The use of political motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and aftermath

ABSTRACT

Political motherhood, which uses traditional motherhood to mobilize and sustain women’s political participation, is understudied in political science. Women played a significant role in Egypt’s Arab Spring and its aftermath by “bargaining with patriarchy” and strategically using traditional motherhood to access the political sphere. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument based on the work of Gentry, Carreon and Moghadam and Amar. We illustrate it with examples drawn from news articles on women’s political activism and social media posts by Egyptian activists. Our argument explores how women’s agency and the larger political context in which women operate reveals how political motherhood takes the particular shape that it does. In the context of Egypt, we examine how the state’s choice to highlight women as “hypervisible” citizens, worthy of protection, backfired. Through a bottom-up political motherhood, women used their respectability as mothers in need of state protection against the state, thereby legitimizing anti-Mubarak and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and challenging these governments.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab Spring
• political motherhood
• Egypt
• activism
• January 25^th revolution

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge feedback from Anne Sisson Runyan, Amy Lind and Rina Williams on earlier versions of this article. We also thank our anonymous reviewers and Megan Daigle for her copyediting work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anwar Mhajne concentrates on international relations and comparative politics with a focus on gender and politics. Specifically, she is interested in how political opportunity structures shape Islamist women’s political participation and is reshaped by Islamist women’s political organizing and framing strategies. Mhajne is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. She received her MA in women, gender and sexuality studies from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Crystal Whetstone focuses on comparative and international politics with an emphasis on women’s political participation. Whetstone is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. She received her MA in international and comparative politics from Wright State University, Ohio.

Notes

1. At least 846 individuals were killed during the period lasting from 25 January to Mubarak’s stepping down as president of Egypt on 11 February. An estimated 4,600 others were injured during this period (Rettig 2011).

2. In Islam, hadith are sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. This particular hadith comes from Mu'awiyah bin Jahima al-Sulami, via Imam ibn Hanbal (Hussein and Imtoual 2013).

3. All translations by Anwar Mhajne.

4. The image was a caricature by the artist Abdulazez Sadiq, modified by Egyptian activists to promote the Mothers of Martyrs March and viewed by the authors at www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=451645908235625&set=pb.294178970648987. This link has since been removed.