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.

In 2011, revolutionary movements swept the Arab world, first in Tunisia, then in places like Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. Listening to slogans like “irfa’ raasak fawq, inta masri” (Raise your head high, you are Egyptian), which were heard elsewhere with substitutions for the country name and coupled with people’s basic demands for hurriyeh, karameh wa ‘adaleh ijtima’iyeh (freedom, dignity and social justice), one notices that a key demand of the people has been karameh or dignity. This paper will explore and problematize this notion of dignity that people have been demanding all across the region. What happens when we take dignity as an analytical category to think through political mobilization? And what can anthropology tell us about the micro-workings of this specific human right of dignity (its everyday practices, embodiments and emotions) for political struggle? In this paper, I will move beyond dignity as a predetermined category as one would gather from the UN charter, where nations are called upon to reaffirm faith “in the dignity and worth of the human person.” Rather, I will propose thinking of dignity as contested and contextual, denoting a sense of struggle, and as a political emotion that gives people and their lives meaning and power. I ask how claims for greater dignity situate the body as a site of contestation and political struggle, and how bodies, as collectivities, are configured, subjected, and mobilized by this discourse of dignity. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and an attention to discourses in the Arab world in the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions, I will show how dignity becomes contested and conflicted in a crisis of legitimacy. Finally, I place this discussion in the framework of an international system that conditions state legitimacy on the right to protect its citizens. In this sense, dignity as a political emotion implicating the body becomes intricately tied to notions of human security and the state’s provision of protection. This paper will expand on these arguments as they arise from conversations and negotiations in the field.

The body as realized in traditional Iranian theater is presented in a variety of ways that heighten its physicality, as a result of more than thirty years of ethnographic research with traditional performance troupes. This presentation creates an underscoring of the body itself as disjunctive from the body as seen in everyday non-theatrical life. The two main forms of traditional theater are the passion play, ta'ziyeh, and the comic improvisatory form, ru-hozi. In each form, performers must present their bodies as representations of heightened versions of the normal corpus, or as distorted caricatures of normality. In both forms men represent women, but using very different representational techniques of distortion to show that although women are represented the performers are not to be mistaken for real women. Techniques of costuming, body movement and voice modulation assure this. Likewise, in both forms the male body is also presented using distortion to present characters that are exaggerated versions of reality. In ta'ziyeh stylized gesture, the use of exaggerated vocal techniques and codified clothing create bodies that are larger than life. This is aided by the use of horses, which expand the presence of performers. In ru-hozi performers, particularly the central black-faced clown figure, engage in elaborate movements that twist and turn the body into contortions that are not seen in everyday life. Other male characters are equally curious in their movements and bodily attitudes. The theatrical body in these forms thus represents a strong departure from everyday reality. In this way, the body as presented underscores what Jakobson would call the "poetic dimension" of communication. Through presenting the body as a "marked" form, the non-reality of the body is emphasized, and thus the viewers are alerted to the significance of movement and body attitude in the performance. In ta'ziyeh much of the poignancy of the tragedy is conveyed by this marked body presentation. Conversely, it is the distorted body of ru-hozi performance that creates the incongruity that underlies the humor in these presentations. The body in this manner is also politicized. In traditional Iranian culture the normal body is problematic. The theatrical body by being both "not" the actual body and representing the actual body evades the religious, political and cultural taboos that surround the image of the body. It thus allows for an essentially political statment about physicality that simultaneously avoids social critique.

The Influence of the Erotic-Mystical Images of Persian Poetry on the Erotic-Political Language of Adrienne Rich This inquiry considers the use of ambiguous or erotic-political images in the verses of the feminist North American poet, Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), in her two poetry collections: Leaflets (1969) and The Will to Change (1971). Rich sustained that writing of women and their bodies releases their energy of unconscious and provides them with a transformative power. At the same time, she strived to use this female language for her political purposes. In fact, she intended to connect her personal to political. As a result, she required a poetical form that could convey this duality. In 1968, through a translation project of the poetry of the Indian poet Ghalib (1797-1869), Rich became familiar with a Persian classical poetical form called ghazal. She believed that the association of images in ghazal provided her with the required tools to express the confusions she was experiencing in both her private and public life. In addition, the ambiguity of the erotic-mystical images in Ghalib’s poetry, inherent to the Islamic tradition of Persian poetry, helped Rich to use the most private images of body and sex to speak of her society and politics. Therefore, this inquiry discusses how Rich used the erotic-mystical duality of images in ghazal to speak simultaneously of women, their bodies and socio-political matters in her own collections of ghazal in English, published under the titles “Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib” in Leaflets and “The Blue Ghazals” in The Will to Change. Islamic mysticism (Sufism) rendered a mystic significance to Persian love poetry (ghazal). The Sufis utilized ghazal for the conveyance of their doctrines. Therefore, ghazal could be interpreted both erotically and mystically. This duality served the union of the carnal with the divine and the body with the soul. In her ghazals, Rich applied this duality to the relation between the carnal and the political in order to speak not only of women but all marginal groups such as the African-Americans and the war-trodden people. She, particularly, employed her female language to speak of the struggles and resistance against war in the countries such as Palestine and Iraq. The overall results of this inquiry suggest that the ambiguity of images in ghazal was influential to the development of an erotic-political language in Rich’s poetry or in her very words to the formation of “a common language”.