Awards

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

Overview

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.

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Reviews

Sherine Hafez draws on oral narratives and the history of the women's movement in Egypt to produce this extremely valuable intervention in narrating the memory of the 2011 Egyptian revolution from a gendered point of view. Hafez demonstrates how women's bodies have always been sites of contestation, manipulation, and dissent. This book is an outstanding combination of firsthand accounts, rigorous theory, and commitment to women's activism for change and justice. --Hoda Elsadda, author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2008 Women of the Midan is 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. --Marc Lynch, Professor of Political Science, The George Washington University

Women of the Midan is 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. * Marc Lynch, Professor of Political Science, The George Washington University *

Women of the Midan is 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. --Marc Lynch, Professor of Political Science, The George Washington University Sherine Hafez draws on oral narratives and the history of the women's movement in Egypt to produce this extremely valuable intervention in narrating the memory of the 2011 Egyptian revolution from a gendered point of view. Hafez demonstrates how women's bodies have always been sites of contestation, manipulation, and dissent. This book is an outstanding combination of firsthand accounts, rigorous theory, and commitment to women's activism for change and justice. --Hoda Elsadda, author of Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2008

Author Information

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.

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