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Hanan Hammad

Abstract

This article focuses on independent Marxist feminists in Egypt during the last two decades of the twentieth century. I show that despite the Islamist discourses that called for women’s withdrawal from public places simultaneously with the demise of state feminism, the public sphere was far from monolithic. Independent Marxist Feminists attempted to challenge the strictures of gender, and to participate with alternate discourses and activism in and through alternate media and public spaces. My goal is to shift the attention from Cairo-based politics and movements and to shed light on feminist activism in the relatively closed communities in small provincial towns.

Author Biography

Hanan Hammad is an assistant professor of Middle East history at Texas Christian University. She is spending the 2010-2011 academic year as the EUME Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. She is currently writing a book tentatively entitled “Mechanizing People: Industrialization, Sexuality and Gender in Modern Egypt.”

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