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.

This paper explores tensions between socially and politically motivated public sexual violence in Egypt and, consequently, the social or political interventions designed to combat such violence. It centers on the work of community-based anti-sexual harassment organizations prior to and following the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution and argues their work is inherently political. This argument engages a critique of anti-sexual harassment activism that has emerged since the start of the revolution. At the heart of this critique is the work of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), an advocacy NGO who began the first anti-sexual harassment campaign in 2005, and HarassMap, a volunteer-based social initiative that was founded in 2010. The targets of both organizations have been discussed as “cultural” in nature (Rizzo 2012; Abdelmonem and Galan 2016). Salient elements of this critique are that the work of these organizations have failed to target the state and hold it accountable for instrumentalizing sexual violence and gendering respectability to push women out of public protest. This critique has argued groups like ECWR and HarassMap have been complicit in expanding the scope of the security state, either through direct calls for increased policing or making available biogeographic data that may be coopted by the state (Amar 2011; Grove 2015). Additionally, it has argued that ECWR and HarassMap have helped to racialize young Arab men, thus making them targets for an expanded security state. This paper contends that such critiques of anti-sexual harassment work rest on a particular conception of gender violence activism that views sites of “cultural” engagement as outside of the realm of the political. Here, the political is largely viewed as a reference only to political culture, where engagement with the state structure is critical. Drawing on anthropological notions of cultural politics, this paper contends the political may be viewed in two ways: 1) as a reference to political culture, and 2) as the contestations and negotiations that take place within “cultural” spaces. Such “cultural” contestations may help to shape the nature of political culture and state practice. Drawing on HarassMap’s work in combating bystander apathy, which involves challenging norms of gender and social responsibility within the community, and seeking to build a critical mass against sexual harassment, this paper highlights how HarassMap bridges these two notions of the political. Here, “cultural” work that does not target the state is an inherently political attempt to combat gender-based violence.

The celebration of the fourth edition of D-CAF, the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, in the spring of 2015 in Cairo revealed important tensions regarding the use and ownership of urban spaces, women's access to and occupation of public space, and the memorialization of the January 25th Revolution in an increasingly securitized landscape following the military intervention of July 2013. My presentation will focus on the street art workshop “Unchained,” organized by the graffiti initiative Women on Walls (WOW) in the framework of D-CAF, and examine the discussions and reactions that the project sparked as the participant artists painted murals on women's issues on the walls of Youssef Al Guindy and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, famous for their revolutionary graffiti and the murals honoring the 2011 Revolution martyrs. Through interviews with organizers and participant artists from Egypt and other countries of the Middle East, photographs documenting the creation (and partial destruction) of the collective graffiti during the 5-day workshop, and online exchanges in Facebook and Twitter among street artists and activists, I will analyze how notions of revolutionary street art are embedded in gendered, nationalist, and political discourses that predetermine who has the right to represent the Revolution and who is entitled to be represented as part of it. I will discuss these events in the context of the rise and escalation of sexual violence in political protests under the military rule that followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and during the Morsi and El-Sisi regimes, and the multiplication of independent initiatives against sexual harassment and assault that proliferated in Tahrir Square as well as on the streets and in public transportation since 2012. Moreover, I will situate my analysis within broader discussions about recent urban developments, the pacification of Downtown Cairo, the securitization of public space, and the co-optation of the revolutionary discourse by El-Sisi's regime.

Historically, Civil society organizations in Egypt have exerted a lot of efforts into influencing legal reform. However its results are often ambivalent. As public and street forms of activism are now punishable, legal reform and policy making are back to be the battleground (NAZRA, EIPR, NWF). June14th, Egypt’s National Anti-FGM Day, honors 12-year-old Bodour Shaker, who died on the same date in 2007 during the procedure. Bodour’s death prompted the MoH’s ministerial decree (271), which closed a loophole in the previous 1996 decree by banning everyone from performing FGM in governmental or non-governmental premises. In 2008, the Egyptian Parliament agreed to criminalize FGM in the Penal Code, also seconded by Al -Azhar and Grand Mufti’s statements. Five years later, in June 2013, Sohair al-Bata'a’s death reached the news. For the first time the Doctor and the family are prosecuted under FGM charges . However, despite the prison sentence, the doctor still operates in the area and National and International organizations have renovated their calls for justice with no tangible result so far . In June 2014, just before handing power to president elect Abdelfatah Al-Sisi, former interim president Adly Mansour, issued Decree No.50 amending Article 306 (a) bis and Article 306 (b) bis to combat crimes of sexual harassment. This was the first definition of sexual harassment ever included in the Egyptian Penal Code. During Al-Sisi’s celebrations as president, several mob sexual attacks were documented. Rapidly, under the new law and also charged for attempted rape, murder and torture, seven assailants were sentenced to life prison. Independent organizations stated: First Verdict in Cases of Mob-Sexual Assault and Gang Rape in Tahrir Square Is No End to the Story . The remaining 500 cases documented since 2012 are still pending for justice. Using approaches developed by Anthropology of Law, this paper examines the first FGM trial and the genesis of the sexual harassment law to understand the complexities and contradictions implied in articulating a dialogue with different patriarchal authorities to foster legal reform. It also explores the possibility of social justice and gender equality through legal reform in the current environment of blatant human rights violations to answer the questions: how are women’s rights articulated in the practice of justice? And which is their particular role in the current authoritarian system?