This paper discusses the problematic and double-sided role of the public intellectual in the Syrian revolution, which started on March 15, 2011 and is still unfolding. When recently challenged by Syrians, the regime enforced its control by carrying out military operations against its own citizens, not without endorsement by a large portion of the population. The paper follows the case of Buthaina Shabaan (b.1953-), the writer, professor, and advocate of the Syrian regime. While spurring the populace to embrace the possibility of democratic reform, this female intellectual has accepted-even embraced-the political control employed by an authoritarian one-party regime, which uses her as a representative of their supposed progressive and women's liberation agendas. Shabaan has been playing a significant role in supporting and ultimately sustaining a totalitarian regime, compromising in the process the interests of women and even children, for whose cause she has long claimed to be a champion and a spokesperson. The shift of Shabaan from being a feminist to serving the propaganda of the regime has damaged her integrity as an intellectual. This shift requires not only a revisionary approach to the Western reception of her, but also an analysis of the way the Syrian people have perceived her role in undermining the revolution.

This study examines the role of young Syrian women grassroots-level organizers from inside and outside Syria in the Syrian Revolution of 2011, with particular emphasis on the voices of “unknown” nonviolent activists. Informed by intersectionality theory, the essay provides an analysis of certain aspects of their resistance to Assad’s regime in relation to intersectional paradigms of ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and nation, focusing on the subjectivity of the oppressed, Syrian women in this case, and investigating their dynamics and exploring their marginalization by traditional political actors. The study offers a historical perspective of the Assad regime’s interactions with varied ideologies (Islamism, Nasserism, Communism, and the Democratic Baath) and ethnicities (Alawite, Kurds, Turkmen, Armenian, Circassians, and Druze) in Syria that will allow for a better understanding of the significance of the resistance of Syrian women and question its universality. Keywords: Syrian Revolution 2011, Syria, women grassroots organizers, Intersectionality, Syrian women, regime change, Arab Spring, national identity, democratization

In June 2011, Egyptian blogger and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah told a reporter from America’s National Public Radio, “a lot of [the revolution] is misunderstood and misrepresented…internationally and even locally, from the framing of this as an Internet-led revolution to a framing that it’s a youth revolution. All of that is based on…aspects of reality, but it excludes the majority of the people who participated in the revolution”. Statements like these raise questions about the predominance of some “revolution” stories. Why do Facebook and Twitter feature so heavily within revolution narratives? Why have so many been quick to classify the Egyptian revolution as the story of a “youth movement”? Who, indeed, comprises the “majority of the people” participating in the revolution? Revolutionary, anti-state protests have been staged by Egyptian women for decades. Some media coverage of the revolution has endeavored to feature stories of women pushing for rights in a post-revolution government with an uncertain future. But few acknowledge the kinds of protests women activists staged prior to the revolution; even fewer suggest the national resistance and critique their campaigns generated fueled a growing mistrust in the leadership of the country. This paper explores the trajectory of the anti-street harassment campaigns in Egypt as one such example of women’s “pre-revolution” protests. I argue that the extensive work of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights and more recently, the innovative HarassMap, run by young women based in Cairo, critiqued the state’s failure to address an alarming level of sexual harassment on Cairo’s streets. By strategically gaining national and even international attention, the anti-harassment campaign pressured the state to officially and legally define “sexual harassment” and to develop policy that would promote justice. Interestingly, the younger activists who left the ECWR to launch HarassMap, a real-time, digital map displaying reports of harassment made by victims via SMS, became frustrated with both the lack of existing law and the targeting of law-creation in campaigns led by older generations. Members of the HarassMap team I spoke to during a 2011 interview were open about their desire to “do something on the ground” in response to harassment; said co-founder Rebecca Chiao, “I was tired of waiting for government change that [we knew] would not happen”.

In contrast to the early theorizations of computer-mediated communication as a democratic and inclusive medium, Theodore Roszak, among other theorists, see in information technology the potential to “concentrate political power, to create new forms of social obfuscation and domination” (1986, p. xii), thus presenting opportunities for social control and suppression of freedoms and rights. Undeniably, ethos emerges as a central component in any rhetorical situation, whether we view ethos as one’s credibility displayed by one’s good or moral character, an element of style, a “dwelling place” in which we should consider the situation and context within which rhetoric is applied, a group quality, or a network of communal discursive practices that is ideally “multi-voiced and authentic,” negotiated with social institutions or situated in “one’s locatedness in various social and cultural ‘spaces’”. This presentation explores the complexity of ethos construction in activist and revolutionary digital feminist discourses by analyzing the visual and textual elements employed by two widely known women figures in the 2011 Egyptian revolution who have used cyberspace and social networking for feminist ethos construction, political activism, and revolutionary work. These figures are Asmaa Mahfouz and Alyaa El Mahdy. The presentation will examine the feminist ethos that emerges and the internal and external challenges posed to their emergent ethos in their virtual discourses. The chapter reflects upon the possibilities of cyberspace to promote and sustain the discourses of activism and revolutionary work and to examine the means of subverting the limitations of the virtual domain and uncover opportunities and frameworks through which women’s revolutionary and activist discourses can survive in the new digital era. In their construction of ethos, these female figures combined elements of Western humanism, feminism, secularism, and post-sectarian nationalism. In addition, the role the body plays in the construction of feminist revolutionary ethos is central, whether in the displaying of the head cover as the dominant Islamic signifier combined with Islamic discourse, or in the unabashed posting of nude pictures of the female body—as in the case of Alyaa Mahdy—in a visual attempt to defy the physical limitations placed on the body by a tyrannical patriarchal society and its political regime. Undeniably, the traditional male-female divide in Muslim communities has found its replication in the political and virtual communities these women traversed, as these women's revolutionary efforts have been largely discredited for defying the male-constructed normative code of women’s silence and invisibility.