This article will examine the activism of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, or the “nude Egyptian blogger,” to reflect on the pause that naked bodies insert into civic life and to evaluate nudity as means of protest in Egyptian as well as transnational feminist politics. By “making visible what had no business being seen,” to quote Jacques Rancière, Elmahdy’s nude body reconfigures the body politic and reimagines the theater of the political. Her activism incorporates two distinct phases. Elmahdy initially launched her nude body into the blogosphere to mark the Arab revolutions as a highly sexualized topography. By elevating gender and sexuality to the forefront of local and global geopolitical conversations, Elmahdy brought sex to Tahrir Square, or underscored its primacy there. Her more recent alliance with the global feminist organization Femen reveals points of tension with her virtual revisioning of the body politic, given her affiliation with an arguably Islamophobic, neocolonial feminist agenda on the streets. Yet both phases of Elmahdy’s activism enlist her body where least expected in order to challenge the patriarchal cartography of Tahrir Square and the gendering of national space more broadly, as well as to re-member the global feminist public square.
A certain shift in the Turkish foreign policy has been noticeable over the last decade, especially after the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002, which manifested in closer relations with its Arabneighbors and simultaneously a more aggressive stance towards Israel. These developments have led many researchers to say that Turkey’s activism in the Middle East represents its return towards the East, at the expense of its Europeanization aspirations. The current research paper aims to study the validity of this claim by looking at different sets of interactions between Turkey and its neighbors, through a constructivist lens of competing yet complementary variables.
The ascending multilateralism manifested in Turkey’s foreign policy discourse and initiatives has been interpreted by some (Reynolds 2012) as a consequence of the exhaustion of the Kemalist project, while others (vom Hau et al 2012) see it as the logical result of the complex internal and external interactions of modernization and globalization at the level of the Turkish society. The conceptual categories proposed for assessing Turkey’s conduct in relation to other states open up perspectives for exploring further cooperation interactions between Turkey and the EU, on the one hand, and with countries in their shared neighborhood as well.