Middle East/North Africa Special: Policing the Female Body...and the Women Who Resist

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The "Million Woman" march in Egypt on Tuesday

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Events in Bahrain, Egypt, and Yemen in recent days have featured a core component of the so-called “Arab Spring”: the profound role of women not just in shaping the contours of protest. but in offering a vision of what North Africa and the Middle East could become if unshackled from its present patriarchal regimes. The female presence on Arab streets directly addresses regional concerns, and it also speaks loudly --- and is made "real" through the experience of many Arab women --- about issues central to gender relations in the West. In an era where "femininism" has, frighteningly, became a dirty word to many, Arab women are literally risking life and limb to state its urgent demands: demands which amount to nothing more than a wish for basic equality, undertaken in the understanding that that is sadly not the status quo.

Bahrain. Thursday. A group of women occupy a roundabout. They present no threat to the authorities ----all footage is clear on this front. Or rather: whilst these women present no physical threat to the regime, they present a symbolic threat. In simply sitting and stating their right to be --- in asserting the fact that this land is their land --- these women threatened a patriarchal order which seeks to ensure the country is constructed in its image. As such, they were tear gassed, assaulted and arrested. Those seized included the high-profile activist Zainab AlKhawaja. Yesterday, Zainab returned to her home --- within minutes, she was using her Twitter account to express a triumphant wish for the downfall of the Bahraini regime.

Cairo, 17 December 2011 (Photo: Reuters)

Egypt. Tuesday. Thousands of women gather in Cairo in shared anger at how they are treated. The touch-paper for protest was lit by a widely-circulated image, and subsequently a video, of a woman being violated physically and psychologically. This was more than an incident of violent aggravation; it showed the belief amongst those who wield power that women should treated by rules, attitudes, and weapons held by men. It spoke to the understanding that women are encountering not only roadblocks to empowerment but flat-out opposition to their holding any post-Mubarak positions beyond playing second fiddle to their male counterparts.

This image of an Egyptian woman, stripped so her belly and bra is visible, with the vicious boot of a soldier poised to stamp upon her, crystallized the ugliness of a power which is the reality for many, if not most, in the MENA region. In an Egypt which asserts a post-Mubarak “freedom”, female protesters have been forced to suffer the sexual assault of “virginity tests” as a punitive measure, adding to the multiple accounts of aggravated sexual violence towards women who simply wish to assert their opinion. From the nameless to the prominent, such as the journalist Mona Eltahawy, no woman is safe from the hands of the interim Egyptian regime.

At the “million-woman march” in Cairo on Monday --- and we should not forget the significance of the twist in words used to name that event --- a female protester came with a hidden, prepared slogan. As soon as a camera was present, she lifted her top to reveal a stencilled bra and the words: "Your eyes are cheap".

The female protester above exposes --- perhaps humiliates --- “he” who would gaze upon her and see only sexualized flesh. In that gesture, she unites the coalition of women surrounding her with the protest made in November by Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy. Aliaa did nothing more than post a photograph of herself, naked, online. Moreover --- and this has been lost in the subsequent discussion --- she uploaded it as one of a series of images, which, taken together, make clear her brave intent.

Click for uncensored image The Western projection of exoticism and eroticism onto the body of the female Arab “Other” --- a centuries-long consequence of what Edward Said termed “Orientalism” --- comes to a confused halt in Aliaa's self-portrayal. The straightforward presence of the naked body is counterpointed by the stockings and red colouring atop the black-and-white image. Furthermore, the playful montage of images that follow her nude self-portrait --- and it is a collection to which Aliaa keeps adding --- frustrates any attempt to sexualise those images, instead encouraging aesthetic and politicized readings.

The female body poses a threat to patriarchal regimes. It is hard to advance a logical argument for this (although there is much that can be invoked) but history and the horror of misogyny has repeatedly played out the theme. Whilst this threat is rendered most explicit when that body is naked, it is the alternative that womanhood poses to man-made structures which Aliaa knowingly challenges. In boldly revealing what is typically hidden beneath the surface --- both visually and ideologically --- Aliaa’s naked body, forcing the gaze of recognition upon her very being, undermines a dynamic structured around putting women in their place.

In Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and beyond, women have continued to exert their agency against the grain of regimes which would otherwise stamp their anger as troublesome or hysterical. In recent days, they have --- as they have for months --- made their presence felt, striking out against the patriarchal systems of governance which threaten to cripple the progressive development of the region. Doing, these women voice a clear and necessary message to the "West": Get your own house in order whilst we deal with the policing of ours.