This paper explores the way that public discourse about female figures in the Egyptian and Syrian revolutions transgress local, international, and even ‘revolutionary’ norms. They may exemplify popular sentiments or be subjects of mockery or (s)heroism. Sama el-Masry, Bouthaina al-Shaaban and Hala Diyab, for instance, respectively exemplify anti-U.S. and anti-Ikhwan sentiments, and represent the most powerful female political figure in Syria and the loyalists’ comedic Ariana Huffington imitator. (S)heroistic figures include those violated physically, or whose existence may have been snuffed out, like Samira Ibrahim, the subject of virginity tests by Egyptian security officials, the falsely accused “sex-jihadist” Rawan Kaddah who is actually a victim of rape and torture, and Razan Zeitounah, the civil rights lawyer who worked alongside jihadists and was kidnapped along with her husband and two others in December of 2012. These female points of comedic/ironic or tragically embodied/disembodied symbolic (s)heroines form a relief, or media ‘buzz’ to offset an overwhelmingly male depiction of the politics of the revolutions. While my broader project includes a range of women, their actions, practices, and representations, and what they signify in the current political moment, in the panel presentation I will focus on Sama El-Masry, the bellydancer who has promised to reveal the secrets of the Muslim Brotherhood and produced several videos highly critical of the United States’ role vis-à-vis Egypt which are simultaneously transgressive, bawdy, and nationalist.

Fadia Faqir, an Anglo-Arab author, is known for her fiction, most famously, in my opinion, Pillars of Salt (1997). Her fiction and nonfiction address the sexual, social, and economic oppression of women, and her female characters present a plurality of consciousness in opposition to the dominant social order and cultural script and a resistance to not only patriarchal hegemonic structures and dominance but also to colonization and imperialism. This paper explores Faqir's representation of madness and the links or shifting alliances between madness and woman as "bad." Madness-ism can be construed, in Faqir's framing, as the free space where the realities of a "bad" Bedouin woman are interrogated and rewritten. In her multivocalic novel, Faqir renegotiates the notion of madness and sanity, showing that they are manufactured constructs that are often defined by the ones who have power. Maha is dubbed mad by her brother Daffash, but through the impassioned narrativization of her story, she manages to dislodge herself from her confinement at the mental hospital and to decenter her madness by loudly proclaiming her presence not as a "bad" Bedouin but as a resilient Bedouin asserting her self-determination. Even though Maha occupies the madhouse in her rational mind, she is not insane. She writes herself into the dominant discourse of madness not by affirming it, but by destabilizing it and answering back to the hegemonic Arab's ubiquitous cultural grand recit, which seems to pigeonhole Arab women in a bad-centric niche. Through her appropriation of the label madness which is used against "bad" women, she inverts its function not only to expose the "real madness" inherent in the prevalent social conditions and cultural iconographies but also to question the fixed assumptions of "bad" women which come to unveil the dynamic operations of social control and oppression.

Many writers and commentators alike have used critiques of the Arab family as patriarchal and oppressive to women for their own purposes, including justifying U.S. occupations. One self-described feminist, Nada Prouty, mobilizes this trope in her auto-biography, Uncompromised: The rise, fall and redemption of an Arab American patriot in the CIA. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) in which she recalls the verbal, psychological and physical abuse from her father and younger brother and how the prospects of an arranged marriage caused her to emigrate from Lebanon to the U.S. This emigration/escape is the first move in which she frames her self as “good” and her family – and collective Lebanese society – as “bad” for an American audience. Ultimately, she was accused of being a Hezbollah spy and was stripped of her U.S. citizenship. In this debacle, some media was clearly on the side of the FBI, with the New York Post declaring her “Jihad Jane.” After the Department of Homeland Security threatened to deport Prouty, she submitted her story to the television show “60 minutes.” The ensuing episode was the first installment in a media campaign to clear her name and stay in the U.S. Ultimately, she was successful. To garner enough of a public outcry, Prouty had to position herself carefully as a gun-totting, badass (but loyal) U.S. spy and an all-around American “good girl” immigrant. Strategically, she contrasted this with a self-narrative as an independent and individualistic Arab girl fighting against patriarchy within her own family and terrorist elements in the form of Al-Qaeda. Prouty privileged feminism by selectively critiquing patriarchy and gender inequality but in fact, suffered and acted on behalf of many oppressions beyond gender, perhaps most especially vis-à-vis Arab stereotypes as dangerous, terrorist and in need of subjugation by an occupying power. An alternative kyriarchal approach acknowledges the “master power” narrative, which includes religion and race/ethnicity as well as U.S. imperialist and world domination imperatives. Through a close reading of the memoir and an analysis of self-advocacy of Nada Prouty, this paper will explore how Prouty positively framed her spy work and her “bad” Arab girl self as she fortified the U.S. patriarchal system. I will argue that the intended responses from a US audience profoundly influenced the framing of a subjective “good” and “bad” girl-ness of this Arab American woman negotiating transnational moralities.

The unfolding Arab Spring brought about unprecedented women’s participation in demonstration squares, social media, and overall political presence. This activism created certain anxieties for supporters of the old regimes who resorted to reviving traditional cultural myths, such as that of the Jahiliyyah’s wa’d, to dub these women as “bad girls.” Interestingly, these women retaliated by owning their “bad girl-ness” and incorporating this trope as part of their revolutionary discourse. In this vein, the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek epitomizes “bad-girlhood” when as an ‘Alawite she participated in the revolution against that country’s tyrant, a member of her own religious sect, Bashar al-Assad. A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution was Yazbek’s courageous response to the defamation propaganda that threatened to bury her alive, akin to the traditional victims of wa’d, for the treason of leaving the clan and embracing the other. In her diaries, Yazbek revives the context of the wa’d myth, traditionally seen as a safeguard against the infiltration of the enemy through the women who are taken as spoils in tribal raids, and shifts its application from the women to the victimized citizens and country instead. In so doing, she manages to move the wa’d trauma from its personal realm where it can be construed as an archaic issue affecting women in the past, to a vital contemporary issue afflicting the whole nation. In Yazbek diaries, the wa’d trope is activated as a symbol denoting despotic practices of authoritarian regimes. The manner in which she describes how political dissidents are buried alive in the regime’s prisons, is akin to the wa’d ritual. This explains the prevalence of multiple revolutionary banners, particularly in the context of the Syrian revolution, contesting the burial of the country and its people under such oppressive powers. Yazbek’s transition from the regime’s good daughter to bad-girlhood reflects the process of her iconization and demonization, and simultaneously mirrors the anxieties she generates and endures as a result of her daring act. The anxiety of erasure that she exhibits is directly tied to the historical wa’d’s trauma, to the erasure of women’s voices. The expression of such anxieties in the national consciousness bespeaks of the survivability of these cultural myths in the turbulent, political climate of the Arab uprisings. The pioneering work of Cathy Caruth and Jan Bardsley on trauma and women’s transgressive behavior will inform the theoretical framework of my research.

Women performers of “girls’ songs” (aghani al-banat) in northern and central Sudan have a history of providing social commentary on Sudanese gender, class, and other hierarchies. Performing at gatherings attended, in the main, by women and girls, ghanaanat have been marginalized in the Sudanese popular music industry for their gendered association with professions inhabited by former slaves, and later women singers of popular music have struggled to overcome this association. Following Islamist efforts to remodel mainstream Sudanese society according to ‘authentically Islamic’ gender (and other) relations, many women singers found their freedom of expression severely curtailed and left the country. My paper explores the new ‘bad girls’ of Sudanese music as they defy national boundaries to bring women’s perspectives and critiques to a global audience. Performers such as Alsarah and Rasha have access to a world music stage to comment upon gender and racial hierarchies, chide Sudanese power brokers about their transgressions, and encourage a more inclusive and just society. Pushback against new voices have included charges in the public domain (e.g. YouTube comments) that these performances are haram and sullied by foreign influence. Emerging out of a larger ethnographic investigation of the Sudanese acoustics of diaspora, my feminist analysis of ‘bad girl’ musicians places their voices in a context of shifting patterns of global migration, national integration policies and the dispersal of families, contemporary expressions of Islamic “authenticity” and anti-Muslim sentiments, and gender and generational tensions among refugee and migrant Sudanese.