The “menstruating” Muslim Brotherhood: taboo metaphor, face attack, and gender in Egyptian culture

ABSTRACT

Euphemisms for menstruation and menstruation as a metaphor target have gained much attention in social cognition or communication studies. What is far less explored is the reverse mapping, that is, the use of menstruation as a metaphor source domain (to describe or reason about politics). The present study, using data from the Egyptian press and social media, aims to rectify this. This data will be approached with the literature on impoliteness in mind. As will be seen in this article, metaphorical descriptions of an opposition movement (the Muslim Brotherhood) as a menstruating woman may instill relevant negative emotions such as anger, not only among out-group members but among pro-government fanatics. As sexist insults, menstrual metaphors involve social identity face. Clearly, the menstrual taboo relates to gender (social group membership) and hence to things people often have much face invested in (i.e. to core identity claims). However, it can also instill positive emotional reactions such as laughter. It is then argued that the enjoyment of a taboo metaphor as such relies not on gender, but on ideological beliefs. One can be simultaneously a radical feminist and a pro-government activist. People, men and women, may thus accept or resist metaphors for different reasons.

KEYWORDS:

• Taboo metaphor and face aggravation
• humor and menstruation
• political discourse
• gender and Facebook emotional reactions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Notions like “concrete” and “abstract” in fact seem to be vague, however. In this article, one writes what is often mentioned as one of the characteristics of conceptual metaphor— that it translates more abstract notions in more “embodied” ones (when WAR, e.g., is seen as actual, bodily fights— not as a more abstract concept). But there seem to be degrees of abstractness/concreteness (for a discussion, see El Refaie 2015).

2 In 2015, a popular Armenian belly dancer, Sofinar Gourian, was sentenced to six months in prison for ‘insulting Egypt’ after she wore a tight dress resembling the national flag during a performance (The Daily Mail 12 April 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Bremen.

Notes on contributors

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen, Germany. His work appeared in more than 25 research papers (e.g. in Semiotica, Social Semiotics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Discourse and Society, Discourse and Communication, and Review of Cognitive Linguistics) and one monograph (Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-based Experimental Study, Routledge, 2019). He is on the board of journals such as Discourse and Society and Multimodality and Society. In addition, Abdel-Raheem acts as a reviewer for a great many journals, including Language Sciences, Text and Talk, Metaphor and Symbol, Language and Communication, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, Cross-Cultural Research, etc.