The Afterlife of Women’s Participation in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising

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Nermin Allam
Kellogg Visiting Fellow
Associate Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark

Allam's project examines how women’s participation in the 2011 Egyptian uprising has influenced their gender consciousness and feminist subjectivities in the afterlife of activism. The uprising, she argues, was an affective encounter that created affective attachments to gender equality and women’s bodily rights. Drawing from the literature on gender and the consequences of social movements, she shows how women’s encounters with gender-based violence in protests and exposures to new social and political networks influenced their personal and professional lives. Building on semistructured interviews with women protestors, she focuses on two examples from women’s biographies: women’s decision to remove the hijab-headscarf and to move out of the family, and the decision by some protestors to change their careers and work in the area of women’s rights. This book project is the first to document the afterlife of women’s engagement in the 2011 uprising. It expands understanding of movement’s impacts on participants following defeated protests and under nondemocratic regimes.