How Best to Be Egyptian? The “Honorable Citizen” and the Making of the Counter-revolutionary Subject

Abstract

Despite growing interest in studying counter-revolution in Egypt, scholars have neglected the ways in which the regulation of normativity governs conduct and discourages resistance. This article argues that discourses of normativity in Egypt have produced counter-revolutionary subjectivities, without whom the counter-revolution could not have succeeded. These subjectivities are constructed through the mobilization of normal/deviant binary logics, which are encapsulated in the normative figure of the honorable citizen. I suggest that the honorable citizen—which informs how best to be Egyptian—is a contradictory figure that is made possible by the ongoing interaction between (post)colonial and neoliberal governing rationalities. By employing Foucault’s work on governmentality, and Cynthia Weber’s queer analysis of figuration, I conceptualize normal/deviant logics through what I call counter-revolutionary governmentality (CRG). CRG reduces the originality of Egyptian resistance by associating it with the desire to be Westernized and constructs revolutionary aspirations as a threat to sovereignty. I argue that figurations of normative “Egyptianness” fortify Egypt’s “backwardness” in contemporary international orderings of progressive versus backward states and maintain international hierarchies that privilege Western modes of socio-economic and political organization. Such maintenance is not only the work of the global North but is also reproduced in the South.