. Her second book, An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements (NY: New York University Press, 2011), challenges binary representations of women’s subjectivities in Islamic movements. Hafez received degrees in Anthropology from the American University in Cairo (master’s) and the University of California, Davis (Ph.D.). In Women of the Midan, Hafez aims to contribute to her existing body of work on the topic of Middle Eastern corporeal dissent. She took multiple research trips to Egypt for the book, which includes some excerpts of her previously published articles.
Analysis
Women of the Midan’s subtitle, The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries, implies an aim of remedying the deficiencies in existing historical accounts; however, while the book does deal with women’s role in the Egyptian revolution, Hafiz clarifies in the introduction that her intention is not to simply set the record straight. The book aims to apply a gender-inclusive lens to an examination of the intertwined and mutually creative processes of gender and politics, at the center of which Hafiz locates the body—specifically, the “gendered revolutionary body” (xxvi). By examining emerging forms of gender, dissent, and violence in Egypt, and the relationships between memory, bodies, neoliberalism, and governmentality, the book aims at theorizing Middle Eastern and North African gendered corporeality. Hafez views the body itself as an archive, the locus of memory, that not only stores experience but also contains the possibility for reactivation. Something about the gendered body as a site of repression, resistance, and remembrance, would have made a better subtitle, since it is such a central part of the book overall.
Hafez’s discussion of her theoretical framework is extensive, interesting, and useful; but her discussion of methodology in terms of how the oral history interviews were conducted, transcribed, shared, and archived, is lacking. Hafez interviewed “close to a hundred Egyptian women from a cross-section of society who witnessed and shaped the realities of the revolutionary period that began on January 25, 2011” (xxix). This heterogenous group of women were interviewed over a period of five years, and Hafez identified potential interviewees organically: Women introduced her to others in a spontaneous and friendly fashion. In order to protect the interviewees, pseudonyms are used in the book. The voices shared represent an impressively diverse set of lived experiences and identities, and the presentation of each narrator’s voice is very well contextualized, accounting for various layers of intersectionality. Hafez chose to share fewer women’s stories, in more detail, rather than overwhelm the reader with hundreds of individual stories; she could have made more robust use of the remembrances she gathered, but perhaps she will use some of her material for future projects. Her presentation of the oral history interviews is varied throughout the book; “scenes,” protest chants, poems, song lyrics, and long block quotes are all used to share women’s words with readers.
A glossary would have been helpful; as a lay person (I am an American-born American citizen who speaks only English), I have no specialized knowledge of Middle Eastern Studies, and I found myself looking up words from the get-go. Take, for instance, the word midan in the title; it means an open space. Did you know that?
The eight pages of black and white photographs in the center of the book are captivating, but as a reader, I often found myself pausing to search online for additional images, and video clips mentioned. This is no fault of the book, and surely some readers will remember seeing or watching these images and videos on or in the news, during the revolution. There are noticeably few notes; 33, to be exact, of which 24 belong to the timeline, 7 to the introduction, and 2 to Chapter 2. Hafez was presumably able to incorporate everything within the main body of the text. The bibliography and index are thorough, and the timeline presented at the beginning of the book is extremely useful; not only does the timeline refresh the memory of, or perhaps introduce readers to, the political events in Egypt beginning in 2011, but it aims to recenter gender in revolution, so it includes much information that perhaps would ordinarily be omitted. For example, February 2, 2011, is not only the date of the Battle of the Camel, in which pro-Mubarak supporters rode into Tahrir Square and killed and injured hundreds of peaceful protesters; it also marked the establishment of the Coalition of Egyptian Feminist Organizations.
Women of the Midan is the latest in the series Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa; Hafez previously co-edited another book in the series, Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium (Indiana University Press, 2013). Of the 23 current books in the series, Women of the Midan is the first that deals specifically with gender or Women’s Studies, although it is the second to consider the Egyptian revolution of 2011 as its main topic. While the topic of women’s engagement in political struggles in the Middle East and North Africa is widely considered under-researched, there are some similar books to Women of the Midan available. In Resistance, revolt, and gender justice in Egypt (NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), Mariz Tadros studies Egyptian feminist movements under Mubarak. Nermin Allam’s Women and the Egyptian revolution: engagement and activism during the 2011 Arab uprisings (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018) uses oral history and archival material to chart the history of Egyptian women’s political activism. What is new about the approach in Women of the Midan is that Hafez not only uses oral history and archival material to study the Egyptian revolution from a Gender Studies framework; she specifically considers gendered corporeality throughout the book.
Conclusion
Women of the Midan is it intended to raise awareness about the ongoing social injustices faced by many Egyptians, especially the women of the revolution. The female narrators’ voices not only tell the larger story of the ongoing social movement sparked by the events of January 25, 2011, but are voices chosen for inclusion precisely because they have never before been given a platform for recorded remembrance. While firmly grounded in Gender/Women’s Studies, this book would also be appropriate for graduate-level courses in Middle Eastern Studies or Political Science, or for oral historians in those disciplines, as well as anyone interested in political movements, corporeality, or feminist theory. It’s a book that makes an impression; keeps the reader thinking; invites multiple re-readings; and will inspire endless discussion.