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Race, Culture, and Identity

The Use of Political Motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring Uprising and Aftermath

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Political motherhood, which uses traditional motherhood to mobilize and sustain
women’s political participation, is understudied in political science. Women played a
significant role in Egypt’s Arab Spring and its aftermath by “bargaining with
patriarchy” and strategically using traditional motherhood to access the political
sphere. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument based on the work of
Gentry, Carreon and Moghadam and Amar. We illustrate it with examples drawn
from news articles on women’s political activism and social media posts by Egyptian
activists. Our argument explores how women’s agency and the larger political
context in which women operate reveals how political motherhood takes the
particular shape that it does. In the context of Egypt, we examine how the state’s
choice to highlight women as “hypervisible” citizens, worthy of protection, backfired.
Through a bottom-up political motherhood, women used their respectability as
mothers in need of state protection against the state, thereby legitimizing anti-
Mubarak and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and challenging these
governments.

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English
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Subject(s)
Revolution
Motherhood
Egypt
political
Activism
Women’s political
Arab Spring
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Article
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