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https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432211057919
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol 36 No. 1, February, 2022 112 –139
DOI: 10.1177/08912432211057919
© 2021 by The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY
BuSSy’s Storytelling as Feminist Social Change
NEHAL ELMELIGY
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA
In this paper, I examine alternative feminist activism and social movements in Egypt by
analyzing BuSSy. BuSSy is a performance art group that hosts storytelling workshops and
monologues of taboo and “shameful” personal stories that challenge societal and state-
sanctioned normative discourses on femininity/womanhood and masculinity/manhood.
Drawing on transnational feminist scholarship and queer theory and using collective
memory as a lens, I argue that BuSSy’s storytelling is an act of airing Egypt’s dirty laundry,
queering normative discourses to enable feminist counter-memorializing. Based on con-
tent analysis of secondary data including BuSSy’s published interviews, YouTube videos,
website and Facebook images, and testimonies from 2006 to 2020, my analysis reveals
BuSSy as curating 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. BuSSy’s works create cathartic experiences to shed
stigma and shame. Finally, I reconceptualize feminist activism and collective memories
outside of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and contribute to the literature on shame by ana-
lyzing how BuSSy identifies and counters shame’s silencing power.
Keywords: shame; gender and affect; queering discourse; honor; collective memory;
feminist social movements
The BuSSy Project (BuSSy) is an Egyptian nonprofit organization and
a feminist performance art group that identifies as a movement
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This paper would not have been possible without the support of my
advisor, Ghassan Moussawi; I thank him immensely. I thank Asef Bayat for his feedback
on an earlier draft. I also thank Matthew Schneider, Kathy Copas, James Baugh,
Dominique Lyons, Rebecca Morrow, Shereen Mowafak, and Noah Glaser for their help. I
appreciate the thoughtful comments by Barbara Risman and the three anonymous review-
ers. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nehal Elmeligy,
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801-3028, USA; e-mail:
nelmel2@illinois.edu.
1057919GASXXX10.1177/08912432211057919Gender & SocietyElmeligy / SHORT TITLE
research-article2021
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 113
(BuSSy, n.d.-a; Zaghmout 2015). It aims to “[document] and [give] voice
to censored untold stories about gender in different communities in
Egypt” (BuSSy, n.d.-b) and to empower and heal storytellers, performers,
listeners, and society at large (Zaghmout 2015). BuSSy breaks society’s
silence by telling stories of “shameful” experiences, pushing against gen-
dered expectations of what society and the state deem appropriate for
public discussion.
Whereas recent scholarship on Egypt focuses on the 2011 revolution to
either account for feminist resistance or highlight the organizing that laid
its groundwork, in this paper, I examine a case of feminist activism that
predates the revolution and did not play a role in its eruption. Drawing on
feminist and queer theory and literature on testimonies and collective
memory, and through content analysis of secondary data from 2006
through 2020, I argue that BuSSy’s storytelling is an act of airing Egypt’s
dirty laundry, queering normative discourses to enable feminist counter-
memorializing, or documenting antinormative experiences. BuSSy’s work
creates feminist social change through affectively contagious storytelling
and cathartic experiences that empower people to shed stigma and shame.
I use “queer” as a verb and an act of disrupting and challenging normative
discourses and ways of being (Moussawi 2020). By analyzing BuSSy
through the lens of collective memory, I argue it creates what Cvetkovich
(2003) calls an “archive of feelings,” centralizing shame. This archive of
feelings and counter-memorializing creates feminist social change that
challenges heteropatriarchal gender norms. Furthermore, I address a gap in
recent scholarship that focuses on feminist collective memories during the
revolution, by shedding light on BuSSy’s feminist counter-memorializing
that emerged before it, as a response to heteropatriarchal normative dis-
courses. Thus, in this paper, I contribute to scholarship on Egyptian femi-
nist activism and to the literature that does not view Arab feminism as an
oxymoron (Abulhadi, Alsultany, and Naber 2011). BuSSy is a representa-
tive case of recently established non–policy-oriented organizing, feminist,
nonprofit organizations, and research collectives, such as Tadwein Gender
Research and Training Center (tadwein.org), and Ikhtyar “Choice” for
Gender Studies and Research (ikhtyar.org). These non-policy-oriented
organizations have been relatively safe amid a “shrinking” space for femi-
nist activism, collapsing NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), and a
ruthless regime (La Beet 2018). The current regime has spearheaded a
(gendered) crackdown targeting many international and local (feminist)
NGOs (Amnesty International 2016) and high-profile women activists (La
Beet 2018). Although Egypt’s previous autocratic regimes have always
114 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
placed restrictions on civil society and the extent of its civic mobilization,
the country’s current military government has launched a “much more
comprehensive campaign to shrink civic space” (Brechenmacher 2017).
BACKGROUND
On January 25, 2011, millions of Egyptians took to the streets protest-
ing the 30-year rule of now-deposed autocratic President Hosni Mubarak.
For 18 days, peaceful protests spread in Egypt calling for “bread, free-
dom, and social justice,” leading to an exponential growth of a peaceful
sit-in in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (Hass and Lesch 2017). Protestors faced
violence from the police, the army, and regime supporters. For many
Egyptians, this was their first time publicly objecting to the status quo and
calling for social justice reform, including gender equality, sexual free-
dom, bodily autonomy, and anti sexual harassment measures. Due to such
encounters and the extraordinary circumstances, the revolution inspired
various feminist and social justice initiatives.
BuSSy, however, started in 2006. It was the first space to spread aware-
ness about women’s and men’s experiences that include silencing and
shaming by families, friends, mainstream media, and state actors (Talaat
2015). In 2011, Sondos Shabayek (2015), BuSSy’s director since 2007,
protested in Tahrir, and explains how her and her friends’ experiences dur-
ing the revolution made them more daring. A week after the revolution
started, BuSSy members started Tahrir Monologues. They collected pro-
test experiences, ensuring not to censor “inappropriate words” and jeop-
ardize the stories’ integrity (Shabayek 2015). Tahrir Monologues played
30 times in four cities. BuSSy resumed in 2012 with its first uncensored
performance about harassment in Tahrir protests (Shabayek 2015).
Originally, BuSSy’s performances were in English and by women, for
women, at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Bussy is a play on
the word pussy and transliteration of the feminine imperative look in
Egyptian Arabic (Talaat 2015). The public performances format of the
2005 The Vagina Monologues at AUC (Ensler 2000) inspired a few female
students to found BuSSy (Talaat 2015). Disidentifying with the Vagina
Monologues’ focus on vaginas, BuSSy adapted the content to “gender
stories” tailored to the Egyptian context and debuted in 2006 (Zaghmout
2015). By 2010, BuSSy had left AUC, performed in Arabic, and expanded
beyond women’s stories (Shabayek 2015). Co-director Menan Omar
explains that the aim of BuSSy is not to “exaggerate the representation of
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 115
women’s malaise, but to expose both sides. . .[we] would like to see men
writing their own stories” (Attalah 2010). BuSSy recognizes that Egyptian
women and men have experiences of shame they want to share acknowl-
edging that patriarchal scripts and normative gender expectations influ-
ence both men and women (Abdulhadi, Alsultany, and Naber 2011).
Therefore, BuSSy (n.d.-b)
organizes storytelling workshops and performances where women and men
step on stage to share stories about harassment, rape, gender discrimination,
honor killing, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, motherhood,
domestic violence, child abuse, mass sexual assaults and many others.
Owing to its founding at an elitist institution, BuSSy’s stories were
seen as reflecting upper-middle-class issues (Attalah 2010). However,
they have come to reflect diverse classes and communities. In 2014,
BuSSy Caravan started—a project to take workshops and performances
annually to two cities other than Cairo. BuSSy traveled to neighboring
cities such as Alexandria and southern cities such as Aswan. By the end
of 2019, BuSSy had traveled to eight major cities and participated in
events abroad (BuSSy, n.d.-b).
Storytelling workshops dictate the content of their subsequent perfor-
mances. Cairo workshops last 2–3 months with participants attending
once weekly; in other cities, they last 2 weeks with daily attendance.
BuSSy advertises its upcoming workshop on Facebook, requiring inter-
ested adult applicants to complete an application (BBC Arabic 2017).
When BuSSy travels to a new city, it contacts local (feminist) organiza-
tions to advertise its workshops. Other times, BuSSy targets a specific
group, and the workshops are not open to the public. With participants’
consent, their stories are audio-recorded, transcribed, anonymized, and
archived to BuSSy’s website. A participant can tell their own story, ask
another participant or member to tell it, or choose not to feature it. All
performances are open to the public.
MEMORIES, TESTIMONIES, THE ARCHIVE OF FEELINGS,
AND THEIR (FEMINIST) POLITICS
Feminist scholars have argued for the legitimacy of marginalized peo-
ple’s narratives as valid knowledge production and a vehicle of social
change. Such marginalized narratives (Anzaldúa 1987) and “chronicles”
of everyday events (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015) serve as social and
116 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
political analysis. Narratives can also be sites of self-creation where nar-
rators are empowered (Kimura 2008). Verbal narratives and testimonies
can take place in public hearings (Abouelnaga 2016) or take creative
forms such as storytelling (Sistren Theatre Collective 2005). Some schol-
ars have explored variations of these embodied collective knowledges
such as Moraga and Anzaldúa’s (2015) “theory in the flesh,” Collins’
(1989) “specialized knowledge,” and Anzaldúa’s (1987) autohistory the-
ory. This methodology of knowledge production is an exercise of one’s
own subjectivity, which is a “central element [in] articulating the possi-
bilities of social transformation” (Vargas-Monroy 2012, 266). By “invok-
ing one’s own history” or past experiences and by “recreating larger
histories” or creating new societal narratives and knowledges that become
histories, social transformation is possible (Vargas-Monroy 2012, 266).
Other scholars have recognized the transformative potential of activat-
ing silenced memories and experiential accounts of marginalized people,
especially in the face of dominant oppositional discourses (Hirsch and
Smith 2002). Writing about memorializing gendered violence against
women in Canada, Bold, Knowles, and Leach (2002) call “feminist
memorials” cultural counter memory as they are sites that practice the
creation of a “collective memory”: “active remembering” to counter
“active forgetting” (129) of “the suppression of public consciousness
about the scope and extent of violence against women as an ongoing,
everyday, systemic social fact” by the hegemonic cultural memory (125–
26).
“Locations of memory” such as “her-story” (Abouelnaga 2016, 107,
emphasis in the original) or counter memory, do not occur spontaneously.
Dominant discourse on power and history is always “suspicious of mem-
ory and [their] true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (Abouelnaga
2016, 113). The way to protect collective memory and “prevent the pow-
erful from selecting and deleting” is archiving and documenting
(Abouelnaga 2016, 131). Anything from histories and experiences to
thoughts and feelings is archivable. Cvetkovich (2003, 7) archives the
feelings and experiences of lesbians who have been marginalized and
unrecognized in the national public sphere to “represent examples of how
affective experiences can provide the basis for new cultures.” She uses
trauma as an entry point through performances to create an affective
archive that uses feelings to create social experiences instead of isolation.
In a similar vein, Ahmed (2004) argues that women’s affective testimonies
are essential for the creation of feminist subjects and collectives. Feeling
pain and being angry are two gendered affects that compel feminists to “a
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 117
movement of social and political transformation” (Ahmed 2004, 176).
Working within this framework, I argue that BuSSy is an archive of feel-
ings making feminist social change in Egypt—but centralizes shame
rather than trauma.
ON SHAME: THEORY AND CONTEXT
Feminist and queer theorists have studied the social and political impli-
cations of shame and how it operates in intersection with gender, race,
class, sexuality, nation, and the everyday. Some scholars have explored
shame “in relation to heteronormative circumscription of desire and queer
sexual relationships” (Fischer 2018, 376). Scholars such as Sedgwick
(2003) have interrogated how shame catalyzes queer pleasure, politics,
and performance. Others have found a relationship between the shame of
the closet and lesser-identified losses that come with assimilation in gay
culture (Love 2007). Some have found that while shame is entangled with
different forms of social inequality, it has productive potential in social
justice endeavors (Munt 2007; Probyn 2005). Others have argued that
shame is a tool of surveilling and policing women to force them to abide
by “respectable” femininity (Brown 2004). It is within this literature that
I analyze the significance of shame in Egypt.
In Egypt, the Arabic word for shame is ‘ar1; it is frequently coupled
with scandal, as in the saying “O scandal, O shame”2—signaling the loss
of respectability and subsequently losing face. Indeed, most Egyptians
believe shame causes scandals and use both nouns interchangeably.
Shame occurs when people violate social ideals and norms; shame
“sticks” to them (and their bodies) and becomes their signifier (Ahmed
2004). With sexual conduct and gender norms, the fear of shame rein-
forces conformity to gendered norms.
In Egypt, the words shame and scandal are heavily gendered, often
referring to women’s bodies. A woman can jeopardize her honor and
bring shame to herself and family if she dresses “immodestly,” behaves
inappropriately in public, or has any sexual activity outside marriage.3
Although she must bear this honor, the men of the family must protect
it (Moghadam 2003). The protection of honor and containment of shame
allow men to commit honor killings over real or perceived sexual mis-
conduct by women (Moghadam 2003). Judges may decrease the sen-
tence if a case is proven to be honor related (Khafagy 2005). Thus, the
heteropatriarchal legal system views the female body as inherently
shameful unless hidden, covered, and unseen.
118 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
In fear of smearing its image, the state silences critiques by alleged
shame-inducing women. During the 2011 revolution, army personnel for-
cibly removed protestors and subjected numerous women to virginity tests
to terrorize and exclude them from participating in national politics (El
Said, Meari, and Pratt 2015). As many protestors were sleeping in tents in
Tahrir, the regime’s media attempted to delegitimize the protest by spread-
ing rumors about men and women having sex, drinking alcohol, and doing
drugs. In fact, an army general explained in a 2011 CNN interview that
“[T]he arrested women were not like your daughter or mine” (Abouelnaga
2015, 44) effectively justifying the virginity tests as a reasonable (puni-
tive) measure. His statement draws a direct, socially, and politically sanc-
tioned link between women’s morality and politics of respectability and
their mere appearance, and/or their behavior in public space (El Said,
Meari, and Pratt 2015). Virginity tests are the invasive materialization of
the belief that not only is women’s (public) dissent a shame-inducing act
but is an act that signals a complete steering away from socially, politi-
cally, and religiously aligned behavior, such as sexual promiscuity. Sex
and the loss of women’s honor are used to both bring shame and delegiti-
mize political struggles. As much as the virginity tests were a form of
humiliation, they were also a form of political censorship—censorship of
the female body and the female voice in the public and political terrain
(Al-Ali 2012).
There has been a long debate in Muslim societies and scholarship
about whether a woman’s voice is ‘awrah (Yeo 2018). While Egyptian
scholars like Abouelnaga (2016) and Tadros (2016) have translated
‘awrah into the adjective shameful, in Arabic, ‘awrah is a noun, and
nearly impossible to translate accurately into English. ‘Awrah, “used to
denote the parts of the body one should cover from sight, explicitly cre-
ated this link between women’s voices and their sexualized visual bod-
ies as the word came to encompass inappropriate sexuality, whether in
sight or sound” (Yeo 2018, 38).4 So, if something is ‘awrah, then Islam
forbids it, often because of its sexual nature. Most of the debates about
women’s voices as ‘awrah surround singing or reciting Quran, but
politically speaking, conservatives use the ‘awrah argument to discredit,
shame, and censor women when they speak up—just as in Tahrir and
BuSSy (Tadros 2016; Yeo 2018).
In recent contexts of uprisings in Arab and North African countries, a
provocative phrase that counters “a woman’s voice is ‘awrah” has
emerged: “A woman’s voice is a revolution (thawra).” Here is a play on
the original phrase as the Arabic words ‘awrah and thawra rhyme. By
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 119
publicly speaking up about women’s bodies and (shamed) societal gen-
dered experiences, BuSSy’s women both relocate their voices “from the
periphery to the center” and suppress “the patriarchal voice” (Spivak
1987, 107). bell hooks (1989, 219) argues that “confrontational, funda-
mentally rebellious and defiant feminist speech”—and, I add, embodied
resistance—indicate “a change in women’s subordinate status” and are
“essential for the transformation of gender roles, of society that the
exploited and oppressed speak to.” It follows that women talking back to
patriarchal dominance and violence, and turning their voices from ‘awrah
to thawra, challenge gender norms that dictate that women should not
speak up, are not allowed to verbally or physically protest, and belong
only, or mostly, in the private sphere.
I examine BuSSy building on Naber’s (2011, 87) argument that Arab
feminists can “wash [their] dirty laundry in public” and be anti-orientalist.
As an Arab and Egyptian feminist, I resist hegemonic and/or feminist
discourses that reify orientalist frameworks that depict cultures and reli-
gions in the Arab world as having “inherent” practices, for which they
provide no historical and political contexts (Abulhadi, Alsultany, and
Naber 2011, xxxv). In this paper, I explore how BuSSy subverts and coun-
ters a politically, historically, and culturally loaded concept by airing the
dirty laundry of Egyptian society.
AIRING DIRTY LAUNDRY AS A QUEER METHOD OF
FEMINIST COUNTERMEMORLIALIZING/THE ARCHIVE OF
FEELINGS AS COLLECTIVE MEMORY
BuSSy is airing Egypt’s dirty laundry in an act of queering hegemonic
patriarchal narratives. One way to say “air one’s dirty laundry” in
Egyptian Arabic is literally “to make oneself nude in front of people.”5
The phrase means to expose oneself to others and be vulnerable by mak-
ing private issues public. The private here is what normative societal
discourses in Egypt deem inappropriate and shame-inducing: experiences
and emotions that these narratives discourage women and men from dis-
cussing or acknowledging. BuSSy queers those narratives, as the verb “to
queer” means to unsettle heteropatriarchal narratives and ways of being.
Therefore, it can be used in relation to non-LGBTQ people and issues and
to refer to acts that challenge and disrupt normative discourses, institu-
tions, and personal accounts (Moussawi 2020). Queer tactics or strategies
are “practices of negotiating everyday life” regardless of the sexual or
gender identity of those who enact them (Moussawi 2020, 6).
120 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
Through storytelling, in workshops, on stage, Facebook, and their web-
site, BuSSy is airing Egypt’s dirty laundry: a queer act that intentionally
induces discomfort to workshop participants, audiences, and Facebook
followers by featuring uncensored and “shameful” stories. Queer theory
and methods and arguably queer acts “conceptualize discomfort as a pro-
ductive tool for challenging the status quo and inciting social change”
(Connell 2018, 131). Furthermore, storytelling, as Shabayek explains, is a
“coping mechanism to be able to live in [Egypt]” (Fanack 2020):
Storytelling is way of negotiating living within a status quo of daily hard-
ships and perpetual silence around them.
Analyzing BuSSy through the lens of collective memory, I argue that
its queer act of airing Egypt’s dirty laundry enables its feminist counter-
memorializing. Counter-memorializing can be a tool of feminist resist-
ance that confronts and “engage[s] with the hegemonic patriarchal
narrative” (Abouelnaga 2016, 10). One important example Abouelnaga
(2016) uses from the revolution to illustrate how women used memory as
a tool of resistance is the story of Samira Ibrahim, one of many protestors
subjected to virginity tests. While all the other women “chose to resort to
silence,” Ibrahim filed a lawsuit. Ibrahim’s “courage was shockingly sub-
versive in a society that has learnt not to break the silence over the ques-
tion of the female body” (Abouelnaga 2016, 119–20). To create a “new
revolutionary memory” that counters the state-sponsored one, which tried
to delegitimize the women’s presence in sit-ins in Tahrir by revealing their
“non-virginity,” the protestors “merged the female body into the body
politic,” turning the virginity test incidents into a tool of resistance
(Abouelnaga 2016, 120). Several initiatives and organizations published
protest-related harassment testimonies on their websites, turning the per-
sonal into the political to reveal the criminality of sexual harassment,
shattering the myth that “it’s the woman’s fault” (Abouelnaga 2016).
BuSSy’s testimonies break the norm of silence around taboos and
enable new feminist realities. BuSSy is a project of feminist counter-
memoralizing that creates an antinormative collective memory destabiliz-
ing society’s normative and gendered conceptualization of shame and the
state-sponsored discourse around perceived taboos. Like Ibrahim, BuSSy
counters hegemonic discourses by subverting the silence that surrounds
taboos, especially around the female body. BuSSy creates “new spaces of
[counter] discourse” that “rewrite cultural narratives in order to challenge
women’s marginalization within the public sphere” (Sami 2015, 87).
BuSSy as a project of feminist counter-memorializing also illustrates
the limits of patriarchal discourses regarding manhood. Normative soci-
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 121
etal scripts see Egyptian families as “traditional” and burden most men
with the gendered expectation to be the “breadwinner” and the “man of
the house” (El-Kholy 2002, 3). Both men and women define men’s mas-
culinity by their embodiment of these expectations (El-Kholy 2002).
These normative patriarchal scripts reserve vulnerability and being emo-
tional for women, whereas men must be stoic, if not violent (Ghoussoub
and Sinclair-Webb 2000). Supposed “real, heterosexual masculinity” here
is defined relationally to normative characteristics of femininity
(Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb 2000, 13). Indeed, Ghannam (2013, 70)
writes that young men in al-Zawiya al-Hamra, a Cairene low-income
neighborhood, are increasingly “associating masculine identities with
physical strength and muscles” due to “[t]he circulation of discourses and
images that depict desirable bodies.” Instead of embracing a structure that
puts them in a powerful position, through BuSSy, men challenge and
denounce such notions and expose how much it hurts them. Consequently,
these men partake in BuSSy’s feminist social change.
While BuSSy’s archive overflows with feelings of sadness, loneliness,
happiness, empowerment, embarrassment, and pain, among others, shame
is at its center; and the desire to overcome it through airing dirty laundry
is BuSSy’s main driving principle. BuSSy’s workshops, performances,
Facebook page, and website combined are the archive of feelings where
Egyptian women and men’s taboo experiences and feelings are docu-
mented. This archive of feeling serves as an instigator for a feminist cul-
ture challenging judgments and taboos.
METHODS AND DATA
I conducted content analysis of secondary data from various sources.
BuSSy’s website has four main tabs: story archive, performances, work-
shops, and press & media. Under story archive, there are anonymously
submitted stories from 2006 to 2019, navigable by year or “tags.” I ana-
lyzed a total of 100 testimonies under the following tags: beauty standards,
body image, body shaming, female genital mutilation (FGM), gender vio-
lence, hair, harassment, hijab, masculinity, motherhood, social stigma,
virginity, and womanhood. I categorized the performances into women’s
stories, men’s stories, and mixed. When analyzing the workshops, I noted
the location, any partners or sponsors, and targeted participants. On
Facebook, I found a sample of the testimonies and performances from the
website accompanied by images and event posters.
122 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
I analyzed 25 local and international media interviews, articles, and
Op-Eds in English from 2010 through 2020, focusing on BuSSy’s journey,
mission, challenges, received support, performances, and workshops. I
watched, transcribed, and took notes on 41 videos on BuSSy’s YouTube
channel. Thirty-one videos are of members discussing BuSSy’s mission,
journey, and recruitment, workshop and performance processes, perfor-
mance promos, parts of performances and storytelling workshops, and
participants discussing their experiences. Eleven were of news reports and
television and online interviews in Egypt and abroad. I noted the names,
genders, age range, and obvious religious markers of participants, BuSSy
members, and the audience.
Some prominent themes and codes that emerged during data analysis
are audience reaction, participant testimony, performance, class, mission,
topic, social change, censorship, masculinity, and femininity; and key-
words are inappropriate, courage, pain, open up, shame, silenced, support,
safe space, blame, the truth, stigma, feelings, document, taboo, awareness,
and empower.
The only clearly stated demographic datum is that participants range
from 18 to 40 years old. The following information is based on my obser-
vations and sociocultural knowledge as an Egyptian. BuSSy members,
participants, and audience members are women and men, in their twenties
and thirties, whereas the audience ranges in age from late teens to mid-
sixties. BuSSy’s team is mostly women, with at least three male members.
Seven members are Muslim, one is Christian, and the religions of the rest
are unknown. The participants and audience are also religiously diverse.
BuSSy members are middle-class. The participants are just as diverse,
perhaps with a higher presence of the lower middle class.
AIRING ONE’S DIRTY LAUNDRY AND ITS AFFECTIVELY
CONTAGIOUS AFTERMATH
In this section, I build on but diverge from Haghani (2015), who has
previously analyzed Egyptian women’s visibility during revolutions
(1919 and 2011). She sees women’s visibility via different artistic pro-
ductions in material and virtual/visual spaces as a performance that cre-
ates a visual public sphere as a way of asserting public presence. Haghani
(2015, 172) uses BuSSy as an example of such performative visibility
among women as “archival evidence” of a making of a visual public
sphere in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. My analysis demonstrates
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 123
how BuSSy, as a performance art group, has used its storytelling to spur
feminist social change and to archive shamed feelings and experiences
before the revolution.
Mona El-Shimi, a BuSSy veteran, explains the status quo in which
BuSSy operates and how it continually fights the “social fallacy” of
shame:
From the moment we are born we are taught to invalidate our own feelings,
our personal experiences. . . and only accept and communicate what has
been presented to us as “normal.” By not sharing, we each live in the illu-
sion that our personal experience is shameful and that we are alone. As the
mass silence continues, this message of shame keeps getting reinforced and
individuals suffer from extreme self-judgement. It’s very important to
break that silence, challenge that message of shame, and give people a
space to express and listen to the stories of others. It helps individuals heal
and accept themselves, and on a larger scale breaks the social fallacy that’s
imprisoning the masses. (Zaghmout 2015)
El-Shimi explains that common patriarchal narratives dictate that peo-
ple must hide their shameful feelings and personal experiences. She iden-
tifies people’s lack of sharing their experiences as the result of a double
illusion: that these experiences are shameful and rare. As long as “mass
silence continues,” the narrative of shame around these experiences will
persevere, causing people to “suffer” from self-judgment. She recognizes
the importance of people breaking this silence and challenging the
shame(ing) narrative. BuSSy, then, calls for Egyptians to challenge “the
scripts of normative existence” of being alone in and silent about their
shame, because, as Ahmed (2004, 107, emphasis in the original) argues,
shame is “the affective cost of not following the scripts of normative exist-
ence.” Having women and men publicly “sharing their shame” and airing
Egypt’s dirty laundry, they are intentionally disrupting and defying those
normative scripts—a queer act par excellence. The following is an exam-
ple of such disruptive narratives:
I didn’t bleed a lot the first day I got my period, so there were doubts about
whether or not it was actually my period. It was the worst time of my life.
There was talk between my family about waiting till the following day, just
to make sure. Then they took me to get a virginity test. This made me feel
so dirty, and to this day I can’t seem to shake that feeling off. Not to men-
tion the way I was treated with disgust after that, even when I was doing
something as simple as bringing someone a glass of water. And just when
I thought it was all over, I was surprised that I had to go get my genitals cut,
124 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
because I was a grown up now and they were afraid I’d start thinking about
inappropriate things. At the time I was surprised. Why? Because I thought
periods only came once. I didn’t know anything back then; I was only 11.
(BuSSy 2019c)
BuSSy is an archive of feelings that centers its storytelling around the
affective experiences of its storytellers’ shame. Shabayek speaks of her
hope of BuSSy “remov[ing] shame and stigma from stories” and people
“talking about issues openly and honestly, and stop[ping] this policy of
hiding [their] dirty laundry” (Elkamel 2016). Like El-Shimi, Shabayek
identifies shame and stigma as the reasons people are not freely discussing
their experiences and argues that it is BuSSy’s goal to “remove” these two
negative associations from their stories, allowing them to air their dirty
laundry.
BuSSy’s goal is not shifting the locus of shame from individuals to
society, but “creat[ing] a safe-space that is free of judgment where the
shame around the stories is released, hold[ing] space for participants to
express themselves and heal” (BuSSy 2018c). Participants in BuSSy’s
videos express initial difficulty and unease discussing their painful per-
sonal experiences, but say they felt safe and comfortable. They cherished
speaking without judgment, tone policing, or interruption; they felt a need
to know they were not alone in their experiences. Shabayek elaborates
that storytelling, while hard at first, eventually replaces the storytellers’
weakness, vulnerability, and shame with empowerment (CNN 2015). As
Nancy, a participant in her thirties, says, “[N]ow I am ready to share so
that all of the world can hear me, to hear that some people say ah”6
(BuSSy 2015).
BuSSy members Dina Abdelnabi and Rasha Sultan reveal further sig-
nificance to BuSSy’s storytelling. Abdelnabi says most Egyptians “statis-
tically” learn about and think of the issues that concern BuSSy (BBC
Arabic 2017). Storytelling, Abdelnabi argues, introduces listeners to the
emotions and perspectives of those affected; consequently, “the recipient
doesn’t listen to the story like it’s a number but a personal experience,”
more effectively creating empathy and awareness (BBC Arabic 2017).
Furthermore, Sultan identifies how BuSSy incites social change—one
person, one story at a time—by explaining that “storytelling is conta-
gious” (BBC Arabic 2017). Haghani (2015, 171) argues that Egyptian
women’s artistic public visibility establishes social relations between the
artists themselves and their audiences and has “the power of becoming
contagious among women” in different settings. BuSSy expands Haghani’s
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 125
argument, demonstrating that storytelling is contagious among men, non-
artists, even outside revolutionary times. Shabayek gives an example of
this contagion within BuSSy’s activities:
At the beginning, people say they won’t share or that they’ll tell the story
to me only. Then like 3 weeks before the performance, a woman would
come and say “Remember the story I told you and said I’d share it with you
only? And I asked you not to document it.” I say yes. She tells me “I’m
going to tell it on stage. . .I want to share it. I see [the others] sharing their
stories and I see how it makes a difference. I can see their emotions and
how things change inside of them. I want to go through the same experi-
ence. I want to overcome [the story] and share it with people and it’s impor-
tant for me that they know this happens.” (BuSSy 2018b)
Storytelling, then, is not only contagious, it is affectively contagious.
This participant’s main instigation to tell her story is her desire to
become courageous enough, like her colleagues, to overcome its emo-
tional burden. The desire for storytelling is not solely self-serving; for
others like this woman, it is a deliberate spreading of awareness of cer-
tain issues. The vector of storytelling spreads the dual contagions of
one’s need and desire to tell their story and the awareness/knowledge
which it produces. Indeed, as Shabayek explains “storytelling can be
used as a tool for social empowerment” (Women’s Learning Partnership
2014). Storytelling empowers tellers and listeners through creating
“affective experiences,” which form “the basis for new cultures” or a
feminist one (Cvetkovich 2003, 7).
The affective contagion of storytelling also occurs after workshops and
performances. Abdelnabi explains that “participants stay in touch with
one another and sometimes they try to create their own little BuSSy in
their governorate” (BuSSy 2018a). BuSSy, then, makes an impact beyond
the spatial and temporal bounds of its own activities as participants
become keen on storytelling and strive to continue feeling relieved,
empowered, and courageous. Furthermore, in performance settings,
BuSSy members say that men would frequently approach them after
women’s experiences performances and tell them they were not aware of
these issues, or of women’s perspectives on/emotions about them. Abd
Allah explains “that when people hear these stories from their friends or
from people who care about these issues, this starts a discussion around. . .
taboo topics that people on the street say don’t exist” (BuSSy 2018b).
Therefore, a BuSSy participant or audience member can start a discussion
within their social circle, causing this feminist consciousness-raising to
126 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
slowly spread across space, time, and social groups.
Women Airing Their Dirty Laundry
Women storytellers expose and critique restrictive and abusive prac-
tices that dictate normative notions of femininity/womanhood. This act of
public critique is in itself a non-normative act by Egyptian women
because they shift their voice from a silenced and shameful ‘awrah to a
confrontational thawra. Throughout BuSSy’s operation, harassment has
been the dominant theme in women’s stories. This is unsurprising, given
that 99.3% of Egyptian women have experienced some form of sexual
harassment (Tadros 2016). Shabayek explains that in 2006–2007, a public
conversation and awareness about harassment started causing “three quar-
ters of the stories [to be]. . .about [different kinds of] harassment from
different places, [and] different classes” (Dreams TV Channel 2010)—in
2014 most stories were still about harassment.
BuSSy’s feminist consciousness-raising about harassment makes space
for other interrelated issues. The social and legal/political hegemonic
patriarchal narrative in Egypt blames and shames women for both being
harassed and speaking up against it, and until recently did not acknowl-
edge harassment occurs—the government did not identify and criminalize
harassment until 2014. Thus, BuSSy was a much-needed space for women
to share their harassment experiences, illustrating its strategy of feminist
counter-memorializing women’s marginalized everyday experiences. It
demonstrates BuSSy’s “active remembering” against society’s and the
government’s “active forgetting” (Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2002, 129);
not only does this counter “hegemonic cultural memory” (125), but also
legal and political memory.
The harassment example demonstrates how BuSSy’s airing Egypt’s
dirty laundry leads to feminist consciousness-raising and community
building. Dominant discourses on Egyptian women’s lives ignore or do not
accurately reflect their lived experiences, especially as they relate to their
affective experiences of shame. Shabayek recounts instances when women
watching harassment monologues would tell her “I discovered when I
heard this story that I was also harassed” (Elkamel 2016). Regardless of the
topic, the most common feedback BuSSy gets from the audience is “I
thought it was just me” (BBC Arabic 2017). This lack of public discussion
about harassment (and other issues) has left some women isolated in their
experiences. Clearly, BuSSy’s storytelling documents and raises awareness
about women’s otherwise hidden affective experiences.
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 127
BuSSy has organized performances concerning an array of women-
related experiences. The 2013 Look at Her at the Rawabet Theater in
Cairo featured daily experiences of two women like harassment, enforced
dress code, gender discrimination at home and work, and abusive relation-
ships. The 2016 Mademoiselle or Madame? at the French Cultural
Institute in Cairo featured stories about how women’s marital status
affects how society views and treats them. The 2017 Supposedly Married
at the German Goethe Institute in Cairo featured stories of women from
Bulaq, a working-class neighborhood, who frequent the Center for
Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance because they were subjected to sex
trafficking or domestic violence and had to leave their homes. These per-
formances serve a sample of many others and of the violence, gendered
social pressures and normative scripts that many Egyptian women live
and experience, which are rarely/not sufficiently discussed in private or
public spaces.
Women airing their dirty laundry is a form of “talking back” to control-
ling images. “Talking back,” as hooks (1989) argues, and the mere “act of
speaking” can be acts of empowering feminist resistance when being
silent and submissive is synonymous with being a woman in a heteropa-
triarchal society. With their voice no longer silent or ‘awrah, the women
of BuSSy speak up about and talk back to shaming narratives, restricting
gendered expectations, respectability politics, and violence against
women. With their voice being thawra, they “protest” against being
silenced, against the injustices they endure, and against their supposed
scandalous shame. This, I argue, empowers women and alters the defini-
tion of femininity/womanhood and women’s normative gendered position
in Egypt.
BuSSy subverts the silence around the female body as female bodies
air dirty laundry about the socially and politically shamed female body in
BuSSy’s various outlets. While women’s bodies are central sites of dis-
pute and control in times of sociopolitical change (El Said, Meari, and
Pratt 2015), here BuSSy is the one to publicize and centralize women’s
bodies to trigger sociopolitical change. Using FGM, or khitan, as an
example, I argue that BuSSy uses “shamed” female bodies and voices to
bring about change, disrupting normative notions of femininity, and gen-
der power relations. Khitan is a procedure many Egyptian girls must for-
cibly undergo to fit into the social constructions of being a wife/woman
and of the female body (El-Kholy 2002). Only a tamed female body is
suitable for marriage, sex, and respectable womanhood, and ensures a
man’s satisfaction and approval.
128 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
Women-embodied refusal of shame around the female body subverts
hegemonic discourses and practices about them, through the affective
storytelling of a female body shamelessly airing dirty laundry about
female-bodied experiences. In a 2014 anonymous testimony on BuSSy’s
Facebook page ahead of an anti-khitan campaign, a woman shares: “I took
the piece that got cut from me and went to the canal and said ‘God please
take this piece so I can get married when I grow up.’”7 In another example
in an in-house storytelling session, Zahraa Abd Allah, a BuSSy member
tells the story of how her extended family came to watch her khitan like
it was a happy occasion; she says “All I know is that a part of body was
taken from me against my will” (BuSSy 2019b). BuSSy’s storytelling
illustrates the uses of feminism as a politics of social change, without
reproducing Orientalist narratives. In highlighting vaginas as a site of
violence, BuSSy’s women challenge a patriarchal structure that mutilates
women’s bodies, perceiving their bodies and voices as ‘awrah. BuSSy
takes the female body center stage as a “strategic use of culture” causing
the deconstruction of the private/public binary (Spivak 1987, 103).
Men Airing Their Dirty Laundry
Breaking the silence and shame around Egyptian men’s feelings and
experiences, BuSSy disrupts normative patriarchal discourses of man-
hood and masculinity. I can’t show any feelings. The only feeling that’s
accepted is anger. I can’t show sadness. I can’t show weakness—this is
what Egyptian society expects from men, according to BuSSy member
Shady Khalil (Ontv 2015). This is why Khalil was surprised when men
flocked to BuSSy’s storytelling workshops in 2010; he says “many men
turned out to have been eager to unveil their stories” (Talaat 2015, empha-
sis added). Khalil’s words illustrate that it is rare for Egyptian men to
share their taboo experiences, making themselves vulnerable as they
reveal that they have (uncomfortable) feelings.
BuSSy has organized performances with a focus on societal percep-
tions of masculinity and men’s experiences. For example, the 2014 Way
to Go, Monster: Experiences and Imaginations about Manhood in
Egyptian Society8 featured women and men performers. Get a Pair was a
2017 performance of stories of 14 young men—performed by 8 of them—
from Ezbet Al-Hagana, a Cairo informal settlement. No stories from these
performances are available but these testimonies from BuSSy’s archive
most likely resemble ones from the performances: “Hit back who hits you,
don’t be a faggot”9; “I was never allowed to cry or show any signs of
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 129
weakness”10; “I consider the statement ‘you’re a man’ a punishment
because it has confined me to a certain way of life.”11 These clearly illus-
trate society’s gendered and patriarchal burdensome expectations of men;
if a man does not act or look like a “man,” he loses privileges. Society’s
normative values dictate that non-normative qualities and behaviors bring
shame.
BuSSy airs dirty laundry about violence against men’s bodies. Khalil
performed a man’s gang rape experience testimony at 10 years old at
Forced, a 2016 performance about rape and sexual violence against
women and men at Goethe. Khalil comments on this testimony:
the fact that there’s a testimony of a guy who was raped and is talking about
it is a rare thing. . . it’s very brave that this person shares that and shows
his vulnerability. Because the way people see it, this takes away from his
masculinity, which is what prevents a lot of guys from talking about their
experiences with rape. (BuSSy 2017)
Egyptian society refuses to acknowledge that men can be victims of
rape because it takes away from their manhood. Therefore, it requires
men’s vulnerability to expose such taboo experiences and disrupt the
silence around male victimhood. BuSSy as a queer affective archive ena-
bles Egyptian men to shift the shame from themselves onto patriarchal
masculinity, making a clear statement that they do not subscribe to norma-
tive discourses on gender. By giving men space to share their shamed
experiences, BuSSy reveals to the public that not all men condone “patri-
archal masculinity,” offering a “a new strateg[y] where feminist masculin-
ity thrives” (hooks 2000, 70–71).
BuSSy is also a space for men’s confessions and expression of guilt
regarding their violence against women. Consider this 2019 confession on
BuSSy’s Facebook page: “Yes, I am a sexual harasser and I’ve touched a
woman without her consent, and I have woken up and realized what I did
in that moment.”12 Such confessions strengthen BuSSy’s counter-memo-
rializing of sexual harassment narratives and victim blaming. They stand
in contrast to earlier men’s testimonies, as the confessor did indeed do
something shameful. However, they both contribute to feminist social
change where men challenge and criticize men’s patriarchal treatment of
women (hooks 2000). I contend that both narratives discard shame’s
inherent femaleness. To illustrate my argument further, consider this tes-
timony performed by Khalil in Way to Go Monster: “They taught me that
a girl’s honor is her virginity and a boy doesn’t have virginity and doesn’t
have honor.”13
130 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
This testimony reveals the assumed inherent femaleness of honor and
shame. This gendering of shame frames womanhood as inherently
shameful and manhood and shame as mutually exclusive, and limits
honor to women’s virginity. Hasan (2002, 6) explains that in Arab soci-
eties male honor is “active” and determined by things like “achieve-
ments, courage, generosity, class standing, social status and family
origin” (5). Male honor can be diminished or increased by acquiring
more wealth, for example. Female honor, however, is ascribed and can-
not be achieved or increased. Due to its passivity, it can only be lost; it
is solely determined by women’s sexual behavior and purity. In the
testimony, the man was taught not to worry about losing his honor
because he does not have virginity to lose, as honor is tied only to
women’s virginity. Hasan (2002) explains that Arab men indeed have
honor, but as his testimony shows, it is not tied to their sexual behavior.
Therefore, while men’s honor can be lost and may cause shame, it can
be restored, reinstating men’s shame-free status. Honor restoration is
unattainable for women, however, making it impossible for them to un-
stick shame. Consequently, men, unlike women, in Arab societies, need
not worry about bringing shame to themselves or their family because
they can always counter it by honorable actions. BuSSy shatters the
myth that shame is female by revealing that men experience shame as
they expose their emotions and pain—as they declare they, too, need an
outlet for their emotions, as they too have been shamed into silence.
BuSSy’s queering of normative discourses around shame, manhood, and
masculinity makes feminist men and gives them the knowledge and
power to challenge patriarchal norms in their daily lives.14
BETWEEN ACCEPTANCE AND CENSORSHIP: NEGOTIATING
TRUTHS FOR FEMINIST SOCIAL CHANGE
BuSSy consistently negotiates how much dirty laundry to air as it
navigates the tension between Egyptian society’s and the state’s accept-
ance and censorship. BuSSy encountered government censorship for the
first time in 2010 when it expanded its activities outside of AUC (El-Shimi
2012). Several cultural centers refused to host BuSSy’s annual perfor-
mance because of its content or because it lacked a censorship permit
(Dean 2015). BuSSy ended up using a stage in an outdoor café at the
state-owned Cairo Opera House (COH) (Dean 2015). Following the rules,
and, as Shabayek describes BuSSy, being “naïve,” BuSSy submitted its
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 131
script to the Ministry of Culture’s Censorship Body (MCCB) to obtain a
permit (Dean 2015). Shabayek explains,
Of course, we gave them a script that was different from the one we were
going to perform. I took out a lot of stories but still they censored it. . .
there was a conversation in which one character says to the other, “I want
to sleep with a woman” and then his friend says, “I want to sleep with one
too.” And they censored it out so it became “I want. . .” and his friend
would respond, “I also want . . .” (Dean 2015)
BuSSy knew its original script would be denied. Unsurprisingly, the
MCCB trimmed much of their already self-censored script, including any
mention of premarital sex. Its rationale, according to Shabayek, is that
“they are protecting the artists. . .there are so many laws on what [artists]
can say and not say in public relating to morality, religion . . . etc. If the
censors don’t censor the works, artists could face serious charges and
prison sentences” (El-Shimi 2012 ).
Criticism and audience backlash are a form of social censorship: they
silence oppositional narratives by pushing against them and questioning
their validity. On their first night at the COH, due to the controversial
content (incest, sexual harassment, male impotence, and premarital sex),
some audience members filed complaints because the performance
offended them (El-Shimi 2012). The next day “the morality police, the
tourism police, State Security and the censorship body” visited BuSSy to
ensure they performed the censored script. In response, BuSSy mimed the
censored parts, sending a message to the MCCB and audience that they
refuse censorship and would rather make a statement through their queer
performances, which subverted this very censorship (El-Shimi 2012).
Due to state- and privately owned venues’ censorship, BuSSy began
performing only at venues that do not require a permit or reviewing their
scripts (Shabayek 2015). This made it increasingly difficult to find venues
(Fanack 2020). In 2015, Shabayek described the Townhouse Rawabet
Theatre as “the only accessible, affordable and free and open space in
Cairo where you can actually give a proper theatre performance” (CNN
2015); the authorities raided it later that year, and it now requires a censor-
ship permit. Nevertheless, in Cairo, BuSSy has been able to operate in
places such as its main office in downtown, the French Cultural Center,
and Dawar, an arts and well-being organization. Outside Cairo, it uses co-
working spaces, rents event halls, local NGOs, and cultural centers.
BuSSy paradoxically encountered further social censorship and over-
whelming acceptance. In March 2012, Shabayek and El-Shimi (2012)
132 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
took part in an art-in-public-space project where they performed mono-
logues about the taboos of women speaking up and using profanity,
divorce, domestic violence, and sexual harassment in the Cairo metro
women-only car. A shocked woman in a niqab appears in a 2013 video
saying “oh my God. . . how scandalous! Where is the metro security!. . .
I don’t understand what’s happening!” A younger woman is then heard
saying “they are women. . .talking about our issues, so shut up” (BuSSy
2013). The first woman tried to hit Shabayek, causing her and El-Shimi to
flee, getting away with their performance (CNN 2015). In another instance
of acceptance, more than half of the audience in Aswan in 2017 partici-
pated in an open-mic session that lasted more than an hour after a perfor-
mance by women and men concerning harassment, the hijab, masculinity,
women at work and in public (BuSSy 2019a). Furthermore, several
organizations have partnered with BuSSy to hold workshops and/or per-
formances, such as the British Council, Center for Egyptian Women’s
Legal Assistance, and the Egyptian Media-arts for Development, and the
NGO Nazra for Feminist Studies.
As the director, Shabayek must balance pushing the boundaries enough
to make social change without endangering the project or team, making
self-censorship a constant battle (Elkamel 2016). BuSSy believes that to
convey reality as truthfully as possible, all stories should be told, includ-
ing profanity and culturally inappropriate content. Unfortunately, BuSSy
is not always able to practice this. El-Shimi explains that
self-censorship is an act of negotiation. . .if I self-censor, then I don’t give
the full truth but I’m more likely to be listened to, but if I don’t self-censor
and I give the full truth, I won’t be listened to at all. (Shabayek 2015)
For example, BuSSy does not feature stories of LGBTQ people because
it would endanger the team.15 Sometimes, however, BuSSy tries to see
with how much it can get away. In 2015, Five Hundreds, a performance
about teenage challenges, was canceled four hours before the show time
at the COH due to “inappropriate” language and content. Talking about
the rehearsal, Shabayek (2015) says “not only were we talking about mas-
turbation; one of the characters actually said the word on stage.” This led
BuSSy to opt for private venues. In Port Said and Assiut, BuSSy asked the
audience whether they preferred the censored or uncensored version, both
audiences chose the latter. Not without a price, however; Shabayek (2015)
writes “after the Assiut performance bystanders and people who had been
present in the venue during the show but didn’t come to watch it, directly
and indirectly threatened the team.” Shabayek describes BuSSy’s journey
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 133
as a political battle because anything that “creates any form of resistance”
is political (Dean 2015). Living under a regime restricting artistic free
expression (Fahim and Ismail 2015), Shabayek knows BuSSy could be
“unceremoniously killed at any time” (Elkamel 2016).
CONCLUSION
Using BuSSy’s case, a performance art group that identifies as a move-
ment and is registered as an NGO, I provide the Egyptian historical,
political, and cultural context to analyze how shame operates in intersec-
tion with gender, sexuality, and state and social censorship. By narrating
“shameful” stories of women and men, BuSSy airs Egypt’s dirty laundry
in workshops, on stage and online. This is an act of queering dominant
discourses around normative femininity/womanhood and masculinity/
manhood that enables feminist counter-memorializing. BuSSy becomes
an archive of feelings through this counter-memorializing—by document-
ing and publicly sharing “shameful” stories. Through storytelling’s affec-
tive contagion, BuSSy’s feminist consciousness-raising efforts spread
awareness about the inner workings of patriarchy and how it perpetuates
itself (hooks 2000). They also propel new antihegemonic subjective
knowledges and narratives, creating feminist social change (Vargas-
Monroy 2012). In addition, in this paper, I explain how BuSSy’s storytell-
ing is at the “juncture of the personal, individual, female body, silence and
public, social, body politic, and memory” and how it exposes the silence
around men’s shamed vulnerabilities and victimhood (Abouelnaga 2016,
125–26).
With this paper, I contribute to the literature on feminist activism in
Egypt by highlighting a case that started before the revolution. By theoriz-
ing BuSSy as a feminist-knowledge producer, I add to transnational lit-
erature on testimony-based social justice initiatives. This paper joins other
scholars (Ghannam 2013, 4) in countering the “disembodiment” of Arab
and North African men in Western scholarship and media. I do so by
focusing not on hegemonic masculinity but on how normative scripts use
shame to define manhood and by moving away from orientalist studies
that cast Arabs as shame-ridden, with a heavy reliance solely on “culture”
as the shaming source. In addition, I focus on embodiment and affect,
contributing to scholarship that investigates emotions’ place and impor-
tance in the public sphere and “the debate on how feelings work towards
social good” (Gorton 2007, 334) and emphasizing shame as a locus of
134 GENDER & SOCIETY/February 2022
inquiry to investigate its productivity. Like Ahmed (2004), I investigate
“what emotions do and how they circulate”; however, I do so by focusing
on shame and analyzing its gendered and sociopolitical construction
(Gorton 2007, 339). This contributes to transnational literature on shame
as it reveals the intricacies of its gendering in Egypt and how recognizing
its silencing power and subversion spurs feminist social change.
This study suggests that further research is needed into the inner work-
ings, concessions, and influence of Egyptian feminist non–policy-oriented
organizations and research collectives, why they were founded, and
whether they have strategies to appease the state or evade its censorship.
Further research into the role of Egyptian men in recent feminist initia-
tives is also warranted.
ORCID iD
Nehal Elmeligy https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7262-2077
NOTES
1. See Hasan (2002) for the interconnectedness between ‘aib/inappropriate
and ‘ar.
2. را يد ا يد
3. Albeit being common beliefs, they are not generalizable to all Egyptian
women.
4. In common (but contested) Quran interpretations, a woman’s body is
‘awrah except her face, hands, and feet. Men’s ‘awrah is between their navel and
knees. Both should cover their ‘awrah and only reveal it to their spouses (Hélie
and Hoodfar 2012, ix).
5. سا ما ي
6. Expression of pain.
7. See Image 1 in the Online Appendix.
8. See Image 2 in the Online Appendix.
9. See Image 3 in the Online Appendix.
10. See Image 4 in the Online Appendix.
11. See Image 5 in the Online Appendix.
12. See Image 6 in the Online Appendix.
13. See Image 7 in the Online Appendix.
14. See Image 8 in the Online Appendix.
15. See Human Rights Watch (2020).
Elmeligy / AIRING EGYPT’S DIRTY LAUNDRY 135
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Nehal Elmeligy is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology minoring
in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. She earned her MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio in 2018. Her first publication, based
on her MA research, entitled “Making a Scene: Young Women’s Feminist
Social Nonmovement in Cairo” is published in the Journal of Resistance
Studies.
