Radwa Fouda

Abstract

Internet has long existed in Egypt, however sudden scholarly interest came after the 2011 revolution. The global scholarly body tended to couple internet accessibility to the so-called Arab-spring, without studying the other forms and politics of internet as an evolution, and almost none have delved in the dungeons of Cyber violence in the MENA Region, needless to say in Egypt. It focuses mainly on individual-to-individual perpetration of violence, how, when and why people variably define unsolicited intervention with their data as "violence", and how, when and why, they choose other notions to define such incident(s). By doing so, it opens up questions about notions such as surveillance, privacy, kinship, control and care, sovereignty, legibility, legitimacy, marginalization and rights. The structure is seen as a vertical gradient, each chapter is a dominant colour that seeps into the one the follows. While cyber violence is visualized as a circular gradient that floods into the center, while having nodes of colours around the edges that signify the prominent hue of the violence perpetuation and the effects of other nodes on its hue. While this thesis is premised primarily on the Castellian view of the network society, various other scholars constitute the rest of the pillars of this thesis to engage more with notions of the state, the social, capital, violence, technology. From Weber, Deleuze, Das, Tilly, Arendt, and Fanon, to Haraway, Bernal, Spivak, Latour and McLuhan, these theories try to give justice to the multitude of entanglements produced by the 9 interlocutors whose stories are extremely rich and telling. From Family, to friends, to work managers, to intimate partners, to totally anonymous persons; the perpetration of violence varying in justifications between care and control, have illustrated the Chimeras that our cyber selves are. Through engaging and living the ups and downs with my interlocutors, I have come to realize the complexities that violence studies involve, beside those that Internet analysis have, through interviews, side talks, countless private messages, and cyber security measures, I have also understood the levels upon which social-scientists deal with their data, as well as themselves in the data, and how interlocutors and the social handle them.

Department

Cynthia Nelson Institute for Gender and Women's Studies

Degree Name

MA in Gender & Women's Studies

Graduation Date

2-1-2019

Submission Date

September 2018

First Advisor

Rieker, Martina

Committee Member 1

ElSabea, Hanan

Committee Member 2

Schwab, Manuel

Extent

115 p.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Rights

The author retains all rights with regard to copyright. The author certifies that written permission from the owner(s) of third-party copyrighted matter included in the thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study has been obtained. The author further certifies that IRB approval has been obtained for this thesis, or that IRB approval is not necessary for this thesis. Insofar as this thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study is an educational record as defined in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 USC 1232g), the author has granted consent to disclosure of it to anyone who requests a copy.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Approval has been obtained for this item

Comments

I would like to thank my interlocutors, my professors who are also mentors of their own right, my advisor for such a pleasant guidance, my friends, and my biological family; without you this wouldn’t have happened. The reason why I said biological family, is that during the journey of this project and this certificate, I have made yet another family, one that through the toughest times, when we were are in our weakest points, we found strength in lifting each other up. In our good days we spread our colourful feathers wide like peacocks, we find joy in the ordinary and the mundane, we create the wild and magnificent from the scraps of affect we collect as we breath, we fight, we argue, and we stay strong; not as one but as diverse. The people mentioned in this thesis, and the people known but not mentioned in this thesis, have given me the honor of sharing their most private, intimate and vulnerable moments, of entrusting me with their data they could not utter sometimes even to their families, kids, friends; I only hope this thesis is insightful to whoever who will read it, not only in theory, or in its academic content, but insightful for you, as a person; a mind, body and soul.

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