The Labor Strikes That Catalyzed the Revolution in Egypt Page 1 of 9 PRINTED FROM NYU Press SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.nyu.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of NYU Press Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in NYSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Illinois at Chicago; date: 07 July 2021 Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring Rita Stephan and Mounira M. Charrad Print publication date: 2020 Print ISBN-13: 9781479846641 Published to NYU Press Scholarship Online: January 2021 DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479846641.001.0001 The Labor Strikes That Catalyzed the Revolution in Egypt Nadine Naber DOI:10.18574/nyu/9781479846641.003.0003 Abstract and Keywords Nadine Naber accounts for the ways everyday life engagements with multiple structures of oppression underlined the conditions and the grievances that inspired the participation of many of the women in the Egyptian revolution. She explains how the women workers’ struggles that emerged in 2005 coincided with the struggles against gender injustice. She also relates gender- based demands to broader struggles such as racial justice, anti-imperialism, and anti- authoritarianism and warns against the potential dangers of attaching lesser value to different forms of oppression during different time periods. Keywords: Nadine Naber, anti-imperialism, anti-authoritarianism, racial justice, women workers’ struggle Two kinds of stories have been consolidated as predominant representations of women’s activism within the Egyptian revolution in both dominant US and Egyptian corporate media discourses: (1) stories about how Egyptian women activists rose up to fight sexual harassment; and (2) stories about how Egyptian women mobilized en masse only to be pushed out of political participation afterwards (Naber and Said 2016). Mona Ezzat, labor organizer and human rights activist, points out that both cases reify the Western fixation on Egyptian women as if there is no broader context or political struggle (beyond “sexism”) shaping their activism. All too often, she notes, it was as if outside commentators were exclaiming, “‘Wow, the women of Egypt!’ without any discussion of why they came to protest. We need a true understanding of the reality of women’s lives and what brought them out to the street en masse. … I’m stunned by this fixation” (Ezzat 2013). Ezzat’s critique reflects the limitations of the liberal feminist lens that shapes dominant US and Egyptian discourses about Egyptian women’s activism, as though their activism is simply a response to sexism. These discourses have assumed that women activists and protesters rose up to fight either against sexual violence enacted by Egyptian men or for equal political participation in official and unofficial politics. Meanwhile, these dominant stories relegate to the background the demands of the revolution for which women risked their lives—bread, dignity,