Abstract:

The book examines how women’s participation in the 2011 Egyptian uprising has influenced their gender consciousness and feminist subjectivities in the afterlife of activism. The uprising, I argue, was an affective encounter that created affective attachments to gender equality and women’s bodily rights. Building on semi-structured interviews with women protestors, I demonstrate how through women’s participation, they rendered questions surrounding gender-based violence—that were traditionally held to be private—public and political in the aftermath of the uprising. The analysis avoids linking the present to the past in a temporal succession, instead explaining continuities and ruptures in women’s experiences with literature on emotions, affects, and contentious politics. It shows what moves us in the afterlife of activism, when structures obscure reform and when disappointment drags our will. The book is the first to document the afterlife of women’s engagement in the 2011 uprising. It expands understandings of movement’s impacts on participants following defeated protests and under nondemocratic regimes.

Bio:

Nermin Allam is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Women and the Egyptian Revolution: Engagement and Activism during the 2011 Arab Uprisings. In addition to numerous chapters and entries, Allam’s work has appeared in Mobilization, Politics & Gender, PS: Political Science & Politics, Social Research: An International Quarterly, Middle East Law and Governance, Politics & Gender and Sociology of Islam, among other journals. Allam sits on the board of the Arab Political Science Network and is currently the co-editor for the APSA-MENA newsletter, the newsletter for the Middle East section at the American Political Science Association.