The Creation of a Revolutionary Icon

From Blue Bra Girl to Tahrir Woman, the Creation and Evolution of a Global Symbol Explored through the lens of Egyptian Graffiti

On December 17^th 2011 after a day of intense clashes between military police and demonstrators in Tahrir square, an amateur video from Cairo was uploaded showing an anonymous, fallen woman surrounded by security forces and beaten with batons, kicked and dragged by the hair. Her abaya was torn open and her naked torso, blue bra and jeans exposed to the world, sharply contrasted against the dark uniforms around her.

Almost immediately, news of the event began to spread. At 10:17pm, Egyptian activist and founder of Art Talks, Egypt’s Visual Art Foundation Fatenn Mostafa posted via her twitter account:  “The blue bra is unforgettable and we all became ‘the blue bra’ girl one way or another. #egypt”[i], a quote picked up and spread by the Associated Press and published in newspapers around the world by the following morning. Inside of Egypt, using the twitter hashtag #BlueBra, female organizers from around Cairo used the event to stage a march to Tahrir Square two days later that drew roughly 10,000 women and 2,000 men in the largest women’s demonstration in Egypt since anti-colonial protests in 1919[ii]. Thousands of protesters prominently displayed the front page of the daily newspaper Al Tahrir from the previous day with the headline “The Forces that Violate the Honor of Women”, showing a still frame from the video[iii] while others carried blown up photographs, hand drawn signs and images of Egyptian flags in which the national symbol of the eagle had been replaced by a blue bra circulated widely on Facebook[iv]. In the next two months, the original YouTube video spread across Facebook and Twitter, disseminated by traditional news media and viewed more than 3.9 million times[v], becoming a visual icon of the systematic brutality employed against protestors and women in Egypt.

Shocked by the violence in a weekend in which 14 people had been killed and hundreds wounded since the previous Friday[vi], reactions to the image rippled through the country. In the Dagahiyya governorate, about two hours north of Cairo, a group of students from Monsoura University decided to act, taking a part in a campaign the following day to raise awareness about violence in Tahrir Square[vii] as part of a barrage of graffiti against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and to dispel what organizers argued were conspiracy theories that “go as far as blaming activists and foreign elements of provoking, and even elaborately staging, much of the military abuse” [viii]. The campaign lasted three days and included several pieces of graffiti placed on the local municipal building and around the university. That Thursday, the group received a stencil of the blue bra girl via email from a person in the nearby city of Mit Ghamr, and by Friday the first stencil of the ‘Blue Bra Girl’ had been posted.

Though just one of thousands, this symbol was emblematic of how graffiti has been used to challenge and transform spaces that until the revolution were a crucial part of a rigidly constructed system of authoritarian control. This street art has a distinct relationship with domestic and international media used as a vehicle to disseminate and spread specific images, symbols and ideas, used as a platform to interact with tens of thousands of others directly through social media tools like Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. Authors use this medium to explore controversial topics about the evolving role of nationalism, femininity, patriotism, gender, militarism, masculinity and martyrdom – some resistant to dominant social discourses while others are in favor.

To examine these themes, this article analyzes the creation and evolution of a revolutionary symbol through visual representations of the ‘Blue Bra Girl’ in Egyptian graffiti from December 18^th 2011 through February 10^th 2012. The pieces used for this paper are associated with Arabic writing; my analyses of them seek to investigate the ideas that are disseminated, as well as the underlying cultural issues being represented. Images were created under diverse circumstances by a variety of artists, some known, others anonymous, and were intended for a variety of audiences. When collected together these images exemplify graffiti’s ability to challenge, interact and construct a revolutionary iconography, its unique relationship with evolving forms of social media, and reveal distinct depictions of gender that deal with female individuals thrust into a national discourse that includes elements of violence, sexuality, honor and violation that challenge established societal and gender norms.

An Initial Icon

While many men and women in Egypt alleged that the picture or video girl was a forgery, critical of the fact that it was shot by a Reuters photographer, that the woman was not wearing a shirt underneath despite the cold temperature or simply arguing that she should be held accountable for the action of being present[ix], the image of the woman in the blue bra also became a symbolic icon synonymous with systematic brutality against women and a rallying point for protestors around the country.

“Would you accept this for your mother?? Would you accept this for your sister??” - Photo by Eric Knecht, from article Far Outside of Cairo a Graffiti Campaign to Denounce SCAF, Jadaliyya.com

The photograph of the graffiti used above was taken outside of the School of Medicine at the Monsoura University on December 22nd and remains a near exact replica of the now symbolic image of the woman in the blue bra. It was created in a very simple and basic format. The characters are dark and anonymous; the monochromatic color of the figures of both the security forces and the woman, as well as her bra place the emphasis of the image on the event itself, instead of any specific stylistic elements. Like the picture from which it is based, the woman remains a passive actor in the scene, unable to resist the agents of the Egyptian state.

This brutality employed against women during protests, documented in more than 100 cases, can be interpreted as an attempt to punish women entering into the public sphere “in order to ‘rescue’ Egyptian masculinity from insecurities experienced as a result of socioeconomic changes and shifting general roles”[x]. These acts to punish the female body serves to “reproduce Egyptian national identity and culture” and can be viewed as an attempt to “re-establish the boundaries of the Egyptian nation” by constructing and reinforcing dominant gender roles as an essential marker for the national collective, used as a contrast from western values, and something inherently Egyptian.

The idea of the female body as a site onto which states assert their control is reinforced by the idea that the nation is an abstraction[xi]. In addition to being an imagined community, images of the nation have also been used to “reaffirm the unity of the nation and give the concept of nationhood greater immediacy… meant to disseminate the idea of nationalism… and that over time with few exceptions, Egypt came to be depicted as a woman”[xii]. The authors, through the use of the nationalistic colors of the Egyptian flag, the dark tones of the black figures, the red Arabic script and the intentional white background, embody the Egyptian identity as the woman, the victim. The attack becomes not just an isolated event of brutality, but an assault on the collective honor of the nation, appealing to viewers and the Egyptian masculine with the heavily contrasted red text “Would You Accept this for your Mother?? Would you accept this for your Sister??

These questions directly tap into a masculine duty to defend a violation of familial honor, which is symbolized by the victim. Many of these same themes were present during the initial protest in response to the event of the blue bra woman, heavily charged around the role that gender had played. Women were quoted as chanting “Drag me, strip me, my brothers’ blood will cover me’, “the girls of Egypt are here” and after forming a protective cordon around them, the men joined the chanting reported as saying “The women of Egypt are the red line”, insinuating that the military had crossed an unacceptable moral boundary.

The Monsoura Group taking a break after successfully spraying another stencil

To spread their message, when the Monsoura group began their campaign, their intended audience was not only The University faculty, staff or neighborhood, nor was it a silent or isolated event. Instead, they held a press conference with a statement condemning the ruling military council and incorporated banners, images from recent events in Cairo and a projector, organizing with other student groups and using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help document and spread their message. On their banner, the most prominent of those images was that of the ‘girl with the blue bra’ with the words ‘Liars’ emblazoned above it, which had been run on the front cover of Tahrir News on a previous day. This publicity was also to combat the idea that while it had been broadcast quickly to an international audience many ordinary Egyptians who lacked access to the internet or satellite television news remained ignorant of its existence[xiii]. One of the primary organizers Egyptian writer Aalam Wassef who runs Cris d’Egypte, a French language news blog announced the effort to “set up screens in cities and towns around the country where people could see that video and others that contradict the generals’ version of events” stating that “…four blocks from here, no one knows about this”[xiv].

This interaction with different types of media highlights the relationship between the producers, intermediaries and consumers of this image. As students at Monsoura University,  the group of individuals responsible for the graffiti was a part of a segment of Egyptian society critical in mobilizing resistance to the military government by spreading images, narratives and themes to the broader Arab world and international audiences. They did so in an expanding zone of contact[xv] as their cultural construction became integrated into social media platforms around the world, disseminated by broad networks of for profit media corporations with their own agendas and becoming incorporated into new local contexts that reinterpreted the images with their own iconographic vocabulary.

“A Global Symbol”

This dissemination of the image of the woman with the blue bra caused an outrage in western media outlets that strongly condemned the actions of the Egyptian military. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in a speech at Georgetown University on December 21^st that the image showed “systematic degradation of Egyptian women which dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform, and is not worthy of a great people”[xvi], showing how the meaning of the blue bra as a revolutionary icon was spread, incorporated and embodied into an international lexicon of resistance against certain systems of patriarchy and gender domination.

International advocacy agencies also quickly condemned the protests and in a widely syndicated opinion piece published in USA Today and the National Tribune among others, author, blogger and feminist Sally Quin argued that “…underneath [her robe] was her statement now available for the world to see… that blue bra, to me, was the ultimate symbol of women’s power, the one thing that threatens men above all. It makes them so crazy that over the centuries they have encoded it into their religions that women are kept down and denied the same freedoms that men have…. Men know that women’s sexuality is something they cannot live without; it is something that renders them powerless. Women can have babies, women can breastfeed, women are the lifegivers. The blue bra is a bold statement of that”[xvii].

With this broad diffusion, complex social constructions of the Egyptian national identity, gender and sexuality were incorporated into a fluid discourse defined through an ongoing interaction with domestic, international and social media, as well as individual, state and transnational actors. In this context, representations of Muslim women have a special role, often characterized by advocacy organizations and western governments that borrow an orientalist image from cultural and social depictions that are dominated, defined and framed through an interaction with the west[xviii]. Historian Joseph Andoni Mossad also argues that “while this was initially used during colonial occupation to further the perceived exotic nature and sexual licentiousness of Arab culture, in the last several decades the modern west has instead attacked this image for its alleged repression of sexual freedoms and desire”[xix].

The importance of the blue bra, and especially its focus by western actors is explained further by Kenny Irby, senior faculty for visual journalism at Poynter Institute, who claimed that the image has become a symbol of the systematic sexism and violence in Egypt and the arab world in western media portrayals because “… it has an aesthetic punctuation that is the blue bra… the clear suppression of female rights but also has the visual stamp which has historically been part of women’s liberation protests [in America]”[xx].  Starting from women’s suffrage in the 1920’s and including emerging feminist movements in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s the symbol of the bra has often played a prominent role. He also notes the importance of how the images were acquired – not by a professional television crew, but instead an individual still of an amateur video, noting the increasing proliferation by “authentic witnesses” and that “… this image now has the potential to impact national policy, and that has been one of the major attributes of photojournalism – images that move the hearts and minds of the public and policy makers”[xxi].

Translated as: “Against the System” or possibly “Against Patriarchy”. Photograph from Flickr user Hanibaael in Beirut, Lebanon, January 5th 2012

As it circulated, the symbol of the blue bra increasingly became dissociated with the event itself, instead embodying and incorporating the socially constructed values instilled by a variety of domestic and international authors, often becoming associated as a sign of resistance by artists around the world. The image above from Beirut was captured on January 5^th, about 2 weeks after the initial event in Cairo. In the photograph, the icon has become a symbol, completely removed from context of the initial experience with both the woman and the soldiers dragging her removed. This transformation from a focus on the event of outrage to the importance of the symbol itself against a systematic degradation of women is paralleled by its removal from the national borders of the Egypt.

This is shown through the simple presentation of the image, meaning the author assumes that the symbol of the blue bra can be understood on its own and correctly interpreted, establishing a basic awareness of the event throughout the broader Arab world. In addition, the complex interaction that takes place between symbol, media and audience is reinforced by the Arabic “Against the System” contrasted by the English graffiti “Resist” nearby.

The Blue Bra Girl as envisioned by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff who posted this image to his blog and twitter on January 11th. Entitled "Masked Avenger".

As the image of the blue bra girl was disseminated internationally, the initial icon was transformed; interpreted and redefined into a new local context, still intended for a broad audience.

This re-envisioning continued on January 11^th by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, who radically transformed the blue bra girl into that of a “masked avenger”, her black abaya partially obscuring her face, like a mask. Instead of lying prone, passive, helpless, she has instead been constructed into an empowered agent fighting back against the military brutality through self-defense. While her body is actually still at the same angle as in the original image, it is clear who the dominate figure is[xxii]. These images were then posted to his wordpress blog, spread using his twitter account and soon reintegrated by Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square, who used the image to create signs, posters and as banners on the side of protesters tents, showing the rapid and dynamic framework in which information can be disseminated.

From #BlueBraGirl to #TahrirWoman

Image created by artist El Teneen in Tahrir Square from February 10th 2012. Photograph by Mia Grondahl.

This reinterpretation of the ‘blue bra girl’ continued to gain traction and became evident in a piece that was put up in Tahrir Square on February 10^th by prominent Egyptian graffiti artist El Teneen, entitled “Tahrir Woman”. In it, the ‘blue bra girl’ has evolved into a symbol of power, her stomach and arms brazenly exposed in a fighting posture, modeled after the image of Wonder Woman. Her hair is long, flowing and unwrapped with the words “it continues” underneath. On her chest, a sidewise crescent has been placed which from afar can be interpreted as the crescent moon and star representative of Islam, while upon closer inspection it also creates the letter “Thaa” or taken in context “Thawrah Woman” which literally means “The Revolution”, or “Revolution Woman”.

The artist also intended for the image to be seen and its location at the ‘epicenter’ of the struggle against the Egyptian government in Tahrir square is very symbolically important. It suggests both a connection to the event itself, which occurred only blocks away, and the purpose to make the image as visible as possible, probably not only to traditional news sources that hyper focus coverage on the square, but as suggested by the Arabic script, likely to other passerby’s and revolutionaries, some who come just to take pictures of the graffiti, and who also happen to be most likely to upload, tweet, facebook and blog about it, disseminating it to thousands of others sympathetic with the movement both inside of Egypt domestically and around the world.

The artist remains anonymous but is well known by his pseudonym El Teneen, Arabic for ‘dragon’. Previously, he had never done any street art, but became active after attending a protest on January 26^th, and was deeply rooted by a desire to use graffiti as a means to document the growing protest movement. “I thought that even if the revolution didn’t succeed, there should be traces of it left for people to see[xxiii]”. El Teneen, in a phone interview with the Egyptian Independent also highlighted the complex relationship between social media and graffiti “It became a new way to express myself. Before, the internet was the only place where we could honestly converse. On the street, we simply couldn’t talk freely, especially not about Mubarak. Through street art, freedom of expression moved from virtual space to the real world[xxiv]”. He also shed some light into some of what his motivations might have been when he created Tahrir Woman, using graffiti as a tool to challenge dominate gender norms “Even though I’m not a fan of politics, I am getting more and more into it…I would also like to turn my work into something more social and provocative. Sex and religion are hot topics, and they should reach the streets. Egyptians have narrow views about these issues and I want to upset them and make them think”[xxv].

This style of graffiti is inherently opposed to and challenges the domination and authoritarian control of public space. By its nature is an illegal act, a trespass upon the national domain and by extension a visual act of defiance that becomes representative of a cultural commentary and a political resistance[xxvi]. Through this graffiti, artists such as Teneen have created an identity; grounded in resistance to the Egyptian state as well as societal practices viewed by the artist as restrictive or wrong. In his honors thesis, anthropologist Bradley Bartolomeo explains the importance of this:

“Graffiti writing is one of the easiest and most efficient ways for individuals and opposing groups to register political dissidence, express social alienation, propagate anti-system ideas, and establish an alternative collective memory. Groups can use graffiti to push their agendas or generally to make their presence felt, for it is an extremely easy means of communicating ideas and establishing a collective identity with the masses by putting a government on notice that anti-system sentiments exist with a definite historical memory. Given by the circumstances of doctoral regimes, graffiti communication can be, if recognized by groups and if organized sufficiently, an important medium for breaking the dominant control and censorship which authoritarian governments exercise”. In addition, the author writes that it is important to understand “that graffiti is not the act of one individual, but rather, is a movement and matter of representation and identity[xxvii]”.

The ability for the blue bra girl to encompass this movement, and embody a constantly evolving representation of meaning, from the icon of the blue bra girl to the symbol of the Tahrir Woman, was predicated on several basic factors. Unlike other cases that have thrust women and debates around gender and police brutality in the public sphere, like that of Samira Ibrahim or Aliaa Magda, the blue bra girl was fairly unique in that she remained anonymous as her story was disseminated throughout Egypt and the world.

There is no voice, face or personality associated with the event and instead representations of her are defined completely through social interaction and an evolving public discourse, much like how at its root, ideas of gender, sexuality and national identity themselves are constructed and transmitted. The case of the blue bra girl allowed for civil society activists, organizations and artists, both inside of Egypt and internationally, to enter a discourse that challenged social and national security, through which sovereignty and political order had been linked and maintained[xxviii].  The brutality of employed against the woman with the blue bra is an example of how the body is the finest scale of geopolitical space, the base root that the policies of people, societies and nation-states play out on an individual and interpersonal level.

It is through these interpersonal interactions that gender and sexuality are constructed, defined and act upon a broader community, onto which the state inserts and asserts its control.  Graffiti then becomes a powerful means to explore not only representations of women and gender in Egypt, but how these dominant social narratives are challenged, as well as examining the ongoing and evolving discourse that takes place as a revolutionary iconography is introduced into an international dialogue that involves domestic, international social media, as well as powerful individual, state and transnational actors.

Ultimately, this framework is inextricably linked to how policies play out on the most basic level – the body, and it is through these interpersonal interactions that the national identity is constructed and maintained. Graffiti of the blue bra girl played an important role as a tool to challenge these prevailing discourses by constructing a new revolutionary iconography, set into a powerful and evolving dialogue but able to retain its inherent meaning as an icon against military brutality. At the same time, the image itself was transmitted and renegotiated into different local contexts around the world, transformed into a symbol of resistance and female empowerment before finally returning and reintegrating into the emblematic epicenter of the Egyptian revolution, Tahrir Square.

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