Representations of Egyptian women after the revolution in Local vs. Western discourses

Introduction: Post-colonial feminists have highlighted the tendency in the West to constitute the “other” woman as oppressed and in radical opposition to the “Western” liberated woman. Egyptian women as part of the larger category of the “Arab woman” are often the objects of such discourses. On the one hand, the emergence of women during the Egyptian revolution, in both Local and Western media, as an integral part of the mass movement that drove the Egyptian revolution, challenge these preconceptions of the other woman as passive, oppressed, and traditional. On the other hand, various accounts of the victimization of women in the post-revolutionary regime work to reinforce the image of the third world woman victim. Research Question: Given these contradictory representations of Egyptian women, this paper aims to investigate how different discourses construct Egyptian women in both Western and Local media in the aftermath of the revolution. Methods: English articles were selected from two US magazines; Foreign Policy and Newsweek, whereas Arabic articles were selected from to Egyptian magazines, October and Al-Ahram. The resulting articles were analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis. Findings: This thesis finds that women are represented as racially and sexually inferior to Western women in Western discourse. By contrast, in Local discourse this thesis finds the representation of women’s agency and the expression of resistance to Western hegemonic discourses on the Egyptian woman. It also situates Egyptian women at the intersection of both gender and nationalism