From Underground to Elite: Egyptian Bloggers before and after the 2011 Uprising

This research looks at how the shift in the status of Egyptian bloggers from underground dissident voices to mainstream political and media players affected the plurality they add to the public space for discourse in Egypt’s authoritarian settings. The role of the internet – and more recently social media and bloggers – in democratic transition has been studied by various media scholars since the introduction of the worldwide web and especially after the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings of 2011. But no work has been done to study how bringing those once-underground bloggers into the public and media spotlight affected the nature of the blogosphere and the bloggers themselves. Star bloggers were not only covered by the media after January 25th, 2011, they also started joining the media as column writers; a move that had various effects on them and the blogosphere but was never examined in media studies. The plurality the blogosphere adds to the Egyptian public space for discourse in light of those changes as well as in light of the financial and practical sustainability of blogging was hence never looked at in a context similar to Egypt’s. Guided by modified theories of the public sphere and theories of hegemony and manufacturing consent, I look at whether bloggers have been co-opted into the historical bloc in the process of renewing the social order and how this affects them and the online sphere. Also, guided by theories of power and media elites, I look at bloggers’ backgrounds to assess whether they come from power elites and are transforming into media elites, thus limiting the plurality of the online sphere. Finally, guided by theoretical works on institutionalizing and commercializing the internet, I look at how those shifts into mainstream affect the independence and freedom of the blogs and microblogs. The research uses a comparative study to assess how those changes affect prominent versus less prominent bloggers and compare their backgrounds. The study uses quantitative content analysis and framing analysis of chosen media outlets and interviews with bloggers, marketeers and media professionals. The findings trace an increase in media coverage of bloggers post January 25th, 2011, especially in the prominent bloggers category, and an overall positive framing of bloggers post the uprising. This led to the mainstreaming of bloggers into the media as well as public work, which had various implications on the freedom they had over their content and voice, both online and offline. It also points to a dramatic decrease in bloggers’ activity on their blogs in favour of mainstream and social media and due to star bloggers becoming more career-oriented and their failure to make blogs financially sustainable. The findings also indicate that more prominent bloggers seem to come from more elite backgrounds than others and enjoy luxuries that allow them the time, technology and security to post online. This research concludes that the shifts in bloggers’ status post-January 25th have limited the plurality they add to the discourse in Egypt.

Radical interiors: Cindy Sherman's ‘Sex pictures’ and Kathy Acker's 'My mother: demonology'

In 1989, the American visual artist Cindy Sherman produced her ‘Sex Pictures’, a number of photographic images of two medical mannequins whose bodies had been dismembered and reconstructed to form abstract configurations that alluded to pornographic poses. Sherman's series was a response to the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, in which American artists such as Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work was considered obscene by the Republican Congress, were censored. Many artists in the culture-war period had their grants rescinded. The American avant-garde writer Kathy Acker published My Mother: Demonology in 1993. A prominent concern of Acker's in the work is what she termed her ‘writing freedom’ in a climate of cultural expurgation by the Republican elite. In particular, Acker was worried that she was ‘internalizing certain censorships’. This article addresses Sherman's and Acker's work in a comparative context to explore, through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva, the ways in which their responses to a climate of political censorship can be read as forms of intimate revolt. Kristeva's notion of ejection—the act of placing something beyond the scope of the possible—transpires as ‘a condition of art's creation’ in Sherman's and Acker's work. Acker and Sherman use the pornographic reference in their work to disrupt and dislocate the narrative and image from convention in order to de-eroticize the body, against heteronormativity's terms, and empower the female sex organs. Eversion—that is, in Sherman's and Acker's works, the act of turning the institutional and maternal body inside out—emerges as a mode of resistance to the danger of the writer and the artist internalizing cultural restrictions. The everted body creates a site of radical interiority which becomes the (impossible) site for the radical (re-)embodiment of the feminine subject.

Global sport in the suburbs: the Regent Street Polytechnic’s sports facilities at Chiswick, 1888–1938

This article shows how the elite origins and religious mission of the Regent Street Polytechnic encouraged participation in amateur sport in London, and promoted the suburb of Chiswick as a global context for competitive sports. From the 1880s to the outbreak of World War 2, the Polytechnic and its facilities forged synergies between the city centre and the burgeoning suburbs in London, engendering a city-wide culture of amateur sports, and embedding the Polytechnic into a global network of athletes. Suburbs are typically presented by writers as being ‘on the edge’ of metropolitan life, but such perspectives are wrong. The West London suburb of Chiswick was the home of Polytechnic facilities that provided a dynamic context for the internationalization and modernization of sport in the capital.