Women, Art, and Revolution in the Streets of Egypt

Abstract

This chapter focuses on women artists from Egypt who struggle to find means to access the public sphere through cultural forms while resisting being labeled as feminists or identified as “only women,” seeking instead to be recognized as citizens struggling alongside men for their right to freedom, dignity, and fairness. Furthermore, the chapter argues that the world is witnessing the birth of what may be termed a “parallel revolution,” unfolding underground and led by women. This revolution, what Hamid Dabashi calls a “delayed defiance,” is gradually accelerating Egypt’s transition to democracy and social justice through “a new imaginative geography of liberation in which ideas of freedom, social justice, and human dignity [are] brought forth to the collective imagination of the revolutionaries—an imagination already cultivated in literary and artistic forms.”