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“The Baddest Girl of All: Diana Spencer During the Last Mubarak Decade
Abstract by Dr. Elizabeth Bishop On Session 193  (Bad Girls of the Arab World)

On Saturday, October 12 at 5:00 pm

2013 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Among the transgressive attributes of “bad girls” described by the editors of Bad Girls of Japan is that “Bad Girls Do What They Want To Do.” In this presentation, I discuss Arab Egyptian women during the last Mubarak decade. Restrictions on the press prevented them from complaining publicly about jobs lost on account of privatization; as Joel Beinin notes in “The Militancy of Mahalla al-Kubra,” economic grievances motivated workers who organized a labor action in that textile town during December 2006; specifically, their standard of living was deteriorating on account of inflation (Beinin 2007). One way (I argue) workingwomen took dignity and power for themselves under globalization, was by turning the ‘good girl’ models that the state and their families imposed upon them, against Diana Spencer who became the ‘bad girl’ symbol of all that oppressed them. Based on fieldwork, I argue that Egyptian workingwomen hid trashy paperback books with pictures of Diana Spencer under their beds in order to read them over and over again. They coupled her thin lips and narrow nose, her dewy display of cleavage, her pitiless blonde coif—with disordered habits of living, with sensual investment, with licentious sexuality, with unlawful reproduction—in short, with how they understood badness. By positioning her willful body as the object of their desire to overcome global authority, readers were free to assume sexualized and racialized personhood. In this paper I interpret a group of ‘trashy’ publications (including popular biographies and beauty manuals) published under censorship, entertaining the possibility that Egyptian workingwomen of the last Mubarak decade vicariously shared Dodi’s conquest of Diana Spencer’s whiteness. “Good girls” of the last Mubarak decade took on normative sexual and racial citizenship for themselves by reading about Diana Spencer’s “bad girl” garments, grooming, and gambols. By means of private reading practices, Egyptian women inscribed the confessional and reproductive ideals governing them, all over Diana Spencer’s “does what she wants to do” body. Theirs was, to paraphrase Rosi Braidotti, a move revealing “not just [their] libidinal desire, but rather [their] ontological desire, the desire to be, the tendency of the subject to be, the predisposition of the subject toward being” (Braidotti 1993, 13-14). As the editors of Bad Girls of Japan note, “other women may furtively admire these paragons of badness” (2005, p. 11).
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies