In the last decade, there has been growing interest in popular culture in the Middle East and North Africa, further boosted by the 2011 uprisings. Yet, until now, political scientists have largely ignored popular culture, reflecting a general lack of attention within this scholarly field to ‘the everyday’ as a site of politics. The construction of the boundaries of the category of ‘popular’ in relation to ‘culture’ should be seen as contingent and context-specific, linked to wider political, social and cultural struggles. In this respect, the paper draws on the work of the late sociologist and cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall, who argued that the definition of the ‘popular’ is inextricably linked to the defining of ‘the people’. In the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the famous slogan was, ‘The people want the fall of the regime,’ thereby clearly defining the popular against the regime. However, just over two years later, ‘the people’ were those siding with the army against the Muslim Brotherhood, helping to usher in a return to dictatorship. This paper will argue that popular culture is crucial for understanding the complex and contradictory relations between ‘the people’ and power and how this has determined the dynamics of the revolution and counter-revolution. Toward this end, it will explore shifting constructions of ‘the people’ within popular culture, focusing in particular on its gendered dimensions, in the post-25 January 2011 period. The paper will draw on examples from a range of popular cultural texts, including graffiti, cartoons and music. In the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, women battled to ensure that the meaning of ‘the people’ would be inclusive of their participation and that their rights would be part of the goals of the revolution. Yet, later, under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue of women’s rights became constitutive of the boundaries between ‘the people’ and the Muslim Brotherhood, contributing to political polarization and paving the way for the 30 June 2013 protests and the July military coup. In this way, the paper challenges binary categorizations of resistance and domination, focusing instead on the multifaceted and shifting ways in which gender was articulated with the notion of ‘the people’ and their revolution.