CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Elaskary, Rawda |
|---|---|
| Title | The Materiality of Exile: Women Exiles and Postcolonial State Violence in the MENA Region |
| Summary | This thesis critically re-theorizes exile by centering the material, gendered, and carceral realities of Egyptian women activists who were exiled following the 2013 military coup. Using Biopolitics and Necropolitics as frameworks, the study challenges Edward Said’s metaphorical framing of exile as a space of critical reflection and foregrounds exile as a material condition produced through state violence. Through 33 interviews with Egyptian women activists in exile, he thesis demonstrates the violent, material conditions that lead to Egyptian women’s exile, including carceral violence, torture, sexual and gender-based violence in detention, and the various technologies of discipline of women’s bodies in prisons through the control over the administration of food, water, space, air, light, and the production of illness and death-worlds through lack of hygiene and medical neglect. The thesis also examines how the Egyptian state mobilizes its sovereign power through multiple registers to produce forced exile at sites of transition, including airports, border zones, and embassies. By reframing exile as a material and gendered reality, the thesis contributes to decolonial feminist scholarship and activism by exposing how postcolonial state authoritarianism, rather than Western imperialism alone, produces the condition of exile in the MENA region. |
| Supervisor | Jones-Jailani, Nadia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/elaskary_rawda.pdf |
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