Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt's Revolutionaries [Paperback]

InWomen 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 ofrememory, 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.

Sherine Hafez is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is author ofAn Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women's Islamic Movementsand editor (with Susan Slyomovics) ofAnthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium.

Women of the Midanis a brilliant exploration of the experience of women in the Egyptian revolution. Sherine Hafez's close observations of the complex engagements of a diverse pool of mobilized women opens up new understandings of Egypt's 2011 uprising and the political forms that emerged in its wake. Hafez makes a compelling case both for the urgent necessity of gendered readings of Egyptian politics and for rethinking the meaning of political mobilization more broadly.

Sherine Hafez draws on oral narratives and the history of tlƒ8