The Naked Body of Alia: Gender, Citizenship, and the Egyptian Body Politic

Abstract

In November 2011, 20-year-old Egyptian blogger Alia al-Mahdy posted a nude picture of herself on her blog. The photograph received 1.5 million hits within a week of its posting and drew condemnations from conservatives and liberals alike in the critical period leading up to the deeply polarized first post-Mubarak parliamentary election. How was Alia’s nudity framed in mainstream public discourse and by Alia herself? Drawing on a corpus of primary sources, 60 articles from mostly Egyptian and Arab newspapers, this article argues that the public controversy transcends contentious media representations of women to reach into the heart of Egyptian revolutionary citizenship. While mainstream Egyptian and Arab media discourse framed Alia’s nudity as “merely cultural” and “Westernized,” Alia described it as an artistic social commentary. These rhetorical frames reveal the reconfiguration of political dissent—its forms, channels, and actors—and the tensions around national identity that animate the contemporary Arab public sphere.