Legal architectures of anti-gender politics in Egypt: The ‘TikTok girls’ case

In August 2025, several women content creators were arrested in Egypt for their online activities in the social media platform TikTok (Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights 2025). Similar detentions had taken place in July 2020 as part of a crackdown on online forms of self-expression (Samir 2020). This paper analyzes what became known as the “TikTok girls’ case” through the lens of anti-gender politics to shed light onto the legal architectures through which gender and sexuality are being policed and disciplined in post-coup Egypt. The paper aims at mapping the constellation of actors implicated in these processes at both the state (legislative, executive, and judiciary) and non-state level as well as disentangling the punitive assemblage through which this repression takes place. To that end, it focuses on the dynamic interaction between the recently enacted Law No. 175 of 2018 on Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes and the Islamic concept of hisba, which has been instrumentalized by the Public Prosecutor to encourage Egyptian publics to denounce whoever, according to article 25 of the law, “infringes a family principle or value of the Egyptian society.” Building upon the work of Michel Foucault, the paper mobilizes the concept of “sexual governmentality,” which I coined to discuss public sexual violence in revolutionary Egypt (Galán 2023), to examine how these practices—situated in the interstice between online and offline, state repression and civic policing—contribute to Egyptian’s conduct with regard to gender and sexuality under the authoritarian regime of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. This paper contributes to ongoing academic debates about transnational expressions of anti-gender politics by complicating the analysis of state vs. non-state anti-gender actors and by extending the analysis to Egypt, a case hitherto missing from the scholarship.