Emergent publics in the time of unpredictable crackdowns: Feminist counterpublics and testimony-based activism in contemporary Egypt

This dissertation examines Egypt’s latest feminist movement wave, which erupted in 2020 as a response to three separate cases of violence against women. More specifically, it examines the resistance by feminist Egyptian collectives regarding gender-based violence, women’s victim-blaming, and the state’s policing of women’s bodies and behaviors that caused a nationwide controversy. Using ethnography and participant observations, in-depth interviews, a digital ethnography, and content analysis I show how feminist initiatives responded and mobilized the country to pay closer attention to everyday violence against women. In the wake of the global #MeToo movement, these causes gained global media coverage. By publishing women’s testimonies of gender-based violence, these initiatives were initially created to expose and help incriminate male sexual predators, change the mainstream narrative of women’s victim-blaming, and destigmatize public discussions around harassment, rape, and sexual abuse. Given its recent occurrence, this feminist wave has not yet been sufficiently studied. The few publications on the subject focus on how the recently founded groups are part of a recent online feminist mobilization by women for women and have created an emerging counternarrative of sexual harassment and gender-based violence in Egypt. This scholarship, however, does not consider that some of these groups have expanded their content beyond gender-based violence and publishing women’s testimonies. As such, it theorizes one counternarrative focusing on one topic, occupied with empowering solely women. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt between 2021 and 2023, this dissertation argues that several social media feminist initiatives founded between 2006 and 2020 produced and are circulating counterdiscourses in the form of Arabic and English feminist knowledges around sexuality, the female body, gender roles, masculinity, femininity, and gender-based violence. I conceive of these initiatives and my interlocutors as knowledge producers, arguing that the knowledge production by them creates multiple and overlapping feminist counterpublics, such as the social media initiatives themselves, offline events they organize and the social circles of the initiatives’ followers. This dissertation traces Egypt’s testimony-based feminist activism to 2006 with the founding of the BuSSy Project and argues that Egypt’s testimony-based feminist activism has also included men members and produced counternarratives about masculinity and violence against men. Finally, this dissertation argues that dominant US media outlets framed Egypt’s 2020 feminist activism through a linear developmental narrative that depicts Egyptian women to have taken their turn in a movement originating from the United States, which culminates in an act of orientalist discursive violence. Therefore, the dissertation challenges a one-size-fits all conception of feminist activism as it traces the multiple and various strategies that feminists in Egypt have employed to make structural changes. Finally, while using the case of Egypt, this dissertation contributes to transnational literature on feminist activism by asking and investigating how feminist activists and individuals seek social and legal gender justice, especially for women, by creating multiple counterpublics, and opposing patriarchal mainstream narratives online and in-person under authoritarian regimes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Elmeligy, Nehal Mohamed Abdelaziz Abdelfattah

Contributors dc:contributor

• Moussawi, Ghassan
• Marshall, Anna-Maria
• Vogler, Stefan
• Said, Atef

• Egyptian Feminist Movements
• Social Media Groups
• Masculinity
• Feminist Counter Narratives
• Feminist Counter Publics

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright, Nehal Mohamed Elmeligy, 2025

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130118

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130118