What can new media theory learn from the history of the body-as-medium in revolutionary times? What insights can the Arab world contribute to media theory? In this paper I argue that a theoretical expansion of the metaphor of virality from the biological and digital to the biopolitical sphere is a promising contribution of to new media theory at large. To reach that conclusion, this paper grapples with these questions through an analysis of communication in three revolutionary periods: the Egyptian Revolution (1919) and the Arab Uprisings (2010-), and as a historical and geographical counterpoint, the French revolution (1789). The paper develops a comparative approach to media theory that considers the history of revolutionary communication across historical periods, geographical areas, and media platforms. Based on an extensive theoretical and historical review, and one year of field research in the Middle East about the Arab uprisings, I will pursue the argument that though in all three periods and sites, revolutionaries used vastly different media against various kinds of oppressive power, the communicative role the body played in all three revolutionary periods remained largely constant. Theoretically, I pair works (Bakhtin, Boas, Butler, Chebel, Elias, Foucault, Haraway) that theorizes the historical evolution of the body and its cultural and political ramifications, with art history work on the nude (Berger, Clark, Knead, Outram), with literature on the body as a symbolic-communication space in political doctrine, revolutionary times and cultural transformations (Belting, De Baecque, Kantorowicz, Kittler, Outram). At once central and alternative to the media that humans have developed throughout history, the body enables a new approach to the history of communication because as a medium, I will argue, it has remained relatively constant since at least the French Revolution, while other communication media have undergone radical transformations. A focus on revolutionary periods is useful because in such times the human body is under pressure to utilize the widest possible range of its capacities, including communicative capacities. Focusing on the history of the communicative body, I conclude, enables a new media theory grounded in a multidisciplinary exploration of the longue durée, eschewing the twin ontological and epistemological traps of technological determinism and historical presentism. A reconceptualization of virality, as manifested during revolution, along biopolitical lines, enables a critical engagement with the data turn.