Documenting defiance: Women film-makers in Tahrir Square

This article discusses the work of national and transnational women film-makers who contributed to the discourse on the Egyptian Revolution in the three years that followed the fall of Mubarak and who documented forms and expressions of female defiance through the lens of their camera. I argue that, in women-made documentaries, the social and political defiance vis-à-vis systems of governance and instances of authority (familial, religious and political) is shaped through the representation of a far-reaching form of disobedience, breaking the rules of social patriarchy and political paternalism, destabilizing the common knowledge on oppressed women and defying the overarching essentialist views on women’s conditions in Egypt. I argue that civic defiance cannot be understood without examining the more radical epistemic defiance to the established régime du savoir (regime of knowledge) informed by power relationships, and the way in which knowledge circulates and functions in relation to power centers and authoritarian elites.