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.

About the Author

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

Reviews

Women of the Midan sheds new light on what really happened on the streets of Cairo during the Egyptian Uprising, from the women's perspective. This study would be of much interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, the Social Sciences, and Feminist and Cultural Studies.

* Arab Studies Quarterly *

Women of the Midan offers one a rich access to both an unsilenced archive and an embodied language that resist being written out of history. The book is an absolute must for everyone who wants to understand what it means to create, remember, and narrate embodied/ gendered histories of revolution.

* Religious Studies Review *


Awards
Commended for Arab American Book Award - Non-Fiction 2020 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780253040619
Author Sherine Hafez
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press