La place Tahrir, dans le centre-ville du Caire, apparaît comme la scène incontournable des mobilisations qui ont secoué l’Egypte au début de l’année 2011 et acculé Hosni Mubarak à quitter le pouvoir. On en oublierait presque le reste de la ville, immense, qui a été traversé durant cette même période, par des dynamiques qui ont donné naissance à des phénomènes inédits, dont les « comités populaires » font partie. Pour faire face au retrait calculé des forces de police et à la peur provoquée par les récits réels ou fantasmés – de violences urbaines, les habitants et habitantes du Caire s’organisent. D’abord de manière spontanée, puis de plus en plus « professionnelle », des centaines de « comités populaires », ou lijân sha’abeya, vont pendant plus de trois semaines, assurer la sécurité dans les différents quartiers du Caire. Ces « brigades » civiles, grâce à une étude réalisée à partir des discours de ceux et celles qui les ont incarnées, se révèlent être des exemples uniques d’organisation collective spontanée, supports d’alliances improbables et d’affirmations identitaires – spatiales et sexuées. Loin de l’épicentre de la révolution, dans l’espace familier des quartiers et l’intime des maisons, sur des scènes moins médiatisées, d’autres acteurs et actrices ont contribué à « faire » l’Histoire.
January 2011, Egypt: a huge revolutionary movement began. Since this moment, the perception of insecurity has clearly increased among the upper class. This feeling of vulnerability has opened the doors to new market opportunities related to personal security. In charming neighborhoods of Cairo, offers of self-defense training for women flourished. These training classes offer a valuable and fascinating ethnographic field for addressing the way emotional narratives shape social mobilizations. In class, selfdefense participants confirm their shared social belonging while expressing feelings of anxiety in specific terms. Through the Egyptian case, I illustrate that anxiety constitutes a relevant analytical tool to better understand the social and emotional dynamics playing out in revolutionary societies.
B ased on ethnographical work in Cairo in women's self-defense classes, this paper focuses on the stakes involved in discourse about feminine violence, as well as the differentiated and hierarchically-ordered forms of legitimacy connected to it. The male and female protagonists in my ield frame this violence discursively, deining its "normal" mode of occurrence. Their comments on the subject will be treated here as discourses shaped in part by power issues, and which shed light on social and gendered orders, as well as on certain shifts within the gender system, connected to the revolutionary period. What frameworks make women's use of violence intelligible? How are the acceptable modes of its occurrence and representation deined? Different modes of narration (« mise en récit »-see Cardi & Pruvost, 2011) will be identiied. Working-class violence, monstrous violence, violence under supervision, masculinizing violence, spectacular violence or "revolutionary" violence are among the narratives drawn out from the speech of self-defense students and teachers; these narratives make women's violence intelligible but also constrain it. For each person, social position, sex and marital status determine the scope of possible and impossible violence, conirming that the social order is inextricably tied into the gendered order. The identiication of these narratives and how they are translated through local referents, allows us to consider broader inquiry into representations of women's violence in Egypt.
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