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The “Girl in the Blue Bra”: Piety, Sexuality and State Violence in Revolutionary Egypt
Abstract
In what became a metaphor of state violence and abuse of military power during the Egyptian revolution of January 25th the image of an unconscious young female body, stripped down to her jeans and bra, dragged by her limp arms, and viciously being kicked in the abdomen by a soldier’s heavy boot almost instantaneously occupied public attention. Although dressed in Islamic attire comprising a hijab or veil and a long black abaya cover, the young woman was accused in state media as a calculating temptress who tore her own clothes to expose her body and implicate the security forces. The state’s manipulation of patriarchal gender metaphors of sexuality and honor are intended to construct female protestors as immoral women of easy virtue. Activists protested the violent treatment of women by the security forces and within days, organized an anti-violence protest. The women-led demonstration became a site of the political transformation of the female body. A flag painted in the colors of the Egyptian flag but with a blue bra replacing the golden hawk epitomized the inversion of the state’s defilement of the female body. Another sign carried by women protesters transformed the unconscious limp body into that of a springing Ninja fighter, leaping into the air to deal a blow to the face of the soldier who oppressed her. The protests reversed the stigma and shame of the vulnerable and bare woman’s body and transformed the state’s metaphors of control into battle cries of resistance and dissent. While the case of the “girl in the blue bra” (as she later became known, her real identity remains undisclosed) starkly illuminates the grim ways women’s bodies become sites of social control and moral engineering, this is not new. Women’s bodies have often been viewed as the terrain of cultural, moral and political control. By going beyond viewing the corporeal form as a repository of disciplinary power, this paper proposes to understand the body as fluid and culturally mediated with the continual potential of being disruptive, destabilizing and transformative. Women’s bodies invert disciplinary power and destabilize patriarchal gender tropes just as they are regulated and disciplined. They emerge as sites of resistance and transformation that both mediate and destabilize state violence and disciplinary power.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None