Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.

Keywords:

• social media
• Arab uprisings
• nudity
• Egypt
• Tunisia
• gender

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Nevzat Soguk, Jane Bennett, Waleed Hazbun, Kathy Ferguson, Jairus Grove, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* The images discussed in this manuscript can be viewed at the URLs provided in the endnotes.

1 Image: Aliaa Elmahdy from her blog ‘A Rebel's Diary’. Retrieved from http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com/2011/10/nude-art_2515.html.

2 Image: Amina Sboui from The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1kjuITs.

3 Image: ‘Freedom and dignity for Amina’. freeamina.blogspot.com. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1leaef1.

4 Image: Women protestors supporting Amina Sboui. FEMEN France on Twitter. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1SCAiM55.

5 Image: FEMEN members protest Sboui's arrest in Tunisia on 29 May 2013. European Press Agency. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1WKCAJC.

6 Image: FEMEN members protest Sboui's arrest in Tunisia on 29 May 2013. European Press Agency. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1XYvUKb.

7 Image: Illustration by Renard Renald Luzier from #freeamina on Twitter. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1PjKqe6.

8 Image: Woman with face covering from Bahrain protests Sboui's arrest on Twitter. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1kjvIXZ.

9 Image: Woman with face covering protests Sboui's arrest on Twitter. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1MRavB1.

10 Image: Early 20th century picture postcard of Algerian woman featured in Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem. Retrieved from http://veil.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/yachmak.jpg.

11 Image: Aliaa Elmahdy and FEMEN defile the ISIS flag. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/1iMAyLv.

12 Image: Elmahdy alters a photograph by Guillaume Herbaut for Elle France by placing a Facebook banner over her breasts. Retrieved from http://on.fb.me/1QnXRZI.

13 Image: A commenter on Elmahdy's Facebook page posts his own version of the doctored image. Retrieved from http://on.fb.me/1NDuFx4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Sunday Grove

Nicole Sunday Grove is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research centers on new algorithmic interventions in geopolitics and novel forms of securitization emerging alongside the use and development of communications technologies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. She is also interested in the intersections between new media, security, gender and sexuality across geographical and digital spaces.