Graffiti narratives: securitization, beautification, and gender in 25 January Revolution Cairo

Abstract

The article focuses on the corner of Mohamed Mahmoud Street and Youssef El-Gendy Street in Cairo, Egypt, to examine the gendered and classed underpinnings of urban processes of securitization, privatization, and beautification during the 25 January Revolution, notably following the 2013 military coup. This particular intersection was the scene of many of the protests that ultimately led to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011. Throughout the revolutionary process, its walls became a contested site of representation through, on the one hand, graffiti engaging the revolution along the fault lines of gender and class and, on the other hand, its periodical whitewashing by public and private campaigns. Taking up visual cultural production as a primary site of analysis, the article draws on visual ephemera written on this corner between 2011 and 2017, online debates about these changes, and interviews with some of their protagonists to discuss the significance of this place in relation to questions of access to and control of public/private urban spaces, and memory. Adopting a feminist perspective that foregrounds gender and class as the main categories of analysis, it focuses on two particular moments—WOW Unchained in 2015 and Calligraphy Nefertiti in 2017— to investigate the transformation of this area through the erasure of the traces of the revolution via public/private beautification projects articulated around transnational discourses of women’s empowerment and neoliberal notions of gender and class respectability, and its implications for Egyptians’ access to public space in post-coup Cairo.