Getting to the Party on Time: Revolution, Gender, and Sexuality as Global Historical Problematics

How does a scholar write about revolution? I was left with this question after reading three recent books relating to the Arab revolutions and uprisings that began in late 2010 and, by some accounts, continue into the present. These works are similar in being inquiries into the gendered and sexualized conditions of and for revolutionary politics. Superficial likenesses aside—all focus on gender in Egypt—Marwan M. Kraidy's Naked Blogger of Cairo, Maria Frederika Malmström's Politics of Female Circumcision in Egypt, and Mariz Tadros's Resistance, Revolt, and Gender Justice in Egypt are works from different fields: media studies, anthropology, and development studies, respectively. Kraidy and Tadros draw on literature across disciplinary boundaries but speak most forcefully from their primary disciplines. I approach these works from the perspective of a historian of Egypt and the Indian Ocean world interested in revolution, gender, and sexuality as global problematics.

Kraidy's Naked Blogger of Cairo, despite its title's specificity, offers the broadest coverage and most explicit treatment of the varied movements for political change, taking into his purview Tunisia, Syria, and Lebanon as well as Egypt. Of the three texts examined, his is the most innovative approach to revolutions, uprisings, and protests, which he regards as quests for popular sovereignty over and against absolutism. Centered on the notion of "creative insurgency," which Kraidy broadly defines as a mix of art and activism, the book is organized in chapters, most of them from two to five pages long, that mirror the bursts or flashes of creative energy that he seeks to track in their "radical" and "gradual" modes and in combination. His study begins by examining the literal spark that unleashed unprecedented regional popular protests: the self-immolation of Mohamed al-Bouazizi in Tunisia on December 17, 2010. Kraidy then turns to the Egyptians' use of animal humor (e.g., referring to President Mubarak as "the laughing cow") and the upsurge in graffiti art. The eponymous anchor for the book is nineteen-year-old Aliaa al-Mahdy's digital art—most (in)famously a nude portrait of herself posted on her blog, A Rebel's Diary, in late 2011. Given its nearly universal rejection and "widespread condemnation" by Egyptian and other Arab commentators across the political spectrum, Kraidy argues that al-Mahdy's work "confounds the gradual and radical modes of creative insurgency" (162). Whether her work was art or not, political or not, was hardly discussed in the revolutionary forums. Egyptians largely deemed her work a foreign, naive, self-serving intervention intended to shock and shame Egypt in front of a world that was watching closely. Kraidy locates in al-Mahdy, who was forced to leave Egypt and became a member of the "sextremist" group Femen, the limit of Egyptian revolutionary radicalism (182–85, 193–96). Her rejection reproduced the gendered and sexualized body in relation to political transformation as male and pure, revealing that the embodied female form or the female as an abstraction could not be the basis of conceiving the individual and by extension the citizen (199).

Malmström's Politics of Female Circumcision in Egypt affirms that conclusion, though not so explicitly. Her book is the least focused on events during and after 2011, as she conducted the bulk of fieldwork in the early 2000s. Nonetheless, the advances and reversals of the revolutionary period deeply mark the work and she explicitly considers them in an epilogue. Basing her research on lower-income families in Cairene neighborhoods and in the countryside, Malmström considers the silent voices of poor women in public national and international discourses of female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C). Because she...