Sofia J. Smith works on gender, celebrity, and authoritarian politics in the Middle East. Her dissertation, Performance Anxieties: Celebrity, Citation, and Citizenship in Modern Egypt, examines how struggles over women’s public visibility — anchored in the mass prosecution of Egypt’s so-called “TikTok women” — become a medium through which citizens and regimes asymmetrically co-author authoritarian order. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork across politically antagonistic communities on and offline, the project develops the concept of “authoritarian citizenship” to theorize how practices of imitation, citation, gossip, and denunciation produce differentiated forms of political membership.