The Egyptian anti-sexual harassment initiatives, HarassMap and Tahrir Bodyguard, and civil society organizations, Nazra for Feminist Studies and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), in November and December 2013 undertook a campaign called “salahha fi dimaghak” (Get it Right) to “correct” what local activists felt were widespread misperceptions of the problem of sexual violence in Egypt. The campaign’s purpose was, in part, to challenge victim blaming rhetoric that effectively undermined women’s human rights and denied them access to public space. Activists designed and disseminated roughly eighteen posters that visually and discursively framed the problem of sexual violence in particular ways. The male body is a central figure in this framing. Exhibiting animal-like qualities or transforming from human to animal, both wolf and dog, the visual representations of this body render it as both hyper-sexualized and predatory. This framing stands alongside other visual imagery in these posters showing the threatening physical prowess of the oversized male body, as well as discursive messages emphasizing male foolishness in denying the sexual violence they perpetrate and their criminal nature in violating women’s human rights. This paper argues that the physical rendering of the male body in these campaign posters as animal naturalizes male predatory sexuality and, therefore, acts of sexual violence. The visual and discursive portrayal of men as both fools and criminals concomitantly challenges ideas that men can overcome this presumed natural inclination toward predatory sexuality. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of the body as discursively constructed and building on debates about nature/culture, in which the female body is theorized as natural vis-à-vis the cultural male body, this paper also argues that a visual and discursive reversal is visible in the “salahha fi dimaghak” campaign posters. Here the male body is constructed as an entity outside the realm of culture, which cannot be “enculturated” toward a non-violent predisposition. Sexual violence activism in Egypt has constructed a self-defeating narrative that seeks to promote change by shaming the unruly male body while simultaneously consigning this unruliness to the realm of nature, where culture may have no effect. Moreover, this narrative runs counter to activists’ own notions that sexual violence is grounded in patriarchal control of the female body and renders it an instinctual act that potentially has no resolution.

In November 2012, Egyptian musician and activist Yasmine el-Baramawy was assaulted in a mob attack while protesting in the revolutionary space of Tahrir Square. Of her assault, she said, “Definitely I could confront rape and get back at the society who condemns the victim… I can't get rid of it and I can't get used to it although I managed to transform it into something useful, but it is always there eating my soul.” Similarly, activist Hend (pseudonym), who was assaulted in December 2013, noted, “The police do something different with every individual. They concentrate on the weaknesses… I would rather go down as a traitor to the country than as a whore, because this way they would kill me socially.” Through these statements and the experiences of these two women, I examine varying forms of embodied resistance to the Egyptian security apparatus’s use of rape as a technology to discipline the revolutionary body. Through both public testimony and silence, Yasmine and Hend have articulated political resistance with one shared objective: regaining the agency extirpated from their bodies the day they were raped. Yasmine sought to overcome the risk of a social death by publicly showing on TV the remnants of her ripped cloths. Hend chose silence, since following events of Raba’a public support for revolutionary youth was scarce. She knew her social death would lead to her public and activist death. Based on interviews with Hend and Yasmine, therapists, survivors and fieldwork, this paper addresses the technologies of domination and body regulation that tailor the possibilities of embodied resistance and healing in post-revolutionary Egypt. Drawing from Anthropology of Health, I focus on the production of narratives emanating from survivors that ponder, act upon and react against the torture afflicted on their bodies with the intended will of “breaking” and turning the survivors into “vulnerable bodies”. Thus, I aim to interrogate the political condition of the “vulnerable” as a form of resistance to the technologies of domination. In doing so, I explore an alternative framework to study the body that moves away from “rescuing” and “victim” narratives and instead accounts for political activism as an element that bargains with social taboos and public opinion in the production of narratives of healing and resistance of survivors of sexual violence.

In the last decade, scholars of the Middle East have offered significant insights into the interconnections between the body and gender in urban centers of the Middle East. One notable contribution of this literature is the national body. The spread of new technologies, medical knowledge, different forms of statecraft, and the colonial encounter, according to this literature, resulted in the discursive construction of a new gendered national body in different nation-states across the region. This paper seeks to build on this scholarship by exploring the production of multiple national male bodies in the Ottoman Empire. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ottomans from a plethora of ethno-religious backgrounds conceptualized the male body as the building blocks of “their” community/nation. In order for a community/nation to be robust and modern, it needed to be made up of fit, agile and healthy male bodies. Physical exercise and team sports, according to modernists, technocrats, educators, journalists, and athletes, served as the most effective means through which they could develop such a body. This paper investigates the ways in which Ottomans established interconnections between exercise, the male body, and nation in Istanbul’s expanding public sphere. Specifically, it analyzes the institutional and discursive trajectory of sports and the gendered body in voluntary athletic associations, schools, stadiums, and physical culture publications. Drawing on a diverse array of primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, French, English, German, and Greek, the paper seeks to explore the following questions: Why did the gendered body play such a prominent role in discussions about the nation among Ottoman Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike? What were the similar and different ways in which Ottomans discussed the ideal male body? What was the relationship between these gendered national bodies and the empire? By treating young men and the male body as the building blocks of the nation, how did Ottomans contribute to a gendered rendering of citizenship, which largely excluded women? The paper is part of a broader book manuscript project, which examines the interconnections between the body, gender, sports, urban space, and national and imperial identity in late Ottoman Istanbul.

This talk deal with particular aspects of making and unmaking masculinities and religious identities through the lens of affective politics in Egypt. I argue that the contemporary military-led state of Egypt has harnessed potent forces of affect in ways that continue to mediate political and religious consciousness and masculine bodies, beginning with a number of strategies seen from the summer of 2013 onward. Although in many ways a continuation of earlier military governments, the current state has not only succeeded in wielding these strong material and affective forces, but also in partly (especially in the beginning) satisfying the widespread desire for stability these forces have evoked, in part by reproducing a neo-patriarchal state that is seen as defending national interests, playing on recognizable gender structures and heteronormative expectations and demands of masculinity (which also intersect in important ways with religious imaginaries, bodies and identities). In doing so, the state has both materialized its presence in Cairo and provoked still more powerful desires for individual and collective safety, stability, and comfort, transforming former neighbors with different religious orientations into enemies, “non-men” and terrorists. One of the most important elements of this strategy has been the creation of a “masculine soundscape” by the military, especially from 2013 to the present. The military use of acoustic vibrations, appears to have deeply molded male bodies, evoking in them powerful responses that continue to play a unique role in the city's affective politics. These materialized experiences are connected to how gendered bodies are produced, remade, expressed, and negotiated. However, the current public affect lack of energy and sense of loss, in combination with a paranoid military dictatorship’s tactics to control its citizens via a collapse of the everyday economy and a total repression of political bodies, especially male bodies, produce a public depression and an everyday anxiety, that may mold masculine bodies differently. Upon reaching subjects or objects, all these forces are experienced seemingly without mediation, but they in fact carry discursive codes embedded by the myriad forces that shaped them in their travels through various inanimate and human bodies. This multifaceted and constant interaction helps us to see how very fragile even seemingly solid constructions of subjectivity are, as well as, to understand the production of masculinities as an open-ended life process, actively shaped by both agency and victimhood.

Graphic novels and comics illustration have been a new focus in theorizing the body. Juxtaposing patients’ lived experiences of disease, pain, illness, and loss against social norms and clinical understandings of bodies, graphic memoirs are powerful records of visual corporeal experience and transformation. The juxtaposition of text and image in comics—as well as the ability to manipulate both time and space into a series of panels -- allows for more complicated representations of bodily vulnerability, pain, and psychic interiority. This paper focuses on Lissa which debuted as a piece of graphic “ethno-fiction.” Lissa tells the story of Anna, the daughter of an American oil company executive living in Cairo, who has a family history of breast cancer. She forms an unlikely friendship with Layla, the daughter of the bawab of Anna’s apartment building, who grows to become a resolute physician struggling for better public health justice and rights in Egypt. Following the women’s journey into adulthood as they grapple with difficult medical decisions, the paper problematizes the medicalization of feminine bodies and experiences of illness. It explores the variety of people’s experiences of illness and mortality against the backdrop of political, economic, and environmental crises. Through a story of friendship, loss, and medical promise, it illuminates multiple forces that make bodies both vulnerable and resistant to forces such as political corruption, gender norms, state violence, toxicity, disease, and the commodification of bodies and health care.