Dr. Elmeligy's talk, centered on the sociology of gender, is titled "Airing Egypt’s Dirty Laundry: Online and on the Ground Feminist Movements and Resistances in Contemporary Egypt". Their abstract reads:
Since Egypt’s 2020 online feminist wave in the wake of the global #MeToo movement, US media outlets have traced the inception of the country’s most recent feminist activist wave to the U.S. In this talk, I challenge this timeline by providing evidence of an Egyptian feminist initiative prior to 2017 that publicized women’s gender-based violence testimonies. Furthermore, recent scholarship on Egypt has focused on the 2011 revolution to either account for the country’s contemporary feminist activism or highlight the organizing that laid its groundwork. However, in this talk, I examine a case of feminist activism that predates the revolution and did not play a role in its eruption. To accomplish the above, I use the case of BuSSy (2006-2020) (a play on the word pussy and transliteration of the feminine imperative look in Egyptian Arabic), a performance art group that hosted storytelling workshops and monologues of taboo and “shameful” personal stories that challenge societal, and state sanctioned normative discourses on femininity/womanhood and masculinity/manhood, I foreground the importance of testimonies of sexual and gendered abuse. I examine the role of emotions and what it means to “air” a nation’s gendered dirty laundry through alternative feminist activism and social movements in Egypt’s authoritarian landscape.
Employing transnational feminist scholarship and queer theory, I use collective memory as a lens to argue that BuSSy’s storytelling is an act of airing Egypt’s dirty laundry, queering normative discourses to enable feminist counter-memorializing. Based on interviews with BuSSy members and audience in 2022-3, and content analysis of secondary data including BuSSy’s published interviews, YouTube videos, website and Facebook images, and testimonies from 2006 to 2020, I conceptualize BuSSy’s feminism as a curation of an “archive of feelings” centralizing gendered narratives of shame. I examine how BuSSy’s affectively contagious storytelling leads to feminist social change by empowering storytellers and listeners. Finally, I center feminist activism and collective memories on shame by analyzing how BuSSy (dis)identifies and counters shame’s silencing power.