Gated communities—walled-off and access-controlled upscale residential enclaves—started to proliferate in the deserts surrounding Cairo under the auspices of the Mubarak regime in the mid-1990s. Increased perceptions of insecurity and the multiplication and intensification of incidents of public sexual violence in the aftermath of the January 25 Revolution have conditioned many Cairo inhabitants’ decision to move away from the city and to one of these compounds, exacerbating processes of spatial segregation and abandonment of public space already in place. Gated communities deploy a profusion of security technologies, including access control, personnel on the ground patrolling around the clock, and video surveillance. The “informal zoning” (Mitchell 2003) that results from the uneven securitization of these different urban spaces functions as a mechanism of “spatial governmentality” (Merry 2001) that “exclud[es] potential criminal acts from segregated spaces, leaving the rest of the city to watch out for itself” (Zukin 2003). While a minority of Egyptians can afford to enclose themselves in these enclaves, the lives of those who stay in the city core are made more precarious as a result of the state’s disinvestment and the failure of governance in the city. Fear—an affect with distinctive spatial dimensions—is at the center of these urban trends. Building upon affect theory, feminist geography and critical urban studies scholarship, this paper draws on interviews with women living in the suburban towns of New Cairo and Sixth of October City and with residents in gated communities to examine how fear operates at the level of the body to create the desire to maintain a physical distance from bodies and spaces perceived as fearsome and—when such a separation cannot be secured—the urge to leave the space before the object of fear materializes. In addition, it explores how the circulation of accounts of violence facilitates the socialization of fear, whereby episodes of public sexual violence are vicariously and affectively experienced at a distance, prompting the preemptive and anticipatory adoption of safety measures. The paper argues that upper- and upper-middle-class women’s increasing adoption of strategies of urban flight further marginalizes those women who continue to inhabit public space. As a result, women in the city are rendered simultaneously more vulnerable and more alienated, facilitating the articulation of discourses that figure women’s bodies in public space as "at risk" and "a risk."

This paper examines bystander interventions to combat sexual violence in Egypt’s public spaces as a form of anti-carceral politics that has emerged in response to police and military tactics of the post-neoliberal Egyptian security state. Such interventions also represent a mode through which activists seek to fashion a new secular morality centered on human rights, in distinction to religiously-inspired articulations of women’s bodily security tied to private rather than public space. HarassMap, an Egyptian anti-sexual harassment initiative founded in late 2010, has served as a pioneer of volunteer-based bystander interventions in the country, which expanded in 2012 at the height of revolutionary protest with the rise of new decentralized, anti-state and anti-NGO initiatives seeking to combat sexual harassment, assault and rape in Tahrir Square and beyond. The rise of bystander interventions in Egypt coincides with its adoption as the solution du jour to gender and sexuality-based violence within international development and humanitarianism. Scholars have expressed concerns over humanitarian-based development interventions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), linking them to increased governmentalization and the (re)orientalization of both male and female bodies. Scholarly critiques of Egyptian anti-sexual harassment work have positioned some activists, including HarassMap, as instruments of Western aid agencies and Egyptian security state institutions. However, transnationally linked bystander interventions work in opposition to the increasing militarization of political power in Egypt, where the lives and deaths of incarcerated male bodies are at stake. These interventions contrast also with the political and juridical solutions to gender violence sought by civil society actors, who assign ultimate power over gendered human rights to the state. Bystander interventions constitute a move away from carceral politics to a politics of community security that rests on an embodied sense of individual responsibility linked to secular understandings of bodily rights and integrity. Here, the focus shifts from the gendered duality of the female victim who requires justice and the male harasser who must be brought to justice within a politico-legal structure that deploys violence against both. Through the figure of the bystander, class, racial and gendered differences in Egypt are, perhaps problematically, smoothed over as each body is ascribed equal capacity, burden and authority to fashion just public spaces. Bystander bodies become new terrain on and through which local and global forces struggle over the meanings of rights and responsibility in creating public security in Egypt.

In developing countries like Egypt, “The neoliberal program,” writes Tim Mitchell (1999), “has not removed the state from the market or eliminated “profligate” public subsidies. These achievements belong to the imagination.” Despite promising wide-reaching positive outcomes, neoliberal policies in Egypt have had detrimental effects on poor households, on the nature and yield of agricultural production, and on the industrial output of the country, but what about the effects on the body? How have gendered/othered bodies fared under the policies of deregulation as they experience what David Harvey (2005) has labeled, the “creative destruction” of former systems of governance? What conclusions can be reached if we placed the gendered body at the intersection of neoliberalism, patriarchy and gender? And, what role does the corporeal play in the production of gender, sexuality and power under neoliberalism? Taking neoliberalism as a historical and social context, this paper re-examines Deniz Kandioti’s (1988) brilliant concept of “bargaining with patriarchy” to argue that neoliberalism has shifted the terms of negotiation. By adhering to expectations of honor and shame, women have “bargained” with their bodies under patriarchal systems as a self-serving strategy. Kandiyoti posits that women often accepted unfavorable patriarchal conditions in return for foreseeable benefits they stood to gain from the system. These decisions to strike the patriarchal bargain are not however, the outcome of disempowered attitudes or passive bodies but are often strategic. Idioms of patriarchy such as honor and shame have been the cornerstone of these bargaining processes that are often played out on the body. While gendered bodies struggle under the economic repercussions of deregulation, they also redraw the limits imposed by honor and shame on the corporeal to create shifts in body scapes. Thus, whereas neoliberalization policies have been economically devastating to patriarchal bargains, the impact on gendered bodies mirrors their “creative destruction.” This paper discusses the effects of this creative destruction on the body and aims to provide the socioeconomic framework necessary for understanding women’s participation in the Egyptian uprising of 2011.

Drawing on ethnographic research in a low-income neighborhood in Cairo and informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and feminist scholarship, this paper explores the body as physical capital that can be converted to economic, cultural, and social forms of capital. This conversion is strongly linked to gender and is particularly central to masculinity, which is deeply connected to a man’s ability to provide and to embody strength, respectability, and good taste. Labor is key to these processes. In this neighborhood, most men work not because of a desire to actualize an autonomous self or because of an abstract sense of individual satisfaction or success. Rather, they work for long hours in difficult jobs to materialize the norms that define proper and caring men. In the context of recent economic and political changes, this endeavor has become increasingly challenging given the difficulties of securing adequate housing, good education, affordable food, and necessary health care. The more the state withdraws from offering these services and the higher the social pressures to engage in conspicuous consumption, the more of a burden is placed on men and women to secure access to these basic services and to satisfy the growing needs of their loved ones. Looking at two siblings at different stages of their life, tracing their journey to adulthood, employment/unemployment, marriage, and parenthood, this paper explores the relationship between neoliberal rationalities, work, and gendered and classed bodies in urban Egypt. It addresses questions such as: How do these changes shape the performativity of gender? How does the standing of a man change when he is not able to find a stable job and cannot convert his physical capital to other forms of capital? How does work structure the body and its daily rhythms?

This paper contributes to the broader endeavor of writing a political history of the effects of neoliberal economy in republican Egypt from a gender perspective, focusing on the corporality of women’s lived experience and women’s narrations of history. Building on the work of feminist historians and theories elaborated by feminist epistemologists on decolonizing feminism, I focus on the construction of what I call a collective feminist body in the decade between the first two UN conferences dedicated to Women: the Mexico City Conference of 1975 and the Nairobi conference of 1985. Trough an analysis of 15 oral histories about that period I have collected in Cairo between 2011 and 2018 (among prominent feminist and human rights activists, intellectuals, trade unionists and politicians), I question the ambiguous link between the launch of infitah policies in 1977 and the emergence of the so-called second-wave of Egyptian independent feminism that emerged in the early 1980s. Specifically, I analyse the feminist genealogies and the trajectories that led to the emergence of second-wave independent secular feminism in the above-mentioned period, illustrating the challenges faced by independent feminist activists who were operating in the framework of an authoritarian State. While the public discussion on women and development, on reproductive health and on sexual rights flourished in governmental and international spaces, in good measure by stressing the burden imposed by “traditional cultures” in order to enhance their agenda of “modern development”, independent feminist activists and emerging women’s collectives and associations emphasized that more than the “traditions” and “culture”, it was the economic factor – in particular, the severe economic crisis followed upon the years of infitah policy and the adoption of a structural adjustment program – that most reinforced cultural and social conservatism. My research, narrating history through the collection of personal stories shifts the focus from the institutional accounts produced by the government to activists' lived experiences, contributes to the epistemological debate about decolonizing feminism and to a larger discussion on corporeality through feminist history lenses. By asking how feminism addressed neoliberal governments’ attempts to policing and to disciplining women’s bodies, this research leads to a deeper understanding of Egyptian political history in that period.