Among the transgressive attributes of “bad girls” described by the editors of Bad Girls of Japan is that “Bad Girls Do What They Want To Do.” In this presentation, I discuss Arab Egyptian women during the last Mubarak decade. Restrictions on the press prevented them from complaining publicly about jobs lost on account of privatization; as Joel Beinin notes in “The Militancy of Mahalla al-Kubra,” economic grievances motivated workers who organized a labor action in that textile town during December 2006; specifically, their standard of living was deteriorating on account of inflation (Beinin 2007). One way (I argue) workingwomen took dignity and power for themselves under globalization, was by turning the ‘good girl’ models that the state and their families imposed upon them, against Diana Spencer who became the ‘bad girl’ symbol of all that oppressed them. Based on fieldwork, I argue that Egyptian workingwomen hid trashy paperback books with pictures of Diana Spencer under their beds in order to read them over and over again. They coupled her thin lips and narrow nose, her dewy display of cleavage, her pitiless blonde coif—with disordered habits of living, with sensual investment, with licentious sexuality, with unlawful reproduction—in short, with how they understood badness. By positioning her willful body as the object of their desire to overcome global authority, readers were free to assume sexualized and racialized personhood. In this paper I interpret a group of ‘trashy’ publications (including popular biographies and beauty manuals) published under censorship, entertaining the possibility that Egyptian workingwomen of the last Mubarak decade vicariously shared Dodi’s conquest of Diana Spencer’s whiteness. “Good girls” of the last Mubarak decade took on normative sexual and racial citizenship for themselves by reading about Diana Spencer’s “bad girl” garments, grooming, and gambols. By means of private reading practices, Egyptian women inscribed the confessional and reproductive ideals governing them, all over Diana Spencer’s “does what she wants to do” body. Theirs was, to paraphrase Rosi Braidotti, a move revealing “not just [their] libidinal desire, but rather [their] ontological desire, the desire to be, the tendency of the subject to be, the predisposition of the subject toward being” (Braidotti 1993, 13-14). As the editors of Bad Girls of Japan note, “other women may furtively admire these paragons of badness” (2005, p. 11).

Bad Girls of Jordan: An Oppositional View Which Enables Creative Self-Actualization Ever since Virginia Woolf asked for "a room of one's own," women have carved spaces for themselves within or outside the embodied communities they live in. Arab women are no exception, and their awareness of positive spaces, alongside a continuing interest in women's and feminist issues, has enhanced their ability to question and unsettle the scope and underpinnings of patriarchy, and revealed their agency in naming and defining who they are as Arab women. In this paper I describe and analyze an attempt by one group of “bad” Jordanian women, all university students, to claim such a space for themselves. "Bad woman," as the term is used within an Arab context, connotes irresponsible, sexually promiscuous, and immoral behavior. Embedded in the notion of the "bad" woman are powerful ideologies of gender that construct the woman as fallen, bitchy, and promiscuous, all phrases that suggest condemnatory lifestyles that warrant a woman's stigmatization or sometimes her death. It is possible, perhaps even necessary, to look at so-called "bad" Arab women, specifically young Jordanian women, as women who come to resist the dominant masculinist constructions through the appropriation of feminist discourses of womanhood. Sexual harrassment occurs on streets, and university campuses, yet scant research has been done on sexual harassment at universities. Based on a brief field study at the University of Jordan, a group of students confirmed the ubiquity of sexual harassment on campus. They found that sexual harassment is normative and that the mechanisms to keep this behavior in check are minimal at best and absent at worst. Through recounting their struggles against sexual harassment on campus in a short movie, four young students transformed themselves from victims into empowered agents of resistance. Nonetheless, in the eyes of people, these women are bad girls who have defied the system and transgressed the borders of propriety and must be disciplined. The public identity of the "bad" woman, must be demythologized so that women are not held responsible for the decline of Arab nations. Rather than accepting the meaning of "badness" which is complicit with patriarchal gender roles and, indeed, Arab culture, we should revise and reclaim its meaning and voice opposition to its cargo of signification and framings. "Bad" women, in Arab countries, are new women whose strong voices engage in thinking, deliberating, questioning, and negotiating.

“They Are Not Like Your Daughters or Mine”: The “Bad Girls” of the Arab Spring Most discussion of women and the Arab spring revolve around two, sometimes competing but often overlapping narratives: a celebratory one that points out the important role Arab women played as organizers and participants, and how their participation cut across lines of class and generation, and undermined social taboos, clearing a space for a new generation of Arab women. The other narrative is a cautionary one emerging now that the Arab spring has completed its second year: This is a skeptical one: it notes that women are not empowered by their participation in these revolutions and, in fact, risk losing some of the hard-won rights they snatched from the toppled autocrats. My paper expands on the skepticism of this second narrative by looking at some of what I would like to call the “bad girls” of the Arab Spring: Faida Hamdi (accused of slapping Bou Azizi and thus sparking the Tunisian Revolution), Iman al Obeidi (accused the Qathafi regime of gang raping her), Samira Ibrahim (subjected to state virginity tests), Alia al Mahdi (posed naked on her blog), and the anonymous “blue bra woman” (publicly beaten and stripped by the army). I argue that these women are “bad girls” because they challenge the entrenched patriarchies not only of the autocratic regimes against which the Arab Spring bloomed, but also the patriarchies of those in revolt. More broadly, these bad girls demonstrate that while there were no slogans specifically related to gender and sexuality raised at the beginning of the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan uprisings, gender and sexuality were and continue to be central to the political unconscious of the Arab spring, and that the “bad girls” are embodiments of this unconscious. My paper will focus on the eruptions of the bodies of these bad girls onto the revolutionary surface. Highlighting these disruptive moments, the reactions to them, and the way they were deployed by different actors (state, army, media, bloggers, activists, feminists) will shed light on the complex intersections between women, nationalism, and revolution. The bodies of these women became sites where revolutionaries and counter revolutionaries contested their claims regarding the nation’s identity and future but where also state and communal patriarchy consolidated itself. This consolidation highlights the complicity between the state and its opponents when it comes to the “bad girls” of the Arab Spring.

What does it mean to be a bad girl in the Arab world? What are the repercussions when the Arab girl transgresses social norms in her art? Which museums and galleries sollicit her work on sexuality in the East as well as in the West? The story that internationally renowned Arab-American artist Ghada Amer tells us began simply in the kitchen and in a fairy tale. The four paintings in her series Cinq Femmes au travail (Five Women at Work, 1991) promised to tell the story of a “good Arab girl”: Once upon a time there were women who did their household chores with a smile: They cooked and ironed, (La femme qui repasse/The woman ironing, 1992). We could read their beauty tips embroidered on dishtowels (Conseils de Beauté Du Mois D’Août: Votre Corps, Vos Cheveux/Beauty Tips for the Month of August: Your Body, Your Hair, 1993). They also shared their very own recipes: La recette (The Recipe, 1992-1993), and La recette du gâteau de la forêt noire (The Recipe for Black Forest Cake, 1993). When these activities traditionally associated with the feminine and frequently relegated to the private sphere entered the public sphere and in the domain of art, they reversed the opposition of public and private space. It is then that the good girl from Cairo turned bad. And this is only the beginning of her artistic journey. The good girl from Cairo soon turned to the man’s world, the forbidden world of pornography and politics. In this paper I will trace her artistic journey and her exploration of sex and politics (women’s poverty, religion, perception of Arabs in the West) on the global art scene.