Dessi', Valeria (2017) Affecting Change: Young Women's Groups, the Nation-State and the Politics of Gender in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Cairo PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/24961 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this PhD Thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This PhD Thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this PhD Thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the PhD Thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full PhD Thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD PhD Thesis, pagination. Affecting Change: Young Women's Groups, the Nation-State and the Politics of Gender in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Cairo Valeria Dessi' Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD 2017 Centre for Gender Studies SOAS, University of London 1 Declaration for SOAS PhD thesis I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of the SOAS, University of London concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all the material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for examination. All pictures have been used with the permission of the legitimate rights holders. The copyright of this thesis rests with me, the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the author. Signed: ____________________________ Date: _______08.05.2017__________ 2 Abstract This thesis examines the gendered production of political and social transformations in contemporary Egypt through an analysis of political affects. It suggests that the relationship between feminism, the state and change in contemporary Egypt cannot be understood or critiqued purely on a discursive level. As a form of governing, the management of affects draws on the everyday politics of gender and sexuality in order to regulate political and social change. The political management of terror, love and safety in Cairo appropriated and capitalized upon deepening reproductive anxieties, generational aspirations and urban transformations in an unstable context. This research looks at women’s rights activism and young feminists that emerged in Cairo between the late Mubarak regime and the current El Sisi regime to examine the feminist disruption of affective management in the deteriorating context of neocolonial repression and masculinist restoration. I chart the intensification of political consciousness and the unfolding of feminist practices that engage with knowledge production and gender-based violence in contrast with the authoritarian patriarchy of the state. The chapters draw on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2013 in Cairo as a crucial site of political turmoil, feminist intervention and violent state remaking. Amid the articulation of existing hierarchies of domination and new forms of control, women’s activism and feminist groups challenged the Egyptian regime’s affective monopoly on gender roles, in both nation- making and everyday life. Bodily suffering, erased memories, acts of courage – together with the advocacy of reform, interventions on the ground, and denunciations of a wide range of forms of inequality and oppression – were central to personal and political transformation. Opposing the state projects and gendered fantasies that organized violence and nationalism, Egyptian feminists subverted gender models, and revealed the contested and complex work of negotiation that shapes gender subjectivities and brings political, social and cultural change. 3 Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 8 Notes .............................................................................................................................. 9 Table of figures ............................................................................................................... 10 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 11 I. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 11 i. Entering the square .................................................................................................. 11 ii. Transformations in the women's movement and the Egyptian nation-state ................ 13 II. Situating the context: the public and intimate lives of the nation-state ...................... 15 i. Political fantasies of gender and the state .................................................................... 15 ii. The nationalist rescue of the state: gender as a meta-capital ...................................... 17 iii. The nation-state screen: deflecting affects, gender and change in Egypt ..................... 18 iv. Gendered affects as diagnostic of resistance ................................................................ 20 v. Affects: material and immaterial entanglements in the field ........................................ 22 III. Research methodology and methods: doing fieldwork during contestation ................. 23 i. Framing the revolutionary fieldwork ............................................................................. 23 ii. Messy research: doubting gender meanings and interpretation ................................... 25 iii. An ethnographer on the authoritarian map: positionality and postcolonialisms .......... 27 iv. The struggle of doing feminist ethnography in post-revolutionary Cairo: ethics in research ....................................................................................................................................... 28 v. Reflexivity in making knowledge ................................................................................... 30 IV. "Listen to me! We are Egyptian women" ...................................................................... 33 i. Knowing and unknowing the subjects of my research .................................................. 33 ii. Young feminists and women rights activists in Cairo .................................................... 34 iii. Anthropology of possibilities ......................................................................................... 35 V. Thesis outline ................................................................................................................ 37 Chapter One: Welcome to Cairo. Contextualizing Feminism and the Gender Politics of Nationalist Belonging .................................................................................................... 40 I. Introduction: A conceptual map of the fieldwork ......................................................... 40 II. Gendering political tensions: figures of exclusion and continuity during Morsy ........... 41 III. Between morality and politics: reworking gender and modernity in Egypt .................. 45 IV. Legalizing exclusion: feminists and the 2012 Constitution ............................................ 47 V. Constitutional concealments and the precarization of women ..................................... 49 4 VI. Repressing women and remaking the regime ............................................................... 53 VII. Militarism and the continuum of violence ..................................................................... 56 VIII. The materiality of affects and the potentiality of feminism ........................................... 59 IX. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 61 Chapter Two: Like Mothers and Daughters: Stories and Genealogies of Young Women's Activism .......................................................................................................................... 64 I. Introduction: genealogies of activism .......................................................................... 64 II. The "I" and the "we": fragments and unity .................................................................. 66 III. Modulating differences ................................................................................................. 68 IV. Making stories personal: narratives, experience and legitimacy .................................. 70 V. Birthing feminism: between identity politics and defensiveness ................................. 73 VI. Careerism and moral purity ........................................................................................... 76 VII. A case for volunteerism: between charity and fundraising ............................................ 79 VIII. Crafting feminism ..........................................................................................................