“It is not the hymen that determines honor,” blogs Egyptian activist Ahmed Awadalla, “[but] honesty, integrity and trust.” The revelation in March 2011 that female protesters had been submitted to 'virginity checks' by the army in the aftermath of the Egyptian uprisings sparked an outcry in the blogosphere, opening an online debate among personal and political bloggers about women's bodies and sexuality. Following this incident, and in response to the succeeding episodes of sexualized violence by the military police, the proliferation of sexual assaults in the vicinities of Tahrir Square by thugs and the escalation of sexual harassment on the streets during the two volatile years of the post-Mubarak era, male and female bloggers have been contesting the state's calculated effort to discourage the protests through the shaming of women by concertedly dismantling and reinterpreting the (patriarchal) foundations of the Egyptian society. The collaborative discussion between political –usually male– and personal –usually female– bloggers is not new in the Egyptian virtual sphere. In 2006, a group of activists denounced in their blogs the wave of sexual harassment that took place in downtown Cairo during the festivities at the end of Ramadan, contradicting with footage of the attacks the official denial of the facts and launching a public debate around this phenomenon in cyberspace and independent media. Traditionally considered a 'women's issue' and relegated to the anonymity of personal blogs, sexual harassment was repositioned at the center of the political arena, becoming a shared social concern for male and female netizens and ultimately leading to the organization of several initiatives of online and offline activism. Through social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative content analysis of selected blogs, I illustrate how –originally disconnected– clusters of personal and political blogs converged through the condemnation of the 2006 sexual harassment attacks, bridging networks of dialogue and action and establishing ties that became strengthened through reiterated reciprocal interaction. I contend that, in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian uprisings, these links played an important role for the dissemination of information and the mobilization of protesters outside of the traditional activist circles. Following the backlash of the revolutionary process, bloggers are now using these spaces to denounce the exertion of sexualized violence as an instrument of state terror, collectively imagining an Egypt free from the patriarchal authority of the army in which the success of the revolution becomes conditional on women's sovereignty over their bodies.

This paper focuses on online discussions of women’s rights and Islam by female, Muslim bridge bloggers from the MENA region. Bridge blogs are blogs that are followed in two or more nations and employ languages other than the dominant ones in the bloggers’ country of origin (Zuckerman 2008). The women I will be studying primarily blog in English. While I could analyze any of a number of topics discussed on these blogs, I am primarily interested in the bloggers’ perspectives on women’s right and Islam and the intersections of these two topics. Preliminary research of these issues denotes complex perspectives, neither fully embracing nor rejecting feminism and often expressing the compatibility between justice for women and Islam. The paper will be informed by transnational feminist, Islamic feminist, postcolonial, and diasporic theories. The methodological approach is most aptly informed by various forms of feminist theory because one of the goals of the research is to privilege the voices of the research subjects and to highlight their experiences and concerns. Postcolonial and diasporic theoretical frameworks speak to the contexts in which Muslim women navigate their existences. Being that some of these women are expatriates in Western countries, they are discredited due to their attachment to Islam; therefore, based on context, the online engagement of the expatriates varies somewhat from that of women still based in the MENA region. Women blogging from the societies of their origins are often rejected due to their perceived affiliation with the West due to their use of the English language and their purportedly individualistic propensities. Advancing from this dialectic, I have conceptualized a few forms of diaspora which may elucidate some of their experiences. These salient theoretical underpinnings also speak to the significance of the proposed research. These female, Muslim bridge bloggers were selected based on their prestige in social media networks, without which their voices might remain largely silenced. Studies that capture the voices of Muslim women and their concerns are crucial to greater understanding of the MENA region and to undermining stereotypes of Muslims, which at times are used as one of the justifications for armed intervention in the Muslim world (Puar 2007). This paper highlights the complex, non-binary perspectives of female, Muslim bridge bloggers that will serve to undercut the Orientalist stereotypes of Muslim women.

With the growing penetration of social media within Emirati society, the paper seeks to examine the role of social media in the learning and sharing of local and international news among the female Emirati population of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Previous studies examined the penetration of social media in the lives of Emiratis and determined how much Emiratis use social media in general, which social media outlet they prefer to use, and how they protect their privacy online (Al Jenaibi, 2011; Strong and Hareb, 2012; Sokol and Sisler, 2010), the extent to which social media is used for networking and employment purposes ("Social Media, Employment, and Entrepreneurship" report, Dubai School of Government, 2012), and how much and why Emiratis are addicted to social media outlets (Hashem and Smith, 2011). One survey-based study examines the purposes of using social media among the expatriate population in Dubai and finds that keeping in touch with family and with the home country is the primary driving force of social media presence (McKechnie et al, 2012). According to a recent statistic that appeared in Gulf News (September 2012), Emirati women constitute 59% of Twitter users and use social media more than men. Yet, no study has been conducted to determine the nature of their online presence. The paper aims to study how much interest exists in learning and sharing local and international news among the female Emirati population especially in the wake of the Arab uprisings, to examine how much social media is used by Emirati women in Dubai, most notably Twitter and Facebook, in learning and sharing news, to study the extent to which Emirati women participate in debates and campaigns taking place on social media networks, and finally, to study what media outlets Emirati women use, if at all, to learn about local, regional, and international events (newspapers, television…) other than social media outlets. The paper first conducts a thorough review of the literature on social media and news, and on the use of social media in the UAE. Then, paper-based surveys will be administered to around 300 females around the UAE in March and April 2013. The survey data will be analyzed in SPSS. Control variables such as age, job, university degree, the major field of study/work, interest in news, and online connectedness will be partialed out in the first step of the study.

In their photographs, Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi and Iranian American Shirin Neshat artists re-imagine the female body of Arab and Muslim women in light of the violence stemming from ideological clashes between the West and the Islamic world. Recuperating the enduring Western obsession with the veil and its overrepresentation in contemporary media, art, and politics, Essaydi and Neshat draw attention to long lasting practices of defacement of Arab and Muslim women. The two artists restage images of the harem and the odalisque perpetuated by Orientalist painters while injecting them with alternative cultural motifs such as actual veils, Arabic calligraphy, and henna for example. In so doing, they violate the Western canon and re-contextualize the representation of Muslim and Arab women to interrupt the eroticizing gaze and force the viewer out of his/her conventional expectations. Some of their photographs such as Converging Territories # 21 (Essaydi) or I Am the Secret (Shirin), in which the women’s bodies and faces are excessively covered with layers of fabric and calligraphy, also redeploy the veil to reproduce narratives of confinement and silence as part of the realities faced by Arab and Muslim women. This aspect caused some critics to describe Essaydi and Neshat's works as neo-orientalist and therefore neo-colonial. However, even though their works are largely directed to a Western audience, the compositions of their photographs, the imposition of the Muslim female body in the public space, the proximity between the sacred and the profane, and the introduction of weapons and Jihadist imagery in their series Bullets and Women of Allah are resolutely provocative and aim to disintegrate myths and stereotypes both in the West and the Islamic world. Essaydi and Shirin thus use ambiguity to emphasize enduring cross-cultural dialogues that have shaped perceptions of the self and the other in both cultural spaces. They also invest sites of conflict and confusion to rethink the place of violence in transnational understandings and discourses.

Since the beginning of the 25th of January revolution 2011, political change has been naturally associated with artistic production and creativity. In fact, one of the characteristics of the revolution is the blurring of boundaries between the role of the artist and that of the activist. In other words, many of the artists who came to be associated with revolutionary cultural production are activists who perceive their art as a means towards realizing political change. On the ground though, in Tahrir square, it is hard to determine whether their art informs their activism or whether their political engagement inspires their artistic production. Moreover, the issue of gender complicates this dialectic even further. Indeed, as women continue to struggle to retain a place in “the square”, and to resist efforts to exile them, a nationalist and a feminist agenda intersect and inform artistic and creative production. In this paper I plan to look at the interaction between art and activism through the prism of gender by focusing on three representative women/artists/activists engaging in the production of three different artistic genres: namely Heba Helmi, a painter, Mona Prince, a novelist, and Samia Jaheen, a singer. All three have been directly involved in the revolution since its outset, and all three have, and continue to produce artistic and creative work that crosses over the clear cut boundaries of art and activism. The paper will start off by contextualizing their persons, the multiple roles they play, and their artistic and creative work within a larger historical framework of Egyptian women/artists/activists of an earlier period of the late 1940 and 1950. By touching on that historical period, I explore the exploitation of a feminist agenda by the state to promote a nationalist agenda that excludes women, and the extent to which this tactic is being recreated today. The paper will, therefore, investigate issues pertaining to the way women/artists/activists perceive themselves today, their art, and their relationship to a country that insists on usurping their rights, by comparing selected life histories of women artists/activists of the 1940s and 1950s and personal interviews of the three respective women/artists/activists to show how women’s artistic and creative production has been historically, and continues to be, perceived as a means for political change.

Studies of Islam in the media have concentrated on how the Western media stereotypes and codifies Muslims and Islam (Said 1997; Saeed 2007, Poole 2002). Many times, such media reports perpetuate the stereotypes of Muslim women as oppressed, passive, veiled objects (Hoodfar 1993; Bullock 2002; Imtoual 2005). To date, no study has examined how religiously observant Muslim women represent themselves in media they control. This study examines how openly religiously observant Muslim women represent themselves using both words and images in print. The study contrasts the representations of Muslim women in magazines where religiously observant Muslim women are in the positions of Editor-in-Chief and sub-editors with the content of “mainstream” women’s magazines that do not attract readership by specifically appealing to a religious population. Specifically, I conduct a content analysis of the topics of articles, images presented by the magazine, and advertisers in two Turkish fashion magazines, Ala Dergi, a magazine established in 2011 with the pledge to feature ‘hijab fashion’ in their photos and to offer the perspective of ‘real Muslim women’ in its editorials and commentary, and Elele Dergi, a women’s magazine that appeals to women, purposely excludes women wearing the hijab from its photos, and claims to offer advice and a ‘modern’ perspective on the issues important in women’s lives. This analysis concludes that, among other findings, religiously observant Muslim women’s magazines emphasize consumerism and fashion more than mainstream women’s magazines. This analysis also finds that religiously observant Muslim women’s magazines do not offer commentary and advice on sex, but their feature articles tend to be interviews and photos with men from pop culture, combined with photos demonstrating men’s sexuality. Mainstream women’s magazines, conversely, tend to offer advice on sex, but interviews with men from pop culture tend to be less sexually overt. This paper ends by contrasting the ‘ideal woman’ the magazines portray through their articles and images.