TWO Amplified Rhetorics

In the mainstream media’s portrayal of Sboui’s story and the #freeamina campaign, certain news outlets focus solely on the “entertainment” factor of Sboui’s and femen’s nudity. As journalist Matt Gurney of the National Post claims, nudity always garners attention: “When presented with nude protesters, enjoy the show, and say so,” he wrote.⁸ In this moment of circulation, the goals underlying femen’s rhetoric—which included resisting sexist, patriarchal discourses—become characterized as the butt of a joke about women’s nudity. What seems most prominent in this statement is the belief that women’s naked breasts alone, regardless of the images’ purposes or contexts, will inevitably lead to more readers and thus generate more capital. This sentiment becomes amplified further as other social media users and bloggers post similar statements. For example, an anonymous writer from the US-based blog, Kafir Crusaders, a site dedicated to “standing up to Islamization,” writes, “This is a jihad I could live with. Titslamism is the future.”⁹

In these moments of amplification, the original message and rhetorical purpose of Sboui’s text becomes completely erased. The amplification of both Sboui’s and femen’s texts as objectifications of women’s bodies illustrate the ways in which one component of a text—the naked body itself, pulled from its relationship to protest, to politics, to the messages literally written on those bodies—can be reconstructed as its own narrative, producing new, and often conflicting meanings. Amplified in these moments is the problematic correlation between feminism and what the body of a feminist should look like. And once again, amplified in these texts is also a Western ideology of the liberated naked body held in opposition to assumptions about religion and politics, specifically in terms of Islam and conservatism.

In yet another example of the amplification of the objectified body, Sboui’s text quickly collapses—and in many ways, dissolves—into the texts of femen. In other words, the contexts and histories of both Sboui’s and Page 48 →femen’s bodily protests become irrelevant; it is instead their bare-breasted images that earn them any relevance. In the article, “femen Storm in DD-Cup: Stand-by for Topless Jihad!” which appeared on the Jordan-based news site Al Bawaba: Your Gateway to the Middle East, an anonymous writer claims: “Women of miscellaneous heritage but from the collective ‘sextremists’ femen—strewn between hubs in the Ukraine, Sweden and Paris—are enjoining their supporters to strip off in the battle with the ‘Islamists.’ femen mean business, as they deploy their best assets to the front-line to tackle the oppressive patriarchal honor society.”¹⁰ In both the headline and opening paragraph, there is no mention of Sboui or Sboui’s text. While her text becomes a focus later in the article, the piece cues its readers to two things: femen’s bare breasts and a war against Islamists. Even if the purpose of this article is to encourage solidarity among women regarding Sboui’s cause, the author’s use of ill-humor in recasting femen’s protest as a “storm” of protesters in “DD cups,” as well as the author’s appeal for readers to passively “stand by” to watch the topless protesters in action, discounts that entire goal. What gets amplified, once again, is a narrative about “sextremists” and their “best assets.”

The slippage in this rhetorical move—the failure to achieve a call for solidarity due to the article’s focus on the body as a kind of sexualized object—points to the ways in which the process of amplification is fraught with contradictory and conflicting outcomes. As in the latter example, the amplification of a woman’s body as a kind of sexualized tool for persuasion, an erotic “canvas” for resisting patriarchal discourses, positions the Al Bawaba text within the exact kind of discourse Sboui’s text sought to resist. In other words, although superficially they claim to support Sboui and femen’s critique of sexism and “male power,” their representation of the sexualized female body undermines that effort, as they themselves purport an ideology wrapped up in the “male gaze.”

While this paradoxical sentiment is amplified further in multiple venues, other writers or responders also focus on the body as a kind of object but amplify its rhetorical functions quite differently. The mainstream media’s focus on objectifying women’s naked bodies, for example, prompted various reactions to and disagreements with femen and Sboui’s mode of protest. In an ironic move, Sboui and femen are ultimately criticized for not being feminist enough because their mode of protest—the body—can only be understood as an object. As a result, “feminists” who might have aligned with femen come to distance themselves from the protest. As Daily Beast writer Janine Giovanni states, “Any protester knows that the only way Page 49 →activism works is to get the people on your side. Femen is not exactly endearing themselves to anyone, except perhaps to hormonal teenage boys.”¹¹ Later in the article, she notes: “Amina’s heart might be in the right place, but I wish she would cover it up with a T-shirt and protest quietly, but effectively, rather than getting her kit off.”¹² The reference here to “getting people on your side” depicts a clear understanding of how users reacted to these texts and how the amplification of a particular ideology ultimately leads to specific kinds of allying.

Within all of these instances of amplification, the bodily objectification and the commentary surrounding that objectification engender certain assumptions about Sboui’s text and the context from which it emerged. Each moment of amplification assumes a westernized view of the body, as the notion of “objectification” is very much premised on Western liberal perspectives related to bodily liberation, sexual freedom, and gendered roles. While it is important to point out the slippages within this theme, perhaps those slippages result from one’s own contexts and experiences as well as projected arguments about Sboui’s body stemming from normative liberal assumptions about sexuality, freedom, and the liberated body. While “objectification” of the body is certainly important here, and while Sboui’s protest gestures toward both a critique and use of bodily objectification for her own rhetorical purposes, sexual freedom and liberation, according to Sboui, were not at the forefront of her protest. Rather, according to a published conversation between Sboui and an Ettounsiya TV reporter, as reported by The National news site, the idea of honor as it is tied to a woman’s body in Muslim contexts was seemingly the focus of her rhetorical act: “‘I want the message to be read this way,’ Amina told Tunisia Live reporters, ‘(A woman’s) body is hers—not her father’s, her husband’s or her brother’s.’”¹³ Here, it’s important to recall the original public debate in Tunisia regarding the constitutional amendment that would position women as a man’s “complement” or “associate.” Perhaps Sboui’s text is less about an “innate desire” for liberation and sexual freedom and more about a kind of provocation that seeks to fracture—both physically and figuratively—a woman’s adjacency to a man. Unfortunately, though, due to the amplified messages around bodily objectification and the decontextualization of Sboui’s text, that reading becomes clouded and ultimately indiscernible.

As the body-as-object theme becomes amplified, so too does the belief that Sboui’s photographs represent madness and female hysteria. Words like Page 50 →“epidemic” and “contagion,” for example, become prominent descriptions of Sboui’s rhetorical act. In several instances, she is even referred to as having a mental illness. One news outlet, for instance, Al Arabiya News, put forth the following headline: “‘Quarantine her!’: Top Tunisian Islamist Says Topless Girl Needs Stoning.” In this same article, Tunisian Salafi preacher, Alami Adel, is quoted as saying, “‘She [Sboui] is like someone suffering from a serious and contagious illness and she must be secluded and treated.’”¹⁴ Following these references, it was widely circulated that Sboui had been hospitalized in a mental institution (which, according to published interviews with Sboui, never actually happened). Two Western-based news sources showcase this. An Elite Daily headline, for example, reads: “19-Year-Old Tunisian Girl Is Sent To The Psych Ward For Posing In This Topless Photo.” And a post from MFS – The Other News, a news blog reporting on religious politics across the globe, cites Sboui’s story along with the following title: “Tunisian Femen Member Incarcerated in a Psychiatric Hospital for Posting Topless Photos on Facebook.” Similarly, the UK news site, Daily Mail, circulated an article with the following headline: “Salafist Preacher Wants Her Quarantined Because She Is Contagious.”

Within these moments of amplification, Sboui’s act becomes associated with a Western discourse regarding women’s psychology—a discourse that, for centuries, has been used to categorize women’s actions as irrational and simply “too emotional.”¹⁵ Evidenced in these headlines, quotes, and phrases is the belief that women’s bodies are directly linked with madness. In this case, responders and circulators of Sboui’s text focus on and magnify Sboui’s naked body as a sign of irrational behavior, and thus a symptom of hysteria. This happens mainly through the repetition of key phrases. Much of the actual content of the articles referenced above simply repeats statements made by Salafi preacher Adel; and yet, despite this detail, what seems to get picked up and recirculated by other bloggers and social media users is not the full context of the preacher’s statement to Al Arabiya, but rather Sboui’s image in relation to certain words such as “quarantine,” “epidemic,” “psych ward,” “psychiatric hospital,” and “contagion.” As a result, social media users on Twitter/X and Facebook posted statements echoing those words, circulating claims about Sboui having a mental illness and having to be hospitalized (see #freeamina).

What is interesting about this kind of amplification is the way in which Adel’s comparison of Sboui to a person suffering from a “contagious illness” becomes immediately positioned within a Western discourse, one that views a woman’s body as a source of mania. If Adel’s use of contagion is Page 51 →repositioned in relation to the context from which it emerged—a religious and political context where a woman’s body is viewed as a site of honor and purity, as well as an adjacent counterpart to a man (as depicted in the Tunisian constitution)—perhaps the reference to “contagion” and the spreading of an “illness” signifies the belief that a Muslim woman’s naked body would be contagious in the sense that it would either “tempt” or lure others to think “impure” thoughts about the body, or that it would literally “infect” her counterpart (e.g., her husband, brother, father). Considering Adel’s response in this light points out the various ways in which amplification is fraught with both contradictory assumptions and misunderstandings of particular contexts. It also suggests that amplification necessarily relies on preexisting discourses that seek to construct relations of power in certain ways. Instead of complicating Adel’s use of contagion and inquiring into the reasons why a woman’s body in this particular context might be tied to “illness” instead of liberation (as seen in the last section), MFS, Elite Daily and The Daily News, among others, amplify an ideology that ties a woman’s body to madness, and thus the “mad” woman’s body to global disruption. This amplification is then sustained through continued circulation.

Further amplification of gendered madness and global conflict occur through acts of citationality (the repetition of key phrases) and rhetorical characterization (the construction of particular claims), to go back to Warner’s terms. Take the following two blog post titles, for example: “Tunisia: Feminist Amina Thrown in Psych Ward” (from the US-based blog, Faith Freedom, a site advocating for the belief that Islam “is a religion of hate, of terror and of war”) and Laura Bates’s “Women’s Bodies: Cause of Epidemics and Disasters?” (from the US-based blog, Women Under Siege). Both titles are particularly troubling, but the latter is even more so. The suggestion of a cause-and-effect relationship between women’s bodies and epidemics and disasters implies that women’s bodies are inherent vessels for contagion and infection. This problematic relationship also suggests something greater about a woman’s body: its potentiality to prompt global dissonance. While the aforementioned headline, posed as a question, may be functioning as a rhetorical critique of that inquiry itself, there is a kind of amplification implicit in that question—one that if read outside of the context of the article, like many headlines are, has the potential to perpetuate and reinforce a firmly held ideology that discounts women bodies as anything but rational and stable. Thus, the nation, too, is rendered unstable.

In yet another instance of amplification, a more nuanced approach to the body-as-madness theme appears. In her post about Sboui’s use of naked Page 52 →protest, a writer with the username “Stable Hand,” states, “Let’s hope this ‘epidemic’ continues to catch on. No one controls a woman’s body except for that woman. Islamists hate losing control of females.”¹⁶ In this case, the term “epidemic” is repeated, but for a different reason: to invoke critique of the notion that women controlling their bodies would be seen as a kind of contagion. Here, amplification is working to subvert a common, widely circulated belief. By citing the word “epidemic” in a mocking context, this writer is able to turn the discourse surrounding body-as-madness on its head. Unfortunately, though, this theme does not gain as much traction and movement as that of the initial amplification, which equates women’s bodies to a kind of global hysteria.

The idea of global hysteria as it relates to Sboui’s text, however, deserves a bit more attention here. In looking more closely at the amplifications of the body-as-madness theme, it is extremely important to realize the racial and cultural implications inherent in this ideological construction. The correlation between a woman’s body and madness, here, is not the correlation between “all women” and psychological illness; rather it is the correlation of Sboui—a brown Muslim woman—and “madness.” femen protesters do not receive this same kind of projection and representation, and neither do international feminist movements and groups like SlutWalk and Pussy Riot. In fact, the distinction between the last section and this one—the difference between the amplification of women’s bodies (all women’s bodies) as sexualized objects and the amplification of Sboui’s body as a representation of madness—reveals how the practice of amplification allows one to construct ideological arguments that contribute to larger perceptions and understandings of power. In other words, in the last section, the main claims that emerged from the body-as-object theme was the belief that all women need and are entitled to sexual freedom and liberation. And in this section, it is the belief that Sboui’s body—a brown Muslim body—is linked to madness and thus linked causally to the infectious growth of geopolitical discord. Ultimately, then, it is Muslim women, as a homogenized entity, that become depicted as irrational and unstable.

femen’s instances of circulation, in particular, foreground and amplify the theme of the body-as-protest as the main message of Sboui’s text, and this happens in several ways. First, femen uses Sboui’s text as a catalyst for organizing a “topless jihad day” (figure 2). In social media posts, as well as in an open letter published on the Huffington Post, femen calls on women across Page 53 →the globe to support Sboui’s cause by using their bodies “as poster[s] for the slogans of freedom,” by “baring their breasts against Islam” and circulating the hashtag “#freeamina” (figure 3).¹⁷ On femen’s Facebook page, Sboui’s image appears against a backdrop of her supporters with the following statements written on their bodies: “Our tits are deadlier than your stones” and “Free Amina!”(figure 4). In these messages, the call for a topless protest is amplified, and for two reasons: to oppose the “oppressive religious nature” of Islam and to help liberate a Muslim woman from a purportedly oppressive Arab nation.¹⁸ This kind of repositioning of Sboui’s text—femen’s move to rhetorically repackage Sboui’s text as a collective mouthpiece for all women, which moves a textual representation of a singular voice to a plural one—is indicative of a Western feminist discourse premised on the goal of forming a global sisterhood.¹⁹ This kind of Western feminist ideology glosses over the local and specific goals of Sboui’s text and instead makes Sboui’s message about gender inequities on a global scale, rather than her specific, localized exigence. This rhetorical move is similar to the use of the body-as-object theme—particularly the ways in which the mainstream media (re)presented and (re)purposed Sboui’s text as a call for sexual liberation and freedom.

Under the auspices of forming a global sisterhood, femen leader Inna Shevchenko tells reporters from The Guardian that an international feminist collective is important and necessary to successfully target larger patriarchal structures that she believes affect all women. Moreover, a global sisterhood of naked women protesters, she argues, is even more necessary for instilling that message in the minds of others. In an article from the Guardian entitled “Rise of the Naked Female Warriors,” Shevchenko is quoted:

A woman’s naked body has always been the instrument of the patriarchy. ... They use it in the sex industry, the fashion industry, advertising, always in men’s hands. We realized the key was to give the naked body back to its rightful owner, to women, and give a new interpretation of nudity. ... I’m proud of the fact that today naked women are not just posing on the cover of Playboy, but it can be an action, angry, and can irritate people.²⁰

Shevchenko’s references to a woman’s naked body as an “instrument”—a visual tool—and as a kind of “action” that gets people angry and irritated Page 55 →speaks to the ways in which she and others see the body as a kind of embodied rhetoric, a public, agentive performance. Here, the notion of agency plays an important role because as in the sections on bodily objectification and bodily hysteria, agency gets repositioned as something desirable. Here, the naked body becomes agency itself. Once again, though, this kind of rhetoric espouses a Western feminist ideology premised on the belief that agency is only ever realized through the complete control of one’s own body.²¹

In a continued amplification of the body-as-protest theme, other web users responded similarly, calling on others to join in the “fight for Amina.” For example, writer Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett from the New Statesman, a London-based online magazine dedicated to commentary on global politics and culture, wrote a piece on both Sboui’s and femen’s rhetorical acts. In her article entitled, “If Women Have to Get Their Tits Out to Make a Point, So Be It,” Cosslett urges others to strip down in the name of feminism. “Fuck your morals, indeed,” she writes, “I may even get my own out in solidarity.”²² Amplified in this moment of circulation—and the literal repetition of Sboui’s phrase, “Fuck your morals”—is the belief that the act of naked protest is analogous to the “fight for women’s rights” and that the physical body should be used as a canvas for protest and a tool for global feminist solidarity—a “body” of feminists, as seen in the image on femen’s Facebook page. Cosslett’s reference to getting her breasts out “in solidarity” points to the way in which amplification functions as a kind of world-making, to use Warner’s term once again: the ways in which texts become the basis for further representations, creating and foreclosing certain subject positions in order to create a world in which one wants to live. On the one hand, the rhetoric of femen and femen supporters proposes solutions to shared matters of concern—gender inequities, for example. Many of these activists and feminists participate in amplifying Sboui’s text because they feel they are furthering the cause for women’s rights. On the other hand, amplifying the body-as-protest also moves Sboui’s local goal to the background, making the local case of Tunisia only a side note. Allying with Sboui, then, becomes a way of allying with her means of protest rather than with its goal—or more accurately, allying with Sboui, and by extension femen, makes the means more important than the cause for which she is protesting.

Page 56 →An important point to note about these rhetorical engagements is the way in which the process of amplification relies heavily on the act of “knowing” and “believing” in something already familiar. What gets amplified in these examples are older discourses, prevailing discourses that form our social relations. For example, much of the amplification of the body-as-protest theme is related to the discourses of feminism from the sixties and seventies (e.g., the women’s liberation movement, the porn wars). These kinds of discourses sought to critique and revise the ways in which women’s bodies were viewed as property and symbols of morality and innocence. This kind of critique and revision can be considered in relation to Shevchenko’s earlier statement: “A woman’s naked body has always been the instrument of the patriarchy ... We realized the key was to give the naked body back to its rightful owner, to women.”²³ This kind of discourse appears again, and more explicitly, in another statement from Shevchenko: “Religious dictatorship begins by enslaving women, but a woman’s act of self-liberation is the first step toward destroying the sharia regime. Topless protests are the battle flags of women’s resistance, a symbol of a woman’s acquisition of rights over her own body!”²⁴ The direct correlation between topless protests and women’s rights speaks to the kind of feminist rhetorical arguments made decades Page 57 →earlier, particularly around sexuality and reproductive rights. Rooted in Shevchenko’s statement as well as the earlier examples involving the body-as-protest theme is a popularized sentiment from the women’s liberation movement: the belief that “the personal is always political.”²⁵

This same kind of sentiment appears in several other venues, reinforcing the idea that amplification is very much about participating in preexisting discourses. For example, in a comment thread on a post from feminist activist Maryam Namazie’s blog, Nothing Is Sacred, the “personal is political” belief is used to justify femen’s topless protests and also to connect femen’s contemporary protests with the history of women’s liberation movements. In response to and in defense of Namazie’s post “Let’s Breast Them,” a post in which she calls on her readers to join in the topless demonstrations on behalf of Sboui, commenter “Sara” writes:

I don’t know if you remember, but the Suffragettes in Britain went on hunger strike and one of them even threw herself under a horse in order to get the vote. Similarly, women libbers in the 60s went on huge marches and burned their bras in order to receive equality. Shock tactics can work very nicely. ... Also, breasts are a natural part of the body and something that women should not be ashamed of. ... I like the idea of subverting ideas of what is hidden and taboo and reclaiming one’s body in order to use it for protest. I especially like the idea of showing solidarity with these Tunisian women, for whom showing their breasts is an even more daring and dangerous move. I don’t see why anyone should be offended or freaked out just because I’m not doing it merely for titillation and if they are, perhaps they should think about why that is. You don’t get anywhere by keeping your head down and playing nice. You have to be a gadfly in order to effect change. I know feminists irritate people and I don’t care. I’ll stop being annoying when people change their attitudes.²⁶

Sara’s reference to the “Britain Suffragettes” as well as “women libbers in the 60s” reflects a kind of discursive engagement with older arguments and thus older beliefs. Amplified through Sara’s statements about “reclaiming the body,” “showing solidarity” and “effecting change” by engaging in topless protests is, once again, a Western feminist ideology that sees a woman’s body as a contested site and thus a site of powerful recovery. In these references, however, the original context of Sboui’s text is completely lost. The local situation in Tunisia falls from view, and we are left with a generalized argument about women’s agency and liberation.

Page 58 →In another instance of amplification, the body-as-protest theme gets highlighted within the context of ethics and values. In a move to identify directly with femen, and by extension, Sboui, writer Jessica Klein from the Montreal-based online magazine, Forget the Box, constructs an ideological correlation between naked protest and liberation: “As a burlesque dancer and strip karaoke aficionado, it both baffles and deeply saddens me that there are places in the world where the simple act of baring your breasts is enough to get you killed.”²⁷ In this moment, amplification involves aligning oneself with a particular ideology and belief system: the idea that the naked body is and should be a liberated entity. And while making explicit this belief, in the same vein, Klein repositions Sboui’s text—Sboui’s breasts that might “get her killed”—in opposition to her own free-moving, strip-working body. In other words, the choice to introduce an ethics narrative (ethics in terms of the supposed moral questions surrounding nudity) with regard to Sboui’s body as a form of protest negates the larger context and specificity of Tunisia in the first place. More important, it negates and decontextualizes Sboui’s own body, which can arguably be read as performing a particular notion of “liberation,” even if only to incite a larger discussion about the meaning of liberation itself (e.g., liberation as something beyond the body itself). Furthermore, the amplified focus on ethics in this particular case assumes certain ideas about Islam and Arab nations as places of continued, abhorrent oppression. Thus, Sboui’s goal in addressing the current conditions of her country is tuned out, and what gets “turned up” is a larger narrative about geopolitical relations and differences between the Western–US context and the Arab world.

Interestingly enough, this ethics sentiment regarding the body-as-protest theme continues to circulate in various venues and becomes further pronounced in even more ironic ways. In describing the death threats Sboui received, Huffington Post UK reporter Sara Nelson writes: “We still didn’t hear [the] voice of Amina and didn’t see her face. Until the moment we hear word of Amina about her safety we are searching for her and continuing our international bare breasts support.”²⁸ Similarly, and yet on a very different kind of site—the blog Women Under Siege, which began as a journalism project addressing sexualized and gender-related violence—blog contributor Laura Bates writes of Sboui’s situation: “Amina isn’t alone. From Russia’s Pussy Riot to Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai, young women across the world are being silenced, locked away, or are even facing attempts on their life for no greater crime than attempting to stand up for what they believe in.”²⁹ In these moments of amplification, Sboui’s text, as an amplified narrative Page 59 →about bodily protest and the ethical questions and consequences related to naked bodily protest, becomes repositioned as an illustration of a missing, silent, and victimized Muslim woman. This kind of Western feminist ideology not only elides the local and specific context from which Sboui’s text emerged, it also perpetuates a problematic perspective of Muslim women as an essentialized, oppressed group. Furthermore, this kind of ideological representation advances a story about feminism and feminist ethics that positions Western feminists as ethically responsible for the silent, “non-liberated” women.

In echoing the work of transnational feminist scholars Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak, I would argue that the amplification of “Third World” women by “First World” women, to use Mohanty’s descriptive terms, obscures the subjectivities and lived experiences of “Third World” women and instead, produces a monolithic, homogenized, composite “Third World Woman.” This “discursive colonialism,” as Mohanty calls it, is “a mode of appropriation and codification of ‘scholarship’ and ‘knowledge’ about women in the third world.” This mode of appropriation enables an implicit self-(re)presentation of the “First World Woman” as secular, liberated, and in control of her body as opposed to the “Third World Woman,” who is always represented as conservative, lacking control of her body, inferior, a victim, and an object of the “gaze.”³⁰ As I illustrate in the following section, this kind of problematic representation becomes further pronounced, particularly in the context of national allegiances and national divides.

As the body-as-object, madness, and protest themes circulated, another theme emerged and was subsequently amplified: a woman’s body as an embodiment of the nation. In tracing this rhetorical sketch, the body-as-nation theme becomes used for various agendas: the body as representative of the hope for Tunisia, and in this case, Sboui as the hope for her nation, and then, in a contradictory move, the body resituated as the failure of Tunisia. This latter construction positions the body as lacking any national context; instead, it becomes indicative of an entire, essentialized region, and even more so, of an essentialized culture. More specifically, the amplification of the body-as-nation theme shows us just how quickly Sboui’s text moves in four phases: first, as a local conversation about the current context of Tunisia; second, as an ahistorical representation of Tunisia; third, as an ahistorical representation of the Arab world; and finally, as support for certain claims about globalism and geopolitical relations.

Page 60 →On several occasions, Sboui’s text, particularly her physical body, gets amplified as a representation of the ultimate hope for Tunisian women, and thus, by extension, the entire nation of Tunisia. For example, several days after Sboui’s post, the Daily Beast published an article with the following headline: “Can Bare Breasts Save Tunisia?: A Tunisian Teen is in Hiding after Stripping Down for Feminism.”³¹ The headline depicts Tunisia as a destitute country and a place of turbulence (note the verb “save”). In this same moment, women’s physical bodies, particularly women’s breasts, become represented as a national response—the hope and fate of Tunisia. On her blog Nothing Is Sacred, Namazie describes Sboui’s act as a response to “the second-class citizenship of women, the debased view of women’s bodies, the vile concept of honour and religious morality, misogyny, and Islamism and its Sharia law that are wrong.”³² Following this description, Namazie writes, “Amina’s is the voice of sanity, reason, protest and resistance. She represents us all.”³³ Here, Sboui is portrayed as a national icon. Namazie’s references to “sanity” and “reason” are a direct move that articulates Sboui’s text not as an act of hysteria, as described in one of the previous sections, but as an act of rationality and logic.

Alongside the amplification of the body as the hope of the nation-state, the amplification of Sboui’s body as a failure of the nation-state also circulated widely. The French news outlet France 24, for example, recirculates Sboui’s text within the context of historical and geographical accounts, and more intentionally, a backward–forward paradigm: “Since the 1950s, Tunisian women have enjoyed more rights than in other Arab countries, including the right to file for divorce. But militants are worried that the ruling Islamist Ennahda party is trying to chip away at their freedom.”³⁴ Here, Tunisia becomes historicized as a previously “progressive” country due to the women’s rights that were in place prior to the shifts in political parties. And prominent in such a claim is the idea that Tunisia is now in jeopardy and that Tunisian women, in particular, are in danger. In these moments, human rights discourse, as it relates to nationalism, becomes heavily amplified. Such discourses, as Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol argue, have the potential to “negotiate the terrain of national, international, and transnational political and social contexts.”³⁵ The amplification of Sboui’s body as representation of Tunisia’s instability reveals how gender, and particularly women, get configured in these negotiations as representative of the fate of the nation. What also becomes clear in these instances of circulation is that the discourse of women’s rights as human rights, particularly as it relates to women’s agency (or lack thereof), as well as women’s Page 61 →bodies, relies on the discursive production of a powerless subject in need of rights—that is, women are powerless, and therefore Tunisia is powerless. As feminist critic Wendy Brown contends: “In its very promise to protect the individual against suffering and permit choice for individuals, human rights discourse produces a certain kind of subject in need of a certain kind of protection ... the point is that there is no such thing as mere reduction of suffering or protection from abuse—the nature of the reduction or protection is itself productive of political subjects and political possibilities.”³⁶ If we accept Brown’s critique of human rights discourse—the idea that in its “promise” to empower individuals, human rights discourse produces a particular kind of subject in need of (currently lacking) empowerment—then a rhetoric of empowerment operates paradoxically as a discursive mode of disempowerment.

This idea is echoed in the Daily Beast article referenced earlier. In a move to situate Tunisia historically, Janine Di Giovanni writes: “Before Sidi Bouzid became the cradle of the Arab Spring, before Zine el Abidine Ben Ali ran away from Tunis with his bars of gold and his greedy family, before a 19-year-old called Amina took off her blouse and wrote across her chest ‘My body is mine not somebody’s honor’ there was feminism in Tunisia.”³⁷ Embedded in this claim is the amplification of Tunisia as a feminist nation prior to Sboui’s protest, suggesting, not so subtly, the belief that Sboui’s act of “taking off her blouse” repositioned the nation of Tunisia as anything but feminist. She even goes so far to say: “I fear that Amina has brought the cause of Tunisian women backward rather than forward.”³⁸ Moreover, she posits that the early “feminist” sentiment in Tunisia was directly related to its geographic location: feminism in Tunisia was a result of the nation’s close proximity to Western European countries and thus Western values. Giovanni writes:

Partially this [Tunisia’s “feminism”] is because of geographic location. Tunisia is close to Italy, France, and Spain and much of the educated population are polyglots who grew up watching global television. A series of grammar schools for über smart kids opened in the 1970s, meaning that an entire generation of bright Tunisians—men and women—was fostered. Even under the dictatorship of Ben Ali, education was promoted. Women rose to ranks that were unheard of in other Arab countries.³⁹

In this excerpt, Giovanni makes explicitly clear that feminism in the nation of Tunisia, back when it existed, was fully dependent on education and the Page 62 →influence of Western belief systems. The move to suggest that “global television” enhanced Tunisia’s national “progress” assumes that Tunisia relied on a larger global structure (read: Western structure) for its growth and national direction.

Later in her article, Giovanni resituates her discussion of Sboui, and thus Tunisia, in the present: “But in a country on the brink of losing its secular freedoms, the online protest could backfire.”⁴⁰ Here, Giovanni suggests that Sboui’s text endangers Tunisia—the potential loss of “secular freedoms,” or as she suggested earlier, Western values. A similar argument appears in the following excerpt from Bounce Sin, a “student lifestyle community” site dedicated to informing students about culture and politics. Olivia James wrote a story on Sboui and the “free Amina campaign”: “The black clouds of inequality rained hard last week in Tunisia, where it is reported that a 19 year old woman has been forcibly admitted into a psychiatric hospital. Her crime? Fraternizing with the concept of female liberation in a culture which still abhorrently belies the rights of women, prohibiting their equal existence alongside the men of their country and circumscribing them to rigidly defined codes of conduct.”⁴¹ What is clear in this excerpt is the way in which Sboui’s image becomes a catalyst for larger claims depicting Tunisia as an anti-progressive, “backward” country. The metaphor, “black clouds of inequality,” immediately positions both Sboui’s text and the nation of Tunisia as interchangeable, suggesting that Sboui’s text represents a regressive nation, bound by gender inequities.

Further down in this piece is a rhetorical maneuver that then repositions Sboui’s text as the cause of the gender inequities and exploitation already in place: “Stoking the fires of discourse is important but is it worth it at the cost of igniting cultural and religious outcry in a country where the results are inevitably dangerous for its voiceless female population? Is one young woman’s incarceration or even death going to aid the cause or just scare her fellow countrywomen into further submission?”⁴² Here, James makes a similar move to that of femen: constructing Tunisian women as a “voiceless population.” Once again, this Western feminist ideology advances a rescue narrative that erases Sboui’s actual voice and the message of her text.

In yet another example, users not only recirculate Sboui’s text as a representation of Tunisia’s decline, but they also cite mainstream news articles that use this kind of representation again and again, thus reinforcing the same sort of amplification. For example, in a debate forum on foreign affairs, one commenter picks up Giovanni’s article (referenced above) and recontextualizes it in terms of Tunisia’s decline. Quoting directly from the Page 63 →article, a commenter writes: “I fear Amina has brought the cause of Tunisian women backward rather than forward. Why provoke a country that stands at the brink of losing rights that women in the past took for granted? ... Other women tell me that while Tunisia has always been an advanced country in terms of women’s rights, they fear these rights will be threatened.”⁴³ In this particular paragraph, the first sentence—“I fear Amina has brought the cause of Tunisian women backward rather than forward”—is highlighted in a box on the page in order stand out among the rest of the text, suggesting the belief that Sboui’s text is indeed a symbol of a nation’s downfall. In a similar rhetorical move, a commenter on the Richard Dawkins’ Foundation Site, a group based in Washington, DC, whose stated goals are “teaching the value of science” and “advancing secularism,” reacted to a post entitled, “Is This Photo Grounds for Death?”⁴⁴ The anonymous commenter writes:

What has she actually done for the women of Tunisia who risk losing hard won real freedoms? Really? Because I’m not really sure her hard working, genuinely brave, female activist peers in the country are thanking her as much as RD net. I’m not sure the female bloggers and protesters appreciate what she is doing for them and I’m sure they’d have preferred an approach more geared to them and their genuine rights rather than teenage boys.⁴⁵

This writer then ends with a direct citation of the entire Daily Beast article mentioned earlier (part of the article is literally copied and pasted into the comment box). Here, Sboui’s text—an image of her naked body—becomes resituated as a risk to Tunisia’s progress. This rhetorical move, then, ultimately positions her as the fate of her nation.

In another instance, the kind of paradoxical move seen in the latter example results in another kind of amplification of the body-as-nation. However, in this example, the nation gets depicted as representative of the entire Arab world. Writer Bates, from the aforementioned blog Women Under Siege, writes of Sboui in this context, citing references to both Pakistan and Egypt alongside Tunisia: “These most basic rights and statements of equality—the right to object to being raped by your husband; the right for a woman to move freely from one place to another without asking permission—these are what the Brotherhood describes as ‘destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution’; these are tools that they claim ‘would subvert the entire society.’”⁴⁶ What is amplified and mobilized within this statement about human rights is not women’s agency within the nation of Tunisia, but rather certain beliefs about women and Page 64 →agency (or lack thereof) in the Arab world. Thus, the amplification of Sboui’s text reveals the ways in which sexual and bodily agency are deeply implicated in geopolitical relations as well as both national and international regulation.

This idea is depicted once again in a post about Sboui’s text operating as a potential risk to the Arab world, and therefore, a risk to all Arab and Muslim women: “Women played a huge part in rallying alongside their fellow male citizens to bring down the dictators ruling their nations. The main political beneficiary of this change, as we are seeing, is the rise of Islamic movements. Many are now saying that as a result of this trend the rights of women are under threat.”⁴⁷ Other news outlets, such as the Huffington Post, circulated and repurposed Sboui and femen’s actions as a human rights issue, using a rescue narrative about oppressed women in the Arab world. In an article entitled, “Topless Tunisian Femen Protester Amina Tyler is Home and Well, Says Lawyer Bouchra Bel Haj Hmida,” Sara Nelson references an interview with femen, reciting Shevchenko’s claim that Sboui represents the fate of the Arab world, the entire region of MENA: “Amina’s example is the voice of Arab spring that turned as cold Sharia’s winter. [An] Arab spring that can come back. Amina represents those who are going to break anti-human traditions that come from the Middle Ages but still are practiced today. For them it’s easier to kill a woman then to agree that she has rights.”⁴⁸ In advocating for Arab and Muslim women’s “voices” as a way of empowering women, as femen and the mainstream media do, such a rhetoric puts forth an ahistorical paradigm, where women in the Arab world are positioned as powerless, in need of a voice to move beyond abjection. In defining and universalizing Muslim and Arab women as agentless—that is, subjects who are not active agents in decision-making about their own lives—the discourse of human rights perpetuates a stereotype of women in the Arab world as downtrodden subjects. Furthermore, this kind of rhetoric implies a geopolitical opposition between the imagined “West” and “non-West.”

In the same Bounce Sin blog post referenced earlier, James moves from classifying Sboui’s protest as directly related to Tunisia to a narrative about Middle Eastern culture and politics. It is worth noting that Tunisia is not in fact considered part of the Middle East.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, James writes:

Don’t get me wrong; I wholeheartedly support their fight; it’s just difficult for me to understand why breasts are being used to desexualise women in Middle Eastern countries where such acts are far more dangerous than they are provocative. Of course one can argue that Amina’s Page 65 →actions have indeed ignited world wide discourse on the subject of female subordination rife within the Middle East and of course, as with any societal/cultural struggle there must often be colossal human sacrifice in the name of progress (Emily Davidson anyone?), but in the battle against patriarchy, is the use of breasts simply counterproductive?⁵⁰

These rhetorical moments represent examples of how circulating rhetorics, in their affective moments, interarticulate other kinds of national and transnational discourses about gender, geopolitical relations, and the global economy. As the image of Sboui circulates, the discourse of human rights becomes the primary focus, detached from the context, history, and body of Sboui herself. Instead, the entire “Middle East” comes to stand in for Sboui, positioning the Middle East (and thus Middle Eastern women) as always in crisis, “always imagined as a ‘region of aberrant violence.’”⁵¹ This kind of discursive formation constructs a perceived need for feminist movements that address human rights issues (e.g., femen), movements that are then repositioned as advocacies for geopolitical agendas—agendas that ultimately conflict and obscure a movement’s original goals and purposes.

The study of amplification’s role in circulation—particularly the amplification of Sboui’s text and the ways in which her text becomes a canvas for various and often conflicting narratives—can help us explore how writing and rhetorics within a transnational context have the potential to both reproduce and resist current ideologies. In this layer of circulation, I traced the ways in which Sboui’s text gets amplified through its entanglement with various discourses. In many instances, the discourses amplified are ones that have been circulating for some time—discourses that many are familiar with and already invested in. And yet what becomes clear in these discursive muddles is the fact that Sboui’s text, and particularly the context and exigence of her original message, becomes completely lost in the discursive disassemblage of her initial post. The amplification of Sboui’s text has less to do with her original message and context and more to do with the various kinds of discursive encounters her text undergoes through its circulation. Through the process of circulation, and more specifically, through amplification, Sboui’s text gets rearticulated as an iconic symbol of particular ideas and beliefs that differ from her original purpose. Central to this chapter, then, is an analysis of how meaning gets embedded and pulled from the continuous circulation of her act. The construction and amplification of Page 66 →these meanings lead to new kinds of arguments and therefore perform various kinds of rhetorical action that ultimately leave us with a variety of conflicting narratives. What we can gain from looking at these moments of amplification is a better understanding of how global differences are simultaneously highlighted and eclipsed, so that we might more keenly grasp the interplay between our own motives and those of locals when partaking in such transnational engagements.

In addition, as the bodily rhetoric of Sboui’s text gets taken up and pushed further into new arenas by various players, the process of amplification functions as a kind of affective world-making. The circulation of texts that emerged within the first four-week period prompted transnational engagements with a multitude of discourses, participation from writers from various parts of the world, and the production of various meanings. All of these meanings stood in relation to one text, produced by one person, from one particular place. In many ways, this kind of transnational engagement speaks to the various possibilities that texts can achieve through circulation. Sboui’s text got people talking—talking across borders, and at times across differences. And yet, through affective responses, the swift conflation of women’s bodies with certain ideologies, and the further amplification of those ideologies, allowed Sboui’s body to become a symbol for various political, economic, and geopolitical purposes. It is important, then, to recognize how the discursive claims that arose from these affective encounters and engagements with Sboui’s text constituted a narrative of “worlding,” to use Gayatri Spivak’s term, an ahistorical and atemporal process through which participants, ideas, and beliefs are brought into history through modes of representation.⁵² For example, as Sboui’s text gets taken up and recirculated in various representations of the objectified body and madness, these representations become evidence of the way in which a woman’s body is constantly used for economic purposes, as well as political projects of regulation. Within the body-as-protest and the body-as-nation themes—particularly the amplified use of rights discourses in both themes—Muslim and Arab women come to stand in for the “developing” MENA region, the powerless “non-West.” Such representations echo what Grewal has argued is one of the implicit problematics in rights discourse: “Women outside the West, in human rights discourse, [are] represented as objects of charity and care by the West but [can] become subjects who [can] participate in the global economy and become global citizens; this [is] the ‘third world’ victim who [has] become a global subject.”⁵³ In other words, the circulation and amplification of Sboui’s text as a narrative about rights in relation to Page 67 →women’s bodies, and rights in relation to the fate of Tunisia, “mobilizes all kinds of knowledges and practices—disciplinary, sovereign, military, and governmental.”⁵⁴

On multiple fronts, the themes discussed in this chapter reveal a trajectory of rhetorical production that begins with Sboui and ends with globalism—the “global subject,” to use Grewal’s term. Perhaps this is a result of the ways in which users amplify messages through circulation—the tendency to pull a message from its original context, moving it further and further outside of that context, so that in the end, it is completely lost, or even erased. As is the case with Sboui’s text, dominant discourses and universalized meanings associated with concepts of agency, liberation, and rights overpower and erase the actual lived experience of Sboui because those dominant discourses do not allow for departures from social, Western norms. Transnational feminist Alison Jagger speaks to this problem, noting that “The existing discourses or texts of [domination] do not provide such a language: even when they promise explicitly to liberate the subaltern, they obscure the distinctive nature of her oppression; indeed, by purporting to speak for her, they position her as mute.”⁵⁵ These obscurities of subjectivity, she suggests, arise out the tendency of Western feminists and activists to project a kind of global solidarity, where all experiences can be known and understood. And yet by attempting to create that global solidarity, as femen tried to do, differences become both strategically obscured and emphasized, and experiences, agencies, and histories relevant and specific to local concerns become something universal and singular.

As I discuss in the following chapter, these differences become even more obscured and emphasized, as certain themes gain a significant amount of velocity and as various individuals and groups begin forming alliances over the symbolic use of Sboui’s text. The possibilities for further conversations about the kinds of themes discussed throughout this chapter become limited and less “possible” over time. The velocity associated with Sboui’s text and its various iterations becomes, in large part, both a communal and divisive effort—a kind of cultural politic and thus a kind of allying mechanism. For example, as femen’s circulation of the phrase, “There will be a million Aminas,” predicts a homogeneity of response, that response fails to eventuate.⁵⁶ Instead, the response, while actively intensified through the velocity of its circulation, becomes far more fractured and contentious, thus creating new social relations where the goals and purposes undergirding those relations diverge greatly from the original context of Sboui’s protest.