"Today I Have Seen Angels in Shape of Humans": An Emotional History of the Egyptian Revolution Through the Narratives of Female Personal Bloggers

Abstract

This article examines the intertwinings between emotion and political protest in the 2011 Egyptian revolution through the narratives of Egyptian female personal bloggers. Drawing from scholarship in the emotional turn of social movement theory and using Deborah Gould's concept of emotional habitus, it aims at describing the dominant social moods at different moments of the revolutionary process, in order to address how these emotions fostered or, on the contrary, inhibited protest for social change. For this purpose, the article considers personal blogs as a modified form of Lauren Berlant's intimate publics, alternative spaces through which affect circulates and a shared understanding of reality is constructed. Through qualitative content analysis of 11 personal blogs written by Egyptian women, the article tracks the different emotional habitus through their narratives. It will shed light on how a pre-revolutionary mood of frustration and resignation gave way, after the revelation of Khaled Said's murder by the police and the success of the Tunisian revolution, to an emotional habitus characterized by hope that opened a political horizon of change and culminated in Mubarak's resignation after 18 days of protest. Once the regime was toppled, however, the personal discourses published in the selected blogs testify to how the economic difficulties and the political instability of the reconstruction time contributed to modify the euphoric mood of the uprisings and turn it into an affective state of frustration and disappointment.