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Self-Governance in Zero-Tolerance Zones: the spatial politics of stop street harassment campaigns in Cairo
Abstract
The phenomenon of sexual harassment and violence in Egypt has recently gained international attention, especially through the coverage of mass assaults in Tahrir Square. Paul Amar critiques the pre-2011 efforts of certain feminist organizations to tackle sexual harassment because they called for an intensified response from Egyptian state security and police, actors that are behind the use of sexual violence to target politically active women (Amar 2011). Moreover, he argues that a securitized response to sexual harassment merely encouraged these security actors to 'protectively' detain women and to round up working class male youth in order to quash public political interventions for democratic change. This paper studies the post-2011 campaigns by various groups (HarassMap, Basma/Imprint and Anti-Sexual Harassment) to tackle street harassment in a way that avoids securitization, sovereign violence and the disciplining of women's public respectability. Instead these groups focus on ending the social acceptability of sexual harassment by targeting day-to-day practices in the streets of Cairo. To do so, they encourage workers in street spaces (e.g. doormen, cafe/restaurant owners, shopkeepers) to intervene to stop harassment when it occurs, creating zero-tolerance zones. I examine these spatial tactics to understand the potentially emancipatory and exclusionary potentials of these localized governance and security strategies.
Discipline
International Relations/Affairs
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies