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Artistic Defiance in the Streets of Egypt: Bahia Shehab’s Rebel Cat!
Abstract
In the wake of major events that have shaken the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab Spring, politically engaged women artists have increasingly come to characterize a key new direction in art production.Since the beginning of the Egyptian Revolution, representations of women through media, art, and even laws and constitutional articles illustrate a paradoxical standpoint. While women have been marginalized in many official and political institutions, images of women and women’s bodies have been abundant, multifaceted, and sometimes incongruous. This study focuses on Bahia Shehab, an art historian and graffiti artist from Egypt who feminized the verb ‘rebel’ and was behind the One Thousand and One ‘No’ stencils that were sprayed all over the city of Cairo during the first two years of the revolution. Two different, but at the same time complementary, aspects of defiance can be depicted in her works, and are of civic and epistemic nature: against the state’s apparatuses and ways of perceiving, representing and understanding women within a revolutionary setting.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies