Combining the notions of “habitus” and “colonial habitus” by Pierre Bourdieu and Vivek Dhareshwar’s with André Nusselder's discussion of the role of digital technology and function of fantasy in mediating the real and the virtual in Interface Fantasy (2009), this paper seeks to address the intertwined issues of gender, nationhood, and the postcolonial habitus in Tunisian cyber culture. With the fall of the Ben Ali regime, there was a surge in virtual cultural production that cut across age, regional, professional, gender and social boundaries. Overnight, thousands of home videos, documentaries, testimonies, songs, and political cartoons were posted on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Tunisian blogs like Nawaat.org, the Les Révolutionnaires de la dignité or atunisiangirl.blogspot.com--a phenomenon labeled by Tunisian facebookers as “Tunihood.” This paper will attempt to answer the following questions: What has prompted this surge in cultural production? In what way did the educational system and the technocultural sophistication help create political consciousness and a sense of national identity during the Revolution? How did the virtual world bring about a national consensus in a country torn by 55 years of regionalism and social and economic marginalization? How did humor and translation affect the reception of the Tunisian Revolution at home and abroad? What language/languages were used in these video clips? Many songs (including the anthem of the Revolution) are based on songs that originate either in the Palestinian (“Raji’ Li Blad”) or the North African Jewish diaspora (“Le Départ de Ben Ali”). What is the significance of this musical intertextuality—in language, genre, diction and authorship? What does it mean for a Tunisian citizen in 2011 to inhabit the exilic experience of the “North African Jew” in the 1960s or the “Palestinian Arab” in the 1940s? Finally, what do these home videos and political cartoons tell us in particular about nationhood and gender in post-Ben Ali Tunisia?

Does a dictatorial regime affect gender constructions, particularly masculinity and notions of manhood? Achille Mbembe demonstrates that through the dictator’s power to touch (beatings, torture, harassement, etc), the subject allows itself to be taken over (166-7, On the Postcolony, 2001). Indeed, Before the Revolution, critiques of men may be found in novels by Amel Mokhtar, Massouda Boubark and Fethia Hechmi, who create male characters that exemplify men’s impotence—and sometimes castration—reflecting the dissatisfaction of women with the Tunisian Man. However, throughout the Revolution, definitions of masculinity and manhood are reexamined as men take back their voices and take responsibility for community formation/ action. This revolution has been called the Dignity Revolution. I argue that it has allowed for an appropriation of manhood connected to dignity and a redefining of masculinity in Tunisian society. A demonstrator in Tunis proclaimed: “If we die tonight, at least, we will die men, instead of living on our knees.” (facebook video) The general strike of January 14th in Tunis included a majority of men (although women were present) as danger was eminent and men sought to protect women while fighting for dignity. Howson mentions that Western thought “has allowed men to think and live as though they did not have to attend or labour over their bodies, to forget the body” (2 Embodying Gender, 2005). This is what Tunisian men did while searching for their dignity and freedom; they knew that their bodies were on the line for the sake of a better tomorrow. Defying the body in its desire to survive allowed for a redefinition of what it means to be a man for a Tunisian. Indeed, Tunisian men are not born men but are made into men. Examples from the cyberworld show the process through which Tunisian men went to re-establish masculinity, redefine Arab manhood and regain dignity.

The undeniable geo-temporal differentials between living through an event and reconstructing it retrospectively as an epistemological object of knowledge are oftentimes complicated by the politics of remembering/amnesia, ideological constraints/concerns, and methodological limitations. For instance, approaches to the Tunisian revolution—and now to the Egyptian revolution—have initially been erratic but soon consolidated themselves around one master narrative at the center of which there is one triggering factor or symbol—Mohammad Bouazizi in the case of Tunisia and Wael Ghonim in the case of Egypt. This paper wants to argue that there is no master narrative of the Tunisian revolution and certainly not a theory of its origins that might explain adequately, let alone justifiably, what happened on January 14, 2011. I am interested in a multidimensional and multidirectional theory of the Tunisian revolution, but I will focus herein on one enduring aspect that I think has frequently been overlooked in the many recent analyses of and commentaries on the revolution whether in the media or in academic circles. I believe there is a repository of critical dissent that has been sustained and consolidated by the insurgency of various cultural practices and the advent of secular modernity, not to mention the robust educational system that was put in place since independence. Of course, critique has not always been manifest or explicit even though some critics have quite explicitly opposed Bourguiba’s and Ben Ali’s regimes and paid a high price for doing so. Whoever studies Tunisian literature and culture since independence would not miss, however, the latent or indirect critique it carried and disseminated. Sociopolitical and cultural critique is there in cinema, in theater as well as in poetry and music. In the months leading up to the revolution, critique has become vocal, particularly on YouTube and Facebook which circulated, among other things, explosive hip hop videos that had instantaneous effects. I will therefore devote a large part of this paper to an examination of the role of hip hop as a vehicle of popular discontent against the regime before and after the revolution. Hip hop insurgency, I will argue, kept alive the critical repository on which the mass mobilization of Tunisians hinged. Psycho-M and El-General will be my main focus but others will be discussed in the process.

This paper examines the Tunisian uprising in the light of the notion of public consensus. This notion pertains to a shared understanding among people over legitimacy, one that is a constantly negotiated within the different spheres of society even under unrepresentative government. In trying to make sense of Tunisia's unforeseen popular revolt, which toppled the seemingly unshakable authoritarian ruler Ben Ali, analysts have emphasized the economic discontent caused by unemployment, poverty, and high food prices. Others have noted the role social networks have played, characterizing the uprising as an instance of online activism and hailing it as a “Twitter revolution.” While these interpretations might carry some validity, they often lose sight of the specificity of the Tunisian context and risk invalidating its spontaneous and organic nature. This paper seeks to look at the Tunisian uprising as a case of endogenous revolution, in other words, an event that occurred because of the particularities of the Tunisian situation. This peculiarity is attached to Tunisia’s long touted ‘miracle’ manifested in Tunisia’s gains of a “system that works” with a sustainable infrastructure, liberal economic reforms, demographic structure, decentralization,women’s rights, and access to education. The context of this so-called‘Tunisian miracle’ represents the ground on which legitimacy and public consensus were to be negotiated throughout Ben Ali’s rule. Under this shared understanding, Tunisians had to trade political concessions for a 'system that works’. As a consequence, one might see the uprising as case of collective action mobilized when the public consensus was disrupted and only awaiting Bouazizi’s spark. More specifically. the social dysfunction generated by Ben Ali’s clan coveted every aspect of society, challenging the economic, moral, and political values. Hence, by co-opting different spheres, the regime broke Tunisia’s long standing public consensus. It did so by contradicting the most quintessential parameters of the Tunisian miracle as well as, and more importantly, its coalescent public consensus on the meaning of legitimacy.