ABSTRACT

This feminist, qualitative study relies on in-depth interviews with dozens of young Arab women activists in an attempt to give them a “voice” (Sahar Khamis 2004, 2010), through enabling them to tell the stories of how they participated in the Arab revolutions in their own words. This is especially important since women have historically been underrepresented in the public sphere, where male voices and perspectives have dominated. As one self-identified feminist activist in the women’s movement since the 1950s observed: “we women have always been defined bymen” (Nadje S. Al-Ali 2000). Thus, there is value in women’s narration of their own experiences. The “power of women is in their stories,” as Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy put it; “they are not theories,

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they are real lives that, thanks to social networks, we are able to share and exchange” (Radsch 2012a, p. 31).