Abstract

This thesis explores the unfolding of Egypt’s MeToo movement through the stories that emerged in the wake of the 2020 Ahmed Bassam Zaki case. Rather than framing this moment as a rupture or a crisis, it seeks to situate it within a longer genealogy of feminist resistance, digital activism, and everyday acts of speaking out and silencing. At the heart of this work is the question: what does it mean for a story to take a life of its own? Stories here are not fixed entities but rather living actants—capable of forming solidarities, generating intensities, and unsettling hegemonic narratives. Drawing on feminist ethnography, digital archives, interviews, and discourse analysis, the thesis foregrounds the politics of storytelling: whose stories are heard, which voices are amplified, and what happens when testimony becomes spectacle. It considers not only what is spoken, but what is withheld; not only what is archived, but what is erased or kept at the margins. From anonymous Instagram pages to grassroots feminist blogs, from courtroom rehearsals to photography and comics, these stories surface and slip, reappearing across different platforms, forms, and bodies. Central to this inquiry is an engagement with the idea of eventfulness—how certain moments become “the story” while others fall through the cracks. In attending to the affective, embodied, and temporal dimensions of storytelling, this research resists the urge to provide closure. Instead, it follows the story-in-motion, asking what it can teach us about violence, memory, movements, and the fragile, powerful work of narration itself.

School

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department

Sociology, Egyptology & Anthroplology Department

Degree Name

MA in Sociology-Anthropology

Graduation Date

Spring 2-15-2026

Submission Date

6-18-2025

First Advisor

Hanan Sabea

Committee Member 1

Dina Makram-Ebeid

Committee Member 2

Munira Khayyat

Extent

128p.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Approval has been obtained for this item

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