This paper examines the gendered nature of surveillance and its effects on individual agency and bodies in the acclaimed, timely novel al-Ṭabūr (2013; The Queue, 2016) by Egyptian writer, psychiatrist, and activist Basma Abdel Aziz. Written in the tumultuous aftermath of the 25 January Revolution of 2011 in Egypt, this novel is part of a recent burgeoning of Arabic science fiction and dystopian literature, particularly since the “Arab Spring.” Set in an unnamed Arab city, al-Ṭābūr presents a critical dystopia of a fictitious yet familiar society that lives under the seemingly omnipotent, authoritarian regime referred to as “the Gate” (al-bawāba). The novel follows the lives and thoughts of several characters as they wait vainly for months for required documents in the kilometers-long queue extending from the Gate, which closed following the “Disgraceful Events” (a thinly veiled reference to the 2011 uprisings) and likely will never re-open. With ties to corrupt corporations and Islamic fundamentalist groups, the Gate maintains control of society by regulating participation in public life through intense surveillance of citizens via invisible observers, extensive phone taps, and peer monitoring, and when that fails, through violent suppression of dissent. Within the growing field of surveillance studies, there are still few studies that examine surveillance cultures in Middle Eastern and other non-western societies, and even fewer that also critically consider gender. This paper contributes to this expanding field and to Arabic literary studies by bringing together scholarship on Arabic dystopian literature and science fiction (e.g., Campbell, Moore, Bakker) and scholarship from surveillance studies, particularly works that engage with feminist theory (e.g., Lyon, Dubrofsky, Magnet, van der Meulen, Heynen), to investigate how surveillance functions within Abdel Aziz’s novel. I pay particular attention to narrative perspective and the motif of in/visibility and analyze key moments of traumatic interactions between named characters and the Gate to show how gender norms inform and are recreated by surveillance structures. I argue that it is the gendered differences present in the various types of surveillance that lead to different, harsher consequences for female and other non-normative characters. While the Gate demonstrates successful, though distinct, control over male and female bodies, it is the well-educated, female characters who suffer loss of agency at emotional and cognitive levels, as well, thereby distorting their sense of self and reality and impeding their participation in collective action.