"Women have built a presence in the revolutionary aspirations of the Arab world"

VSIs a young woman, dressed in jeans and a sweater, with short hair, who climbs on a railing and starts to harangue the crowd in Tunis, on January 8, 2011; it’s an elderly lady talking to a soldier at a roadblock in central Beirut, and sneering at her like she would do for her own children in the early days of the October 2019 revolution; she is a woman beaten and stripped by the security forces in the streets of Cairo, on December 17, 2011, and whose blue bra becomes the symbol of violence against women; it is the workers of the Egyptian spinning and weaving company who go on strike and are supported by the young revolutionaries; it was the mothers who opened the series of street mobilisations in Libya in 2011, these mothers of thousands of prisoners who died in detention who came to stand before the Benghazi court with portraits of their sons; it is, obviously, the Iraqi women left in dozens of demonstrations on February 13 under the slogan "Banatek ya watan" (Your daughters, oh country!).

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They came out, sometimes also out of their hinges. They have suffered, as much as men, from repression. They hoist themselves up, speak loudly, shout, sing too. Their names have sometimes reached us; sometimes they remained anonymous.

Strong symbols

They also organized large women's demonstrations, in Tunisia and Egypt for the first March 8 after the dictatorship, but also before, in Bahrain or Syria, finding ways to come together without exposing themselves by organizing demonstrations at the inside the houses which they filmed carefully and posted on networks, or directly confronting the police, armed with stones and Molotov cocktails.

"In Egypt, it is the issues of sexual harassment that are at the heart of an unprecedented mobilization, targeting the practices of the police who carry out" virginity tests "on the activists"

There remained strong symbols, which build a history of revolutionary women in the Arab world, and paradigmatic struggles for the integrity of the body, for autonomy and for strength.

In Tunisia, feminists mobilize very early to ensure that the revolution is also an opportunity to reopen the issue of women's rights, and that the legitimate and democratic accession of Islamists to power is not a step backwards for them . In Egypt, it is questions of sexual harassment that are at the heart of an unprecedented mobilization, targeting the practices of the police who carry out “virginity tests” on the activists, or those of militias infiltrated in the demonstrations which surround women and rape them.

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