“They Are Not Like Your Daughters or Mine”: The “Bad Girls” of the Arab Spring Most discussion of women and the Arab spring revolve around two, sometimes competing but often overlapping narratives: a celebratory one that points out the important role Arab women played as organizers and participants, and how their participation cut across lines of class and generation, and undermined social taboos, clearing a space for a new generation of Arab women. The other narrative is a cautionary one emerging now that the Arab spring has completed its second year: This is a skeptical one: it notes that women are not empowered by their participation in these revolutions and, in fact, risk losing some of the hard-won rights they snatched from the toppled autocrats. My paper expands on the skepticism of this second narrative by looking at some of what I would like to call the “bad girls” of the Arab Spring: Faida Hamdi (accused of slapping Bou Azizi and thus sparking the Tunisian Revolution), Iman al Obeidi (accused the Qathafi regime of gang raping her), Samira Ibrahim (subjected to state virginity tests), Alia al Mahdi (posed naked on her blog), and the anonymous “blue bra woman” (publicly beaten and stripped by the army). I argue that these women are “bad girls” because they challenge the entrenched patriarchies not only of the autocratic regimes against which the Arab Spring bloomed, but also the patriarchies of those in revolt. More broadly, these bad girls demonstrate that while there were no slogans specifically related to gender and sexuality raised at the beginning of the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan uprisings, gender and sexuality were and continue to be central to the political unconscious of the Arab spring, and that the “bad girls” are embodiments of this unconscious. My paper will focus on the eruptions of the bodies of these bad girls onto the revolutionary surface. Highlighting these disruptive moments, the reactions to them, and the way they were deployed by different actors (state, army, media, bloggers, activists, feminists) will shed light on the complex intersections between women, nationalism, and revolution. The bodies of these women became sites where revolutionaries and counter revolutionaries contested their claims regarding the nation’s identity and future but where also state and communal patriarchy consolidated itself. This consolidation highlights the complicity between the state and its opponents when it comes to the “bad girls” of the Arab Spring.