Inverting Agamben: Gendered popular sovereignty and the ‘Natasha Wars’ of Cairo Paul Amar Global and International Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, 93106-7065, USA.
Abstract Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of ‘the sovereign’, ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ have been used by political theorists, particularly since the declaration of the Global War on Terror and during the more recent age of wars of humanitarian intervention, to conceptualize the sovereignty exercised by security states. These state processes have been mirrored by absolutization within some branches of political theory, conflating Foucauldian concepts of biopolitical sovereignty and circulatory governmentality with notions of absolutist rule, and narrowing optics for interpreting popular mobilizations around gendered ‘human security’ projects, emergency regimes and moralizing repression. Suggesting more productive directions for theory, this article generates a close reading of female activists working in an unexpected industry in Egypt who have struggled to invert and subvert absolutist and moralizing framings and have generated their own theory through practice. The ‘Natashas of Cairo’ – well organized and transnationally linked belly dancers – successfully promoted gendered popular sovereignty in remarkable campaigns between 2002 and 2006, utilizing personal-rights litigation to create frameworks to render the absolutist state more accountable; establish labor solidarities that crossed international boundaries as well as class boundaries; and articulate an alternative moral regime for dance work that rejected both ‘pornification’ and the ‘respectability politics’ of professionalization. Contemporary Political Theory (2014) 13, 263–286. doi:10.1057/cpt.2013.24; published online 5 November 2013 Keywords: sovereignty; gender; sexuality; security; Egypt; Giorgio Agamben
How can we theorize popular sovereignty in ways that reveal the complexities of absolutist sovereignty regimes rather than reconsolidate them in our conceptual imagination? How can political theory become more attentive to the unique forms of gendered political subjection and subversion that coalesce around and turn inside-out forms of securitized and moralized rule in the post-colonial world? To answer these questions, this article proposes that we engage powerful regimes of sovereignty theory as well as regimes of historical, moral and socio-political power in which formations of © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/
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securitized rule are embedded. In this light, this article unfolds in two parts. First, as approaches developed by Giorgio Agamben (and those inspired by him) have influenced political-theory perspectives on ‘states of emergency’ and modern biopolitical sovereignty in the recent period between 2001 and 2012, this study engages this dominant trend, offering a critical assessment of its non-engagement with gendered colonial history and post-colonial subjects of rule. Second, I transition to a method that mixes political sociology, anthropology of the state and cultural studies of the gendered public sphere. I offer a brief empirical elaboration of the contemporary performances and organizing strategies of citizen and migrant women labor activists working in the dance and performance sector in Egypt. I focus on a time (2002–2006) when the state deployed a wave of police raids, media campaigns and regulatory pronouncements to repress dancing in general, and to expel foreign dancers in particular. I explore transnational labor mobilizations, legal campaigns and morality critiques that intersected to shape a model of popular sovereignty as an alternative to absolutism. This article does not represent a narrowly empirical attempt to prove which particular movement tactic caused the reversal of government policies banning foreign dancers or policing public performances. The multiplicity of individual, institutional and structural factors impacting on that particular decision would make any causal proposition easy to pick apart. Instead, it is more interesting for the purposes of political theory to illuminate how these resistance efforts between 2002 and 2006 produced new publics through which to repopulate, relocate and desecuritize a different kind of nation, and to generate discourses of the popular through which to channel gendered forms of popular sovereignty. Women-led dance militants drew upon global networks in an increasingly multipolar world of rising global-South and global-East powers, and in the context of increasingly interlocking global protest movements and imaginaries. Dancers’ movements in Egypt, in this context, mobilized labor actions, engaged the mainstream and tabloid press, developed alternative online manifestos and generated detailed plans for new kinds of training and professionalization structures. Dancers gave interviews in prominent outlets where they generated alternatives to state ‘moral panic’ language, deployed class-action lawsuits against the labor ministry and parliament, and mobilized transnational networks and local communities of women dance fans and practitioners during a time when bellydance quite suddenly became a global craze. Establishing this context gives us a better idea of why this seemingly minor issue of revoking permits for foreign dancers in one country came to be symbolically situated at the center of larger global and national questions of sovereignty, gender and security of interest to political theory.
Popular Globalisms and Alternatives to Imperial War Mass anti-war protests in February 2003 produced the ‘largest coordinated set of mass protests in human history’ raging against the imminent US war in Iraq 264
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(BBC News, 2003). However, less commented on was the fact that this moment of revolt also unleashed global desires from within the popular sphere to imagine anew issues of gender, Islam and culture in the Middle East. This happened in ways that reincorporated desire, not just rage in the struggle against both militarism and fundamentalism. It also played boldly with imperial, feminist and erotic fantasy. Bellydance exploded worldwide in 2003 in popular culture in tension with the gender and Arabophobic tropes of the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq by the United States in that same year. Bellydancing schools spread like wildfire throughout the United States, Russia, Central Asia, Brazil, Argentina and Europe; and televised bellydance competitions and video clips featuring bellydance styles proliferated starting in that year. Mainstream Western media coverage of the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq focused on the global threat posed by militant Islam and on the need to rescue women portrayed as victims repressed by severe human rights discrimination and repressed by strictures on sexuality rights, public mobility and personal expression. Meanwhile, this dance craze simultaneously offered an explicitly alternative agenda through which Arab culture and Islam was portrayed as endowed with pleasurable practices, popular notions of female empowerment and engines for public sociability. Central to this view was the notion that apprehension of Arab and Islamic gender cultures would not be limited to stereotypes of the ‘other’ in the malecolonial gaze, and that women’s bodies would not just serve, in global public culture, as targets for rescue in times of war or as justifications for militarized humanitarian interventions. Certainly this feminist or womanist vision of global dance politics was saturated with revived Orientalist tropes and imperial imaginings (Maira, 2008); but those rich tropes were also deployed in ways that challenged the racialized nationalism, human-security militarism and moral panic discourses that fed efforts to militarize ‘Western’ relationships with the Islamic world. For example, as Israeli bombs rained down on Lebanon in 2006, Lebanese– Colombian singer–dancer Shakira released the single ‘Hips Don’t Lie’, a reggaeton– salsa–Arabesque flavored hit about seducing her lover with bellydancing, whose starting and ending lyrics called for ‘no fighting, no fighting’. On 26 July, Shakira demanded an ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, saying ‘like the rest of the world I am saddened that so many mothers and children are dying due to this conflict’ (La Hora, 2006). The song became number one in 25 countries including across Europe, Brazil and Egypt, and became the ‘most-played single’ (Contactmusic, 2006) in a week in the history of the United States. The video clip features Shakira bellydancing but not in a standard Orientalist Arab-world ‘harem or hookah’ setting; instead, she is frolicking among revelers in the Carnaval de Barranquilla (Shakira’s home town, a center of both Afro–Caribbean and Syrio– Lebanese culture in Colombia). The choreography is directed by Indian Bollywood dancer Farah Khan (Chadha, 2006), and throws in robotic and ‘krumping’ dance moves in ways that jar with movement norms of ‘traditional’ Islamic world bellydance (Wyclef, 2009). Although Arab cultural authenticity is obviously not of © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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concern to Shakira, she insists that her dance is not prevarication. She sings: ‘So be wise and keep on reading the signs of my body. And I’m on tonight. You know my hips don’t lie’. In 2003–2006, this global movement of the body popular thus embraced bellydancing in all its contradictions. This movement offered a global counter-discourse to wars and repression in and around the Middle East that were often partially justified by the need to rescue the repressed, cloistered or violated bodies of Arab women. In Egypt, resistance efforts of belly dancers fed off this context, asserting claims, taking spaces and articulating legitimacy for a notion of popular sovereignty that appropriated and turned inside-out the bourgeois and Islamist morality politics of ‘professionalization’ and ‘respectability’ on the one hand, and redeemed notions of public sexuality-as-sociability that had been hijacked by cultural and economic security campaigns against ‘pornification’, sex trafficking and degradation in the symbolically and economically critical sector of women’s dance labor on the other hand. The result was that these ‘Natasha’ activists developed broader and more outward looking concepts of the nation in an increasingly multipolar and globalized setting, and offered a distinctly gendered agenda of popular sociability and solidarity as an alternative to the moralistic human-security agenda that had defined the absolutism of the security state in the last years of Mubarak’s rule. This model of gendered popular sovereignty inverts and, in the end, substitutes for Agambenian notions of ‘states of exception’, ‘bare life’ and ‘emergency rule’. In Egypt at this time, these bellydancing and geopolitical struggles were conceptualized in terms of a sovereignty crisis. Press, religious, parliamentary and police actors asserted that two phenomena intersecting in the bellydance sector – the increasing mobility of women workers across national borders and the changing sexuality of popular practices across public spheres – threatened the moral stability, cultural security and economic viability of the nation. These public actors ‘securitized’ labor migration and public sexuality, that is, they identified them as imminent threats to the identity of the people and thus to the rule of the state. The security state revived colonial-era humanitarian discourses and rescue operations, restored exceptional policing and legal decrees, and reanimated highly moralistic discourses of protectionism, in order to secure the gendered boundaries of nation and culture. Certain Islamist and populist morality campaigners who would emerge as dominant figures in 2012 after the uprisings in Tahrir Square and the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 ‘cut their teeth’ politically by mobilizing moral panic and repressive legislation during this struggle, including Mohamad Morsi, who, during the ‘Natasha wars’ period, served as head of the Muslim Brothers’ elected bloc in parliament and held sway over Egypt’s Labor Ministry. He was later narrowly elected president in June 2012 in a highly contentious run-off, and then removed from office on 3 July 2013. This case of the ‘Natasha Wars’ of 2002–2006 – a sovereignty crisis that justifies extraordinary measures to control dissidence and repressively ‘protect’ subject 266
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bodies – would at first glance seem like a fruitful field in which to apply Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics and state power. However, instead, this article argues that Agambenian political theory displaces gendered histories of moral and biopolitical governance, ignores shifting geographies of securitization in the post-colonial period and reifies absolutist ways of what Scott (1998) terms ‘seeing like a state’.
Sovereignty Crisis and Moral Panic In the first years of the twenty-first century, the sector of Oriental dance – or bellydancing – (al-raqs al-sharqi in Arabic) had begun to regain importance and visibility after a two-decade period of steady decline in economic viability, symbolic importance, and moral legitimacy. From the mid-nineteenth century through the late 1980s, the woman dancer had served as a fulcrum of popular identification as well as focus of colonial and touristic desires. The dancer thus has long borne both intensely ambivalent and uncomfortably contradictory forms of significance, embodying the ‘prostituted’ nation that was subjected to the Orientalist-touristic gaze coming from the West (Alloula, 1986; Dougherty, 2004; Maira, 2008), or degraded by misogyny or sexual harassment coming from Arab-region tourists (Wynn, 2007). Yet, simultaneously, the dancer has been consistently celebrated as an icon of panArab populism not to mention the focal point of weddings and popular festivals (Van Nieuwkerk, 1995; Puig, 2006; Roushdy, 2010a, b). However, in the early 2000s, class relations and security practices in Egypt shifted in response to changing immigration patterns and geopolitical alliances. Relevant shifts that came to impact questions of sovereignty occurred along three axes. First, local perceptions of the gender and ethnic composition of citizenship were changing as female workers from Russia, Sudan, Somalia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Asia began entering Egypt in larger numbers (Zohry, 2005), and with recent figures showing women making up a high portion, 46.6 per cent, of immigrants coming into Egypt (IOM (International Organization for Migration: Egypt), 2012). Second, representations of the sovereign embodiment of the Arab nation were changing as tensions flared between Arab countries with oil wealth and those without, as well between Sunni- and Shi’a-identified countries (Wynn, 2007, Chapters 1–2). And third, the deepening influence of global consumer-culture lifestyles and exuberant renaissance of popular festival cultures challenged doctrines of respectability and public morality in new ways (Swedenburg, 2000, 2012). Meanwhile, Islamist piety movements as well as extortionary police rackets intensified their targeting of bellydancing practices and nightclub economies (Amar, 2013, Chapters 2 and 6). This article builds upon the important work of a set of scholars who have analyzed the unique contestations around gender performance, state rule and moral economies during this same 5-year period, including that of © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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Ismail (2007), who analyzed the struggles of women artists in Egypt around issues of public sexuality, and Arvizu (2005), who offered an early, insightful account of the first stage of this moral panic around bellydance and migration during this period in Egypt, and Abbas (2013), whose work has productively challenged the ways in which cultural political theory, in its battles over the subjective limits of liberalism, has suffocated possibilities for grasping Arab women’s sovereignty and agency in its contemporary complexities. As will be described below, a series of emergency legislative maneuvers, police raids, media scandals and regulatory efforts were deployed in rapid succession against immigrant belly dancers (foreign nationals working in Egypt) in an attempt to shore up the security state during a time in which its legitimacy was already crumbling because of skyrocketing levels of corruption, police brutality and sociopolitical exclusion. Moreover, a new set of popular sovereignty claims and performances mobilized to resist and eventually defeat the repressive moves of the absolutist state. Since approximately 2001, however, political theorists seeking to grapple with the issues of biopolitical sovereignty in the context of emerging forms of militarized-humanitarian rule and security-state repression have turned to the work of Giorgio Agamden. Thus in order to clear the ground for an understanding of dynamic popular sovereignties, it is now imperative to analyze the distinct limitations of Agamben’s views on sovereignty and of those theorists who have taken up his work.
Exceptionally Bare Sovereignty Agamben-inspired approaches to the study of repression, detention and emergency rule became ubiquitous in the first decade of the 2000s (see McClennen, 2010; Vasilache, 2007; Swiffen, 2010; Jennings, 2011). Between 2001 and 2010, over 14, 900 scholarly books and articles cited Agamben’s (1998) Homo Sacer. The ‘Agamben paradigm’ seemed to provide conceptual tools readymade for urgent problems of the age: the rise of surveillance and interrogation tactics in the context of the so-called Global War on Terror; state repression of anti-globalization movements and anti-austerity protests; and the re-embracing of aggressive war, legalized torture and the indefinite detention of insurgents and displaced peoples in camps. However, as critical scholars embraced Agamben’s account of sovereignty, they ignored many of the political-theory advances of the 1980s and 1990s. Theory innovation during this period had identified the plural origins (including non-Western origins) of some of today’s hegemonic forms of constitution and authority (Abu-Lughod, 1989); deconstructed the monolithic Hobbesian state through alternative models of fractured, circulatory and internally contradictory models of governmentality (Foucault, 1991; Mitchell, 1991); and revealed that gender, class, sexuality and race are formations of rule and subjectivity that constitute critically important and essentially 268
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differentiated political bodies and authorities, even, or especially, in the most authoritarian or repressive regimes where bodies are targeted for violence, detention and degradation (Foucault, 1980; Stoler, 1995; Gilmore, 2007). Agamben-inspired sovereignty theory sidelines these three critical advances just as it restores Eurocentrism and a consolidated notion of state rule, often through selective re-readings of Arendt (1951, 1963a) and Foucault (1977, 2010) whose work was, paradoxically, inspiring to those shifts in cultural–political theory identified above. For example, Gratton points out that Agamben’s (1998) reading of the History of Sexuality asserts that in Foucault’s conception, ‘The “body” is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or in the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power’ (pp. 188–189, as cited in Gratton, 2006, p. 456). Agambenian lines of thought conflate absolutism and biopolitics, appropriating a particular moment in Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarian states (1951) and the ‘banality of evil’ (1963a) when she argues that the rationalization of sovereignty over populations represents not the transcendence of disciplinary governmentality over sanguinary sovereignty, but rather the limitless naturalization and bureaucratization of the latter. But selecting this moment in Arendt’s thinking marginalizes her more engaged work on the racialization of Jews in mid-twentieth-century Europe, and on specific colonial and fascist discourses and practices. Agambenian readings restore Eurocentric notions of geopolitical geography and re-universalize notions of the human in political society, and thus undermine aspects of Arendt’s and Foucault’s work that are most useful for theorizing the specific history and geography of coloniality, and the racialization and gendering of rule. These Agamben-inspired approaches collectively generate three axioms for theory: absolutization, monolithization and stripping down. These three axioms reduce or evert (that is, turn inside-out) the ‘sovereignties of the popular’ that animated the mobilization of Natasha Wars’ resistance against the security state in Egypt.
Absolutization Central to the Agamben-inspired model is a critique of Foucault’s shift from sovereignty to biopolitics. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault (1980) terminated old sovereignty theory by demanding that we ‘cut the head off the King … in political theory’ (p. 121).1 By contrast, the Agamben-inspired trend in sovereignty theory puts the head back on top. As described by political–legal theorist Mike Larsen, ‘Agamben envisioned a sovereign state as the main actor within states of exception and the actions that occur within such circumstances. [Rather than in a more grounded, fieldwork-based approach in which] imagining of sovereignty is one where state powers are distributed amongst the many, with different sectors controlling different aspects of power and discretion’ (Law and Society, 2012). © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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Agamben describes sovereignty as the logic that overdeterimes the totalized body of biopolitical rule, and thus reflects a modernization of absolutism, rather than a break with it, whereas Foucault explicitly distinguishes between absolutism and biopolitical governmentality. This Agamben-inspired merger in accounts of power assumes absolutist sovereignty as the chief logic of biopolitics. It occurs in the work of Campbell (2011), Johns (2005), Diken and Laustsen (2002), Van Munster (2004) and Minca (2005), and even, one could argue, that of Judith Butler (2008) in Precarious Politics. These conversations describe self-disciplinary, panoptic modernity as an intensification of absolutism through apparatuses of torture, degradation and extermination. Agamben offers an absolutist notion of sovereignty where exception becomes the rule. In Homo Sacer (1998, p. 25), Agamben states, ‘What emerges in this limit figure is the radical crisis of every possibility of clearly distinguishing between membership and inclusion, between what is outside and what is inside, between exception and rule’. This concept of exception does not discuss modes of imbrication, articulation or relationality, as ‘it squeezes the societal out of the political diagram’ (Huysmans, 2008, p. 174). This foreclosure echoes an absolutist notion of the state rather than exposing its constituent complexities.2 By contrast, Foucault’s work tends to see these two – absolutism and biopolitics – as distinct epistemes or logics of sovereignty. Theorists such as Gregory (2009) and Welch (2008) have emphasized the distinct, but complex interrelationship between the two epistemes in Foucault’s work, arguing that his later writings on race (see Stoler, 1995), neoliberal rule (Foucault, 2010) and sexuality politics (Foucault, 1980) do reveal relationships of co-formation and mutual imbrication between sanguinary and disciplinary power, or between absolutist and biopolitical. However, these readers insist that these two forms never collapse into one consistent regime form in Foucault’s models. In a similar vein, cultural–political theory work on colonial and post-colonial regimes of rule build on Foucault rather than Agamben, as they tend to problematize and center this very issue of the non-European and colonial essence of what is seen as Euro-originating absolutism and modern biopolitics. In this line, Stoler’s (1995) work reveals the racial biopolitics and gendered colonialism of colonial sovereignties in Indonesia. Hussain (2003, p. 7) shows how ‘emergency sovereignty’ reveals the very presence of the colonial at the heart of modernity. Yet, Agamben (as in his ‘State of Exception’, 2005) does not build on these kinds of Foucauldian and post-colonial work, and instead restores the European metanarrative of modernity. It does not engage, either, with the earlier work of Hannah Arendt and her studies of the origins of fascism in colonial racialism in Africa, which served as important inspiration for later theory on race, coloniality and politics. In the new optic of ‘exception’, Arendt’s legacy is reframed as an abstract theoretical model (anchored in the concentration camp), rather than a richly detailed, highly specific case study of coloniality, racialization, institutionalization, rationalization and political–social conflict. It could be argued that Arendt’s aim was not to produce a philosophy of the state that mirrored totalization; her project was to expose the specificity of totalitarianism 270
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and to redeem local popular sovereignties, revolutionary forms of participation and popular-community councils (Arendt, [1963b]1990, pp. 254, 265–266). Emphasizing these aspects of Arendt’s work, I demonstrate below how the ‘Natashas’ performances of citizenship, nation and labor represent new sovereignties of the popular. Monolithization Those who work on ‘state theory’ (and who may or may not necessarily use the term ‘sovereignty theory’) have built on the complexity and dynamism of projects elaborated by Gramscians Laclau and Mouffe (1985), or neocolonial state theorists of Southern Africa and the Caribbean (Alexander, 1994; Bayart et al., 1999), or the post-colonial state theory of Mitchell (1991). Noting these absences in Agambenian work, Jennings (2011, p. 47) argues that the splitting of relational, grounded state theory from universalizing sovereignty theory reflects the abstract totalism of Agamben (1998) himself, who writes in Homo Sacer: ‘[T]he problem of constituting power … requires nothing less than a rethinking of the ontological categories of modality in their totality. … Only an entirely new conjunction of possibility and reality … [can] cut the knot that binds sovereignty to constituting power’ (p. 44). As Robinson (2011) says, Agamben’s theory of sovereignty is not contingent but ontological – the state is exclusionary repression. Politics is the decision of the sovereign to exclude or abject people, rather than to enfranchise or recognize. Sovereignty is a universal regime (Euro-centered, of course) and a linear, cumulative process, existing ‘in all states through time … and getting worse’ (Robinson, 2011, p. 2). The totalization of the subject of sovereignty sounds radically mobilizing and provocative, drawing on certain elements of the European anarchist tradition (Amster et al., 2009). Stripping down One of the most alluring metaphors of Agamben-inspired sovereignty theory is that of ‘bare life’. As Agamben (1998) states, ‘Declaration of rights must therefore be viewed as the place in which the passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty is accomplished … The fact that in this process the “subject” is … transformed into a “citizen” means that birth – which is to say, bare natural life as such – here for the first time becomes … the immediate bearer of sovereignty …. Citizenship names the new status of life as origin and ground of sovereignty’ (pp. 128–129). Thus after three generations of critical work, starting roughly with Fanon’s (1963) Wretched of the Earth, on anti-colonial popular sovereignty and its emergence in relation to regimes of violent subjectification and to biopolitically specific racial formations, gendered embodiments and sexuality controls, Homo Sacer presents a single, naked subject of modernity as a baby born in © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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Europe with full rights and citizenship held in abeyance by sovereign identity. As Fischer (2007, pp. 7–8) asserts, the term nuda vita (naked or bare life) is a radical stripping down of politics, a reductivism ‘that prevents us not only from understanding some crucial instantiations of exploitative and exterminatory politics, such as colonialism or slavery, but instantiations which became foundational for the establishment of “politics” in the West’. Simultaneously, the abstract graphicness of the concept of ‘bare life’, and the lack of contextual detail in the theory that produces it, makes it available for a highly suspect fantasy investment that can distract researchers from exploring complexities of historical roots or causes (Fischer, 2007, p. 8). As Fischer (2007, p. 7) explains, the gendered and racial subjects of the slave and the colonized remain outside of this sphere of active sovereignty-making. The Master may fetishize the nakedness of the slave subject, but such subjects are certainly not bare of history; they are capable of claiming rights and status and remain constituent, productive sites of power even when the most extreme forms of rule target them for deadly violence. Agamdenesque theory-framing designates the naked subject of the central European detention camp as the embodiment of mass exclusions and exterminations. These were unleashed by nationalistic political movements to incorporate rights and citizenship within ‘national’ communities ‘by blood’ with exclusive claims to ‘national lands’. A primary focus on the exterminated other as the victim of absolutist sovereignty displaces and erases the specific processes by which popular protest and participation perform and embody popular sovereignty as a much more general phenomenon.
Sovereignty and the Body Popular In a time of ‘sovereignty crisis’, legislative, economic and security agencies within the Egyptian state faced challenges to which they responded with forms of repressive humanitarianism, ‘protective’ human-security policies and moral panic. However, gendered popular sovereignty claims were also asserted against this absolutism, creating a ‘body popular’ that mobilized the contradictions of humanitarian and securitized power that had rendered the dancer as a symbolically critical subject of national concern – as both a kind of ‘sex slave of globalization and colonialism’ and a celebrated vehicle of Arab futurity and popular nationalism. Notions of popular sovereignty have been expelled from trends in political theory by, on the one hand, the absolutist, statist approach of Agamben, and, on the other, by a narrow focus in liberal politics on elections and constitutions-as-social contract as the only imaginable expressions of this foundational concept. Of course, for two centuries there has been a debate in political theory around social-contract notions of popular sovereignty, split between the classical liberal vision of Locke (1689) of a governing order founded among consenting (male) individuals that would function by majority 272
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rule and ensure an ‘impartial magistracy’, and that of Rousseau (1762) who imagined a ‘general will’ constituted by ‘the [male] people’. In Rousseau’s conception individuals, or minorities, or monarchs, or officials who dissented from this ‘general will’ must be ‘forced to be free’. However, more recent generations of political theory work have articulated alternative schools of thought on the topic of the embodiment of popular sovereignty. Frantz Fanon, although often reductively viewed as an apostle of violence, asserted notions of popular sovereignty based on the recovery of dignity, political passion and consciousness of racism and moral hypocrisy by peoples in the colonial worlds, thus linking the sovereignty of the body popular to resistant action against particular regimes of psychic–ideological as well as racial–biopolitical oppression, rather than to a static or monolithic notion of general will or neutrality (Dane, 1994). Pateman and Mills (2007) asserted the gendered and race history of how socially ‘neutral’ or individual-equality-centered social-contract forms of popular sovereignty have been twisted to intensify and mask forms of domination. They argue that the assertion of explicitly gendered and racially critical assertions of popular sovereignty are not just projects for strengthening minority rights, but are essential to the realization of substantially democratic rule. Shifts toward gender and race-critical theory work on popular sovereignty have been complemented by shifts in theoretical work on spatial scales, that is, on the local and global formations in which popular sovereignty is embedded. Engaged in conversations of the sub-altern school of post-colonial political theory coming out of South Asia, Chatterjee (2004, pp. 5–9) argues that the work of ‘narratizing the nation’ today emerges from ‘popular politics’ embedded in the ‘heterogeneous time and space’ of street-level engaged governmentalities that is distinct from the homogenous or utopian space of ‘the state’ or ‘capital’ that previous schools of popular sovereignty theory had imagined as their object. Drawing upon local, post-colonial case studies of law-making violence and local forms of appropriation and resistance in the racialized and class-stratified case of contemporary South Africa, Hansen (2006) emphasizes how contests over the ‘performance of sovereignty’ have shifted the ‘symbolic locus of sovereignty from being a distant and impersonal state to becoming the local community’ (p. 279). Moreover, Agnew (2012, pp. 88–89) has argued that older notions of popular sovereignty in the Middle East have been ‘hollowed out’ by both authoritarian populisms in the region that tend to rule on behalf of the ‘people’ or the ‘people’s revolution’ while giving actual populations no participation in governing. He also argues that real possibilities for popular sovereignty have been further squeezed by global actors and forces such as international anti-terror, military-humanitarian interventions and global political–economic forces that have overridden sovereignty of states in the region in the name of opening markets or protecting the rights of global ‘humanity’. However, Agnew insists that new revolts, movements and popular uprisings in the Middle East demonstrate that the notion of popular sovereignty is more alive than ever in the region, although these movements would © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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make a mistake by just targeting their own national regimes and dictators rather than these new regional and international forces, and so working to fill in the ‘hollowed out’ notion of popular embodiment and participation in its own practices of mobilization. R.A. Rudy, drawing upon Egyptian and Tunisian novelists and activist poets, reinvigorates neo-Fanonian theory of popular sovereignty in the context of the changing global and political context identified by Agnew. Rudy (2012, pp. 12–14) identifies a discourse of a ‘revolution of dignity’ at the heart of Naguib Mahfouz’s notion of ‘general human duty’ that produces ‘perpetual revolution’ in culture and social practice. Moreover, Rudy highlights Tunisian poet Abou el-Kacem Chebbi’s resonant language in his poem ‘If the People One Day Will to Live’ (1933, cited in Rudy, 2012). These verses became the anthem of the 2010–2011 revolution and a rallying cry for the uprisings’ core concept of ‘human dignity’, blending notions of collective recognition, individual expression and civic participation, while also offering an implicit critique of the indignities produced by state violence and moral hypocrisy.
Mobilizing New Gendered Sovereignties: From Multipolarisms to Alter-Moralisms Egypt’s situation since the 1990s vividly illustrates these shifts in the spatial scale of sovereignty that would eventually generate a crisis in notions of governance and the body of the popular. During the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Egyptian nation and the geopolitical geography of Cairo experienced seismic shifts as a multipolar global order displaced the bipolar geopolitical frames of the Cold War and the more recent Global War on Terror. Several non-Western superpower and middle-power agendas materialized in Egypt and the region. Russia and post-Soviet Central Asia’s social, economic and political presence in Egypt increased dramatically. China became a huge investor, trade partner and mass distributor of consumer goods (Al-Kady, 2004; Mostafa, 2006; People’s Daily Online, 2008; Spollen, 2009). In fact, Chinese businessmen, vendors and labor organizers established a thriving immigrant community of 200, 000 in Egypt in the first decade of the twenty-first century (McDonald, 2010). The insecurities and challenges posed by these new international powers were transforming daily life, labor and consumption; gender and class identity; geopolitical relations; and urban space in Egypt in ways that stood increasingly at odds with US and EU agendas. The binary metaphors of East versus West and developed versus underdeveloped lost much of their analytical purchase in a multipolar world that is experiencing, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse says, a ‘rebalancing’ and an ‘East– South turn’. This is characterized by the layering of both plutocratic and emancipatory scripts of political action (Pieterse, 2011, p. 22). In this context, the Egyptian security state attempted to shore up its crumbling claims to authoritarian/repressive 274
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absolutist sovereignty by targeting Natashas as both a Western cultural threat to Eastern values and as a Bolshevik threat to Egyptian workers and capitalists. In a sense, the Egyptian security state’s response to the Natashas took the form of anachronistic bipolar-era mechanisms. These were inadequate for addressing the emergent multipolar nature of power and globalization in Egypt. The discourses of prostitution/trafficking/White slavery (which deny subaltern forms of gendered agency) necessarily inform the anti-bellydance discourse. These two realms of hypervisible sexualized security-state politics haunt each other. In previous eras, the threat of globalization or foreign occupation was coterminous with Westernization. But in these twenty-first-century struggles over the properly moral, raced and sexed bodies of the nation, the cultural-security discourse of the state and nationalism had to grapple with the post-Soviet age. So how did the Natashas assert their alternative popular sovereignty claims? As case-study findings will recount below, first, the international worker-artist movement around Nour proposed a new set of economic and geographical logics and relationships by defining the work of ‘foreign’ women dancers as essential rather than alien to the constitution of Egyptian national identity, thus encouraging the Egyptian state to see as positive, rather than as a security threat, the cultural, economic and regional changes that have remade the highly securitized meanings of Islam and the Middle-East region. Second, the campaign asserted the rights of migrant artistic laborers in Egypt to be treated equally, regardless of national origin. And third, it offered a distinct model of trans-moral professionalism and respectability that rejected bourgeois and Islamist by deploying a popular culture rooted politics of citizenship, substituting for the politics of respectability. The campaign argued that the militarization of moralism through security raids and mass arrests by the police were not protecting Egyptian culture, but rather destroying it. By 2001, hotel, tourism and entertainment establishments had actively promoted Oriental Dance as a way for Cairo to become a globalized hub for cosmopolitan consumers and an exporter of cultural and entertainment commodities. As reported by the BBC, Egyptian bellydancing had ‘gone global’ (Gardner, 2001); Egyptian designer Amira captured the new dance ideology with eloquence: ‘[Bellydancing] has become an international culture. It has been a wonderful sort of breaking the barrier between East and West. It has become a common language which people said East and West shall never meet; well here we are in belly dancing. They have met (Gardner, 2001)’. Moreover, this agenda had a particular feminist, or at least womanist, agenda for righting some of the injustices linked to the gendered division of labor: ‘You know, it’s ultra-feminine, it’s an opportunity to live that goddess that everybody has inside them. There’re very few opportunities in the world today with women as they are and having to be masculine and enter the working world’ (Cairo Times, 2001). However, the real goddesses of Egyptian dance thought the discourse of ‘dance-as-feminized globalization’ was crap. In what became a landmark interview with the English-language Cairo Times (2001), bellydancing superstar Sohair © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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Zaki (born in 1944) raised the banner of nationalist militancy. Zaki decried what she saw as an invasion of foreign dancers, particularly Russians, who ‘have occupied Egypt’. Here, Zaki intentionally recalled the phrasing used to describe how Israel occupies Palestinian territories. Furthermore, she implied that not only did they drain the Egyptian humor and spirit from dance (Gardner, 2001), but that they vulgarized and sexualized dance, prostituting the tourism sector and the nation. In 2002, Cairo’s moral panic industries roared to life again when sex tapes emerged featuring Dina, one of Egypt’s most renowned and highest-paid belly dancers. The video tapes captured her with her third husband, to whom she was bound in a form of ‘temporary marriage’ (Roya, 2007; Allam, 2010). This is a legal form of union in Islam, but controversial, because it is linked with tourism and prostitution. As bootleg copies of her sex tapes were being hawked all over Cairo, Dina, in an attempt to preserve her dignity, proclaimed she would give up dancing and adopt a modest, moral life; then she fled the country. Simultaneously, police raids at working-class nightclubs accelerated, sweeping up, arresting and charging ‘lower-class’ women belly dancers and wedding performers with prostitution. A national moral purge ensued. An Egyptian member of parliament affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Morsi, stated that, ‘From the viewpoint of our religion, [belly dancing] is not allowed, it’s forbidden … It’s a bad thing for a woman to show off her body to the public’ (Gardner, 2001). Vice Police in Cairo typically held Egyptian dancers to a high standard of modesty, arresting them even if their whole torso and shoulders were covered in dense netting. Meanwhile, police permitted foreign dancers to perform in nothing more than a beach bikini. The bloc of ultra-elite Arab dance stars led by another Sadat-era dancer, Nagwa Fouad, demanded a ‘locals only’ dance syndicate, made up of elite, award-winning artists, in order to protect the country from the ‘Russian invasion’ (Al-Watan Voice, 2007). In 2002, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper ran a story, ‘Oriental Dance and Globalization’, defining the terms of the controversy and turning upside down many of the ‘Third Worldist’ metaphors and narratives that had framed the Egyptian security state’s representations of globalization as predatory, perverse and Western. Rather than protect ‘the people’ from predation by wealthy Western consumers, politics now shifted to protecting Egypt’s most profitable, culturally and technically ‘superior’ belly-dancing industry from the cheaper, unskilled, vulgar work of Russian labor migrants. In 2003, the Egyptian security state responded to this growing outcry with a plan to chase working-class Egyptians out of the tourism sector and treat them as illegal prostitutes rather than legal dancers. The goal was to shore up the moral security of the city as demanded by the Islamists. Meanwhile, by deporting Russian dancers and eliminating competition in the labor market, the state would offer protection to a handful of privileged Egyptian dancers. The Labor Ministry, supported by Morsi’s speeches in parliament, drafted Law 136/2003 to ban foreigners from the dance 276
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sector by revoking their permits in Egypt. ‘Ahmed El Amawi, Minister of Manpower and Immigration [also known more traditionally as the Labor Ministry], announced his intention to ban all non-Egyptians from working as belly dancers in Egypt starting in January 2004’ (Wynn, 2007, p. 222). Almost 50 years after Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal and thus radicalized the Free Officersʼ Revolution, Cairo broke its 30-year neoliberal privatization streak by re-embracing the protection of the national industry of bellydancing. Nawal El-Naggar of the Labor Ministry proclaimed bellydancing ‘is not an industry where we need foreigners’ (Nafie, 2004). As analyzed by McDonald (2010) in her study of this debate, ‘By asserting that it is an Egyptian thing, rather than an Arab or Middle Eastern thing, al-Naggar is declaring an Egyptian entitlement to an activity known to be performed and practiced in other nations’ (p. 52). As described by Arvizu (2005), ‘Russian Shows [in Egypt] feature choreographed routines to mostly pop music. Sometimes there is an attempt to incorporate oriental dance elements, but the overall technique and style presented is not what is considered a proper oriental dance performance’ (p. 165) and were described by the Cairo Times as ‘transparent veils of prostitution rackets’ (Carrington, 2003, cited by Arvizu). In 2003, Nour, the most visible of the so-called ‘Russian’ Natashas, mobilized a court case and cultural campaign to turn back the legislative proposals of the Labor Ministry and the deportation orders that President Mubarak’s ministries of Labor and Culture decreed. These political initiatives drew out the tensions between wage-workers’ individual rights and workers’ collective solidarity structures on one hand, and the moralistic and hard-line police logics of the anti-trafficking movement on the other. Nour, with the backing of her Syrian husband Yasser Alswery, created the International Association of Artists in Egypt. Nour’s first aim was to break through the out-of-date East-versus-West discourse. Through a series of press conferences, television interviews, workers’ meetings and international cultural festival appearances, she reminded the Cairene public that although she was born in Moscow, she was of Uzbek origin and a practicing Muslim. Like many of the ‘Russian’ workers, tourists and investors newly visible in Egypt (McDermott, 2006; TodayAz, 2007; UzDaily, 2008), Nour identified herself with a post-Soviet geography in which Central Asia was at the center of circuits that linked newly booming cities, petro-dollar economies and cultural industries, breaking with the Eurocentric or colonial patterns that had privileged the West and its liberalism. Nour wove together the new geography of contemporary Cairo with the economies of post-Soviet Central Asia, the booming city-states of the Persian Gulf and the trade patterns of Indian Ocean states. Her association’s move to challenge Egyptian security-state repression embodied the popular sovereignty that this new global circuit could animate. Part of this coalition was also an Australian of Russian extraction, a long-term Cairo resident and Arabic speaker Caroline Evanoff, who created along with Nour the Expatriate Artists Association (Nagui, 2003). © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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Nour’s coalition argued that it was not Western perversion that had degraded the dance sector; it was the meddling of moralizers, themselves, that had degraded Egyptian labor and the image of its women. One Egyptian dance superstar, Lucy, offered a political–economic argument about the productivity of the sector, portraying religious prohibition, not gendered immorality, as the prime threat: Each foreign dancer employs a team of [Egyptian] musicians. If there are 100 foreign dancers, then each one of them utilizes 25 musicians in her band … Because the Labor Ministry tightly regulates the permits, they will also pay fees and taxes to the government [that most Egyptians would not pay] since the recent era has witnessed a conspicuous withdrawal of Egyptian dancers from the profession because of the rise of a certain religious consciousness rejecting women’s dance. (3iny3ink.com, 2007) Since the late 1990s, police services had become more engaged in this moralization campaign. Egyptian women on their way abroad to work as dancers were arrested at the airport, accused of being prostitutes and forcibly ‘rescued’ from sex trafficking (Amar, 2013, Chapter 2). By contrast, Nour’s campaign supported the creation of professional schools for dancers in Cairo, linking them to a vast network of performance and training opportunities in Russia, Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, India and Europe, raising the stock of their labor and its global market value. Thus, the campaign did not attack and undermine the moralization and securitization of dance at the nexus of concerns about globalization, national security and gender. Rather, it delinked moral security from the para-military violence of the Vice Police and Interior Ministry, rearticulating it in terms of the revaluing or professionalization of women workers. A new generation of Islamists, influenced by a new generation of Islamic feminists, picked up on Nour’s campaign and supported secular-nationalist Nagwa Fouad’s idea of a High Institute of Oriental Dance, resembling the cinema and music institutes that had guarded for decades Egypt’s position as the metropole of Arab cultural production. Such an institute would raise the quality of the art form, legitimize the re-entry of Egyptian women into the sector and revalue their labor as agents of positive globalization, rather than as its victims. Nour’s legal campaign against the Labor Ministry succeeded, and Law 136/2003 was scrapped before it came to a vote.
The Triangle of Moral Securitization The struggles over dance, prohibitions and erotic cultural economies in Egypt during this period rendered visible three spheres and structures in which questions of women’s dance-work were inserted: (i) the ‘pornification’ of dance through music videos, (ii) efforts to morally Islamize and professionalize bellydance by ‘upgrading’ 278
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or socially cleansing it of lower-class elements and prostitution and (iii) movements to restore dance performance as articulators of popular sociability, bringing individuals, communities and eventually national identities together in playful, celebratory contexts from the level of working-class weddings and popular Sufi festivals in public in urban Egypt, to cosmopolitan dance festivals and popular music communities on the global scale. As noted by Kubala (2005) and Arvizu (2005), the profileration of popular satellite music video channels featured video clips of beautiful, highly self-sexualizing young women performers, such as Ruby. These videos were condemned as ‘porno clips’ by preachers appealing to rather prosperous and moralistic segments of the middle classes such as Sami Yusuf and Amr Khaled, the latter proclaiming, ‘the problem with the video clips is not only the dissolute words and movements … but that [they] have nothing to do with our own culture … The picture is Western and the voice is ours … It is useless and aimless … it is directed to desire and impulse … I ask all those who are with us today to not accept that they wipe out the identity of our nation. Preserve our culture and our art!’ (Amr Khaled, 2004, cited in Kubala, 2005, p. 41). In this discourse of ‘pornification’, dancing is seen now as wholly separated from popular spaces and social functions – such as when dancers move about the crowds cultivating collective fun and interaction at weddings and Moulid festivals. In the ‘porno clip’ discourse, dance becomes reduced an instrument for masking alien pop genres as Arab. One throws in some bellydancing so as to better penetrate the local market. This “sexualization” of Egyptian music is thus presented not as an expression of indigenous popular culture and erotic practice but as an explicitly Western threat to “traditional” gender norms and faithbased national identity. The reformist agenda generated by this triangle of moral securitization combined professionalization, respectability, and Islamization. Middle-class friendly preachers like Amr Khaled and elected Muslim Brother’s leader Mohammad Morsi, during this period, did not want to scare off mainstream public by advocating a total ban on dancing or videos, but they did see this chance as a moment to resubordinate women dancers and behaviors to state regulatory frameworks and hierarchical class norms. Thus Morsi supported the idea of a National Professional Academy of Dance, to teach proper ‘Islamic’ ways of female dancing (whatever that would be) and built on Nagwa Fouad’s suggestion that proper training and certification should be provided to renationalize the sector, cleanse it of vulgar working-class sexualities and establish its religious legitimacy and national stamp of authenticity. But dance activists – both transnational artists networks (like those mobilized by Nour and Caroline Evanoff) and working-class local dancer collectives (on Pyramids Road and in the popular clubs downtown and in the popular quarters of Cairo) – came together against this reformist agenda and against the repression, harassment, and protection-rackets connected to the Vice Police. This activist coalition aimed to restore dance not as merely a tourism-revenue generator (which, in the end, can never be perfectly distinguished from promotion of sex tourism), nor as a state or © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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mosque-governed professionalization operation, but rather to restore dance as an articulator of public sociability and popular sovereignty. In that way, it would occupy and assemble in spaces that would articulate gendered and mixed-class sociabilities. They aimed to establish autonomy both from the security apparatus of the state and from the absolutist sovereignty of moralistic nationalism. This coalition had come together previously. This coalition had come together previously, in 1997–1998, when conservative parliamentarians and Salafist movements had tried to ban dance at weddings. The result of this would have been ‘only that women’s dance ceases to perform ritual, customary functions at milestone events, without which it will only exist in a commercial context’ (McDonald, 2010, p. 61). That outcome would be a self-fulfilling prophesy, repeating the situation that unfolded back when Mehmet Ali banned dance back in the 1830, forcing dancers into prostitution and necessitating their dependence on tourists rather than allowing them to perform as public rallying nodes, as inspiring social actors at the moving center of the body of the popular. Through resistance to the metaphors and moral policing frameworks that had animated the panic around the ‘Natasha Wars’, Nour and her allies began dismantling the hegemonic East-versus-West discourse that had structured the security state’s heavy-handed interventions. Interviews in popular radio and television talk shows, and much-visited online manifestos, women’s dance gatherings in Egypt and highprofile international conventions worked to generate this women-centered, sociability-cultivating agenda for dance, in which Cairo and the Egyptian nation were centered as a site of outward flowing creativity, rather than of insecure, over-policed cultural protectionism. The campaign rearticulated a workers’ rights legalism with an empowerment focus on labor upgrading, women’s leadership and enhanced mobility for migrant women artists. The campaign positioned the dancers as cultural ambassadors and the anchors of a flourishing cultural economy, rather than as trafficking victims and vectors for degradation and recolonization. However, by also rearticulating the security-state’s obsession with moral regulation, Nour, Lucy and company had locked the issue of Oriental Dance into a paternalistic framework of state-centered training, regulatory policing and professionalization. Not everyone was satisfied with the compromises around respectability and professionalization that forged this fragile counter-hegemonic bloc. Dina, the dance star who had been caught in the sex tapes, gave up trying to become a pious penitent. She roared back into Egypt, adopting a more ‘personal rights’ strategy and pro-sex attitude. She enthusiastically took up dance again and turned her legal struggle into a demand that men be held economically and personally accountable when they engage in ‘temporary marriage’, and that men have no right to slander, defame or blackmail their partners with sex tapes. Dina won her court cases, which established important rights for women in the context of temporary marriage (Albawaba, 2003). The Natasha Wars ended with provisional victories for migrant women as well as Egyptian artists, challenging the fundamental binaries that structured the security state: Islamic East versus a ‘liberal’ West, and moralized national security versus 280
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globalizing sex perversion. From both a liberal legalist perspective and a collectivist ‘worker solidarity’ perspective, then, the international dancers had prevailed. They had preserved their rights to personal expression in a liberal–legalistic sense, but they had also kept the entire dance, nightclub and tourism sector functioning, providing incomes for many Egyptians during a time of moral and financial panic. Moreover, they had created international links between women artists that had benefited and upgraded the labor status and income of Egyptian artistic workers – if and when they returned to the sector. And most importantly, these efforts revived an option between pornification and professionalization for bellydance in Egypt. They reasserted women’s dance labor as an animus of the body popular and as a real, material articulator of popular sovereignty and of alternative notions of nation and accountability in a multipolar global context and contentious postcolonial historical setting.
Conclusion In the same week that I concluded the draft of this article in Cairo, in March 2013, an echo of the earlier culture wars over bellydancing broke out again. Egypt’s senior dance star, 70-year-old Nagwa Fouad, announced that she had given up dancing, saying ‘Artists are staying at home because Islamists destroyed art and creativity … Production houses are going bankrupt … and people only watch the news on the daily clashes’ (Egypt Independent, 2013). In a similar event, complaints from Salafist preachers and from then-president Morsi pushed Egypt’s satellite bellydancing channel, ‘El-Tet’, off the air. The high-court judge said, ‘El-Tet airs ads that are “offensive” and can “arouse” viewers. The station carries advertisements for sexual enhancement products and matchmaking services. It is broadcast out of a Cairo apartment that airs videos 24 hours a day of scantily clad belly dancers giving sultry performances to music’ (MSN, 2013). The channel’s owner, Baligh Hamdi, was arrested on charges of promoting prostitution, and the station went black. On the same day, the guys in the working-class gym where I exercise, in the Abdeen quarter of Cairo, were cursing the state and courts for banning the station. This gym is a place where women work out in the morning and men come in the afternoon. It fills up with radical revolutionary Ultra boys pumping iron alongside those who would be their arch enemies on the street – young Central Security troops and junior police conscripts. On the music loop, as always, three songs were repeated, Ana ragal, qawi mish qilla, huwwa mish hiyya [‘I’m a man – a lot, not a little; he not she!’] a highly ironic Egyptian sha’bi popular music anthem banned on most radio stations for being too vulgar, then Mohamad Mounir’s anthem of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square, Ezzay [‘Why’], and yes, Shakira’s ‘My Hips Don’t Lie’. ‘Hips’ is played so often, even 8 years after its release, that it has seeped deep © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
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into consciousness, to the point that guys in this gym yell ‘Shakira Shakira!’ to each other to encourage each other to push out that extra rep on the bench press. The Natashas, and the transnational bodies of the popular into which they mobilized, have created a body of claims, pleasures and visibilities by animating a transnational nation, asserting labor rights for artistic performers and advocating a fiercely ethical but anti-moralistic populism. ‘Bare life’ and ‘state of exception’ as theoretical tools would have shed little light on the nature and originality of these struggles with security structures, repressive biopolitics and absolutist authoritarian moralisms. Dance embodiment, race/gender human-security politics and notions of sociability and popular sovereignty, explicitly designed to expose and undo nationalism and securitization processes, have opened new doors for the theorization of popular sovereignty through gendered, global-South and post-colonial lenses. These challenges to disciplinary biopolitics and gendered logics of emergency rule comprise a three-part popular sovereignty alternative to both Agambenian forms of absolutist sovereignty and humanitarian, liberal and colonially inflected trajectories of rule. First, they turn moralistic protection inside out, challenging the security state’s reliance on seemingly humanitarian notions of gendered rescue and protection, and revealing the labor exploitation and class hierarchy that these doctrines have enabled. Second, they remap the transnational body-politics of the Arab nation, undermining the gendered nationalism in the powerful narrative of the trafficked dancer who prostitutes the nation and the woman humanitarian rescuer who redeems it, and revealing the non-Arab agents and global social forces invested in celebrating and reconstituting the Arab nation. Finally, they center embodied subjects of gendered labor in popular sovereignty, mobilizing against the identity politics of both the new religiosity and the old anti-colonialism that were asserting patriarchal notions of rule and marginalizing issues of work, particularly the work women do in the cultural or service sectors. This three-part model – averting moralism, remapping transnationalism and centering gendered labor – also challenged the ‘moral panic’ agendas of the security state and anticipated some of the most innovative and powerful forms of popular mobilization that have flooded Tahrir Square and continue to do so.
Notes 1 For further discussion of this trope in Foucault, see Neal (2004) 2 For an elaboration of this critique, see Ojakangas (2005), Jennings (2011), Genel (2006) and Gratton (2006).
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