Bodies That Protest
The Girl in the Blue Bra, Sexuality, and State Violence in Revolutionary Egypt
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19005773 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sherine Hafez (0000-0001-7833-4770, University of California, Riverside, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 20-28 |
| Publication date | 2014-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/676977 |
| OpenAlex | W2178814885 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 16 |
| References cited | 10 |
In what became a synecdoche for state violence and the abuse of military power during the Egyptian Revolution of January 25, 2011, the image of an unconscious young female body, stripped down to her jeans and bra and being dragged by her limp arms and viciously kicked in the abdomen by a soldier’s heavy boot, almost instantaneously occupied public attention. While the case of the “girl in the blue bra,” as she later became known (her real identity remains undisclosed), starkly illuminates the grim ways women’s bodies become sites of social control and moral engineering, this is not a new phenomenon. Women’s bodies in the Middle Eastern region have often been viewed as the terrain of cultural, moral, and political subjection. By going beyond viewing the corporeal form as simply a repository of disciplinary power, this paper proposes to understand the body as a fluid and culturally mediated form with the potential to be continually disruptive, destabilizing, and transformative
Aesthetics · Art · Girl · Honor · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Psychology
Tracing the Impact of Revolutionary Despair on a Dream of a Non-Gendered Society
The Ordinariness of Ethics and the Extraordinariness of Revolution
Navigating Human Rights, Feminism, and History
The Political in Iraq’s Thawra Teshreen
On political street art as expressions of citizen media in revolutionary Egypt
The Lives of Egyptian Women Between Continuous Trauma and Everyday Resistance
Authoritarian Hegemonic Masculinities and Gendered Rhetorics of the Protest
Reconsidering the Image of the Blue Bra
Hymenoplasty, Virginity Testing, and the Simulacrum of Female Respectability
Theorising uprisings
Lāzim yuḥkā ! »
The sexual and gender-based violence epidemic meets the Covid-19 pandemic
Militarised cultures, disgraced bodies, and autocratic securities
Contentious and Prefigurative Politics
The art of queering the ordinary canceled concerts, broken eggs, and artistic attunement to ethical life in Amman, Jordan
My Place Isn't in the Kitchen
| Unique citing works | 16 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,45 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 14 |