This book is a valuable contribution to growing literature examining the political, aesthetic, affective, and performative dynamics associated with the Arab Uprisings of 2011–2013. Editors Frances S. Hasso and Zakia Salime identify “spatialized gender and sexual dynamics and symbolism” (2) as the central themes that animated contributors’ research and collaboration in the four years of putting the volume together. The book gathers explorations of embodied protest, virtual discursivity, and the political messages in viral and semiviral photographs and performances. It is an enthusiastic, hopeful documentation of individual and collective efforts associated with the “Arab Spring.” In the introduction, Hasso and Salime establish that the individual contributions are less interested in an analysis based on political efficacy than they are in the “sticky and embodied aspects of difference and inequality that limited the horizons of inclusive pluralities” (4–5).

The editors claim that the volume works against the dominance of spectacle in media coverage and analysis of the political events in the region, ranging from the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor, to the buoyant occupations of Tahrir Square and other public places, to the draconian, widely disseminated displays of police and state force on both individual bodies (in protesters beaten and bloodied) and public landmarks (as in the destruction of Manama's Pearl Roundabout). They write, “the public square ‘eventfulness’ of the uprisings, which made them globally legible and consumable as media ‘spectacle,’ often concealed the quotidian, dispersed, embodied, and less visible dimensions of especially sexual and gendered dynamics in multiple sites, including the ‘private,’ virtual, and discursive” (5).

In trying to work against this dominance of the spectacle, most of the case studies and examples featured in this volume nonetheless rely on relatively spectacular and viral or semiviral examples to prove their point. Widely shared musique engagée in Tunisia, viral video clips in Morocco, substantial public gatherings in Yemen, the controversial nude images of Alia Elmahdy, footage during Egyptian protests of “the girl in the blue bra,” the photograph of “the girl in the red dress”—examples viral enough to have an international shorthand—form the majority of case studies in this book. In this way, despite the volume's emphasis on gender generally and on women and girls specifically, many of the contributions cannot escape the spectacle of both uprising and gender within which the understandings of the political transformation of the “Arab Spring” circulate in both local and international discursive planes and media networks. While this volume offers compelling scholarship on embodied and spatial aspects of the uprisings, accompanying media dynamics, the related blogosphere, and the transnational dimensions of some of these embodied/virtual forays, the question remains for this reviewer what an ethnography and analysis of politics in the region that really avoids the “globally legible” and refuses consumption of “media spectacle” would look like.

Sonali Pahwa's contribution, the first chapter of the book, “Politics in the Digital Boudoir: Sentimentality and the Transformation of Civil Debate in Egyptian Women's Blogs,” is perhaps the most successful in evading the spectacular and in so doing offers a rich, close description of the intermeshing of affect and politics in digital discursivity. Part of the strength of the piece is the way in which Pahwa follows individual female bloggers in Egypt leading up to and away from the January 25 Revolution, thus undermining the widely held centrality of Hosni Mubarak's February 11 abdication and the 18 days of occupation of Tahrir Square that preceded it. In her chapter, we follow the rise and fall and recycling of authors and the platforms they build as “digital homes,” (31) an analysis that breathes intimate life into the negotiations of a network of activists and writers “largely outside the dominant repertoire in the revolutionary blogosphere” (39).

Susana Galán's chapter, “Cautious Enactments: Interstitial Spaces of Gender and Politics in Saudi Arabia,” pushes an analysis of physical and digital space to welcome effect in her analysis of the Women2Drive campaign. Her analysis of offline-online collaboration and the ways in which she inverts the example of the flash mob in her reading of the cyber activism that worked to encourage Saudi women to take the wheel in 2011 is a sensitive treatment of agency and the particular negotiations of private and public space unique to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This makes for compelling reading of the possibilities of action and coordination, “the outcomes [of which] … are not easy to control or delimit” (185). The way in which she connects the “interstitial spaces of automobiles, shopping malls, and cyber sites such as personal blogs and YouTube” (185) pushes against expectations in the literature about the liberatory effects of certain kinds of spaces and behavior for women in the Arab world (Khalili Reference Khalili2015).

Karina Eileraas's chapter, “The Politics of Rage and Aesthetics in Aliaa Elmahdy's Body Activism,” and Banu Gökarıksel's “Intimate Politics of Protest: Gendering Embodiments and Redefining Spaces in Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park and the Arab Revolutions” are both strong contributions to growing bodies of literature on gender performance and activism in the Middle East and North Africa. These chapters are theorized analyses of familiar images of and actions taken by women that intervene in and synthesize existing literature with nuance. Gökarıksel's chapter additionally works as a compelling conclusion to the volume. One does wonder, however, why the case is made to tie Gezi's protests exclusively to the occupations of city squares in Arab cities of the Arab Uprisings when the evidence for other through lines of protest (Occupy, for example) are equally apparent.

The volume uses contemporary theorizations of gender, affect, performance, and space to analyze a range of embodied actions and digital discursivity. Its language will be familiar to students of gender, performance, media, geography, anthropology, and cultural studies. It is worth noting that the subjects of analyses, while perhaps familiar to many following the revolutions over the past several years, will not always be remembered with clarity. The volume thus additionally functions as a valuable archive of the images, sounds, and interactions that touched the lives of so many and whose effects, the authors remind us, are still “uncertain and contestable” (14).