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Survivors and not Victims: The movement against public sexual violence beyond the politics of recognition.
Abstract
This paper investigates the growing movement against public forms of gender-based violence in Egypt. I place the politics of combating sexual violence against women, and the rise of new forms of feminist consciousness over the past three years, within the context of post-revolutionary formal and informal politics. I focus specifically on the synergies between the activism of two of those earliest groups (OPANTISH and TAHRIR BODYGUARDS), and the work on one feminist organization (NAZRA FOR FEMINIST STUDIES). I focus specifically on how those groups/organizations define their activities and chart new ways to negotiate and redefine women's presence in the public sphere, their bodily integrity and their role in politics. With repertoires that range between direct street intervention to save women who are assaulted, to launching media campaigns, to raising consciousness among young women, I argue that together, these groups represent a new form of feminist activism that seeks to problematize established beliefs including that of body safety, the and the duality of victim/ survivor. I specifically analyze how this type of activism trouble common understandings of feminist activism.The female survivors of sexual assaults became an important iconic representation of this movement, one through which the message of empowerment, resistance and direct engagement could be enforced, and through which victims could become survivors. But was the iconic survivor a political actor? And if so, how? In this paper, I combine a discursive institutional analysis grounded with a symbolic treatment of subject-formation, to explain how the frames, repertories and activism on part of this movement converged with, diverged from and transformed the scope of women’s rights in post revolutionary Egypt. Based on a six month qualitative fieldwork research in Cairo between 2013 and 2014;including forty in-depth interviews, I reflect on how key activists' efforts became central in the revolutionary discourses and the internal contradictions that arose out this. Finally, I argue that new forms of activism around sexual violence in Egypt are political acts that provide a departing point from earlier feminist engagements with gender-based violence in Egypt, and that redefine the very notion of the political.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies