Sherine Hafez: "Women of the Midan. The Untold Stories of Egypt's Revolutionaries"

Abstract

#14–2020 Book Reviewed. Indiana UP, 2019 ISBN 9780253040602 Women of the Midan: Untold stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries, by Sherine Hafez, is a much needed contribution to our understanding of the Egyptian Revolution. While this critical event, precursor of the many other conflicts that are still reshaping the region, has been narrated from multiple angles, using gendered corporality as the lens through which to investigate the revolution is an innovative and important approach. The book amply discusses the intersections of gender, sexuality, politics, citizenship and social movements which is a less-explored angle of the Egyptian revolution. The book starts by laying out the concept of rememory, a term the author borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to explain the experiences of ordinary women who joined the protests in Tahrir Square. Rememory is presented as a corporeal act where the body is a “signifying agent of collective action and transformation” (Hafez xxvi). In this context, therefore, rememory is part of the repertoire of acts of contentious politics that revolt against the entrapment of women’s voices, bodies, and stories in the nationalist project. As many academics have argued, including Hafez, the state is highly concerned with tailoring the notion of womanhood in accordance with the nation-building project and as such it shapes and oppresses women while also providing avenues for resistance and contestation. The scholalry work of Abouelnaga; Abu-Lughod; Ahmed; Badran; Baron; and Botman among others, has vaslty addressed these issues. The act of remembering is presented as a powerful process to build collective identities and preserve the social memory of a collective action currently under threat; for the present regime, January 25th was a brief anecdote preceding the real revolution of June 30th (an idea that is highly contested because many actors saw in that day a coup d’état that counted on the support of a vast majority of the population). The narrative of June 30th portrays El-Sisi as leader of the nation against the terrorist threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and who later instituted the prosperous current rule. Hafez explains how ever since then the ordinary women activists spawned in Tahrir Square have been forced to forget and are currently living in exile or have been imprisoned, demobilized or their activity otherwise suspended. While combatting precarity and under threat from a repressive security apparatus, these women struggled to redefine their resistance and positionality. Rememory emerges as a complex corporeal act that mediates the past and the present and forces the interlocutors in the REVIEW 181