Online Space for Collective Dissent: Reconstructing Gender Discourses in Egypt
Panel 155, sponsored byAssociation for Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS), 2014 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 24 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
In "The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution," Aouragh and Alexander distinguish between conceptualizing the internet as a tool that brings change from a grassroots level and viewing it as a virtual space for the collective articulation of dissent. Their concept of the internet as a space for dissent allows us to understand social movement actors as citizen participants: engaging with public discourse to define social problems, organize social action, and negotiate social constructions of citizenship. The internet has allowed Arab women activists to mobilize across the country and to connect online discourses and grassroots activism, such as the activism seen during the anti-Mubarak uprising in Egypt. This panel explores how online spaces are used to negotiate alternative constructions of gender, sexuality and violence in Egyptian public discourse, with a focus on how these new notions are operationalized in calls for social justice.
Paper one examines the innovative use of technology and social media by HarassMap, a social initiative, to raise awareness and mobilize on a nation-wide scale against sexual harassment. The author argues that by breaking the fear of engaging in protests and other political activities, the Egyptian Revolution has created opportunities for projects addressing gender violence, and HarassMap's use of online platforms generates a new form of collective action with feminist underpinnings.
Paper two explores discussion forums and social media sites, such as Egyptian Talks and Twitter, as a space and tool for constructing an alternative, gendered conception of taharush el-ginsy (sexual harassment) focused on women. It argues online forums provided safe spaces to debate norms on sexual harassment, which prior to the start of social activism in 2005 focused on child molestation, fears of molestation leading to homosexuality, and some workplace sexual violence. Since civil society activism began, activists have employed online sites to fashion new norms of taharush el-ginsy as the public assault of women in order to define the scope of the problem and advocate for social change.
Paper three explores the construction of a Muslim, female, activist identity in the You Tube call for action credited with starting the Egyptian Revolution, disseminated by Asmaa Mahfouz, a leader in the April 6 movement. It argues that because online space is available to both local and international audiences, Mahfouz employs secular discourse and religious discourse to appeal to both simultaneously. However, the author further argues that Mahfouz articulates a rhetorical position independent from both, exhibiting what Habermas calls a 'postsecular,' to articulate an alternative political identity.
This paper will explore the ways in which Egypt’s 2011 revolution has provided a fertile climate for women’s movements to gain widespread recognition, thus allowing them to instigate an unprecedented push for collective action. We will focus on HarassMap: Egypt’s first ever initiative working to combat the sexual harassment epidemic using mobile and online technology. A damning UN report conducted in 2013 claims that 99.3% of Egyptian women admit to have been sexually harassed, while 85% said that no bystanders stopped to intervene. Although this is nothing new, such sexualised violence has emerged again as a highly organised and systematic tactic for ‘punishing’ and humiliating Egyptian women who partake in political action including being groped, verbally abused, undressed or gang-raped.
Launched only one year before the revolution, HarassMap offers Egypt’s first online platform where victims can anonymously report incidents of sexual harassment using email, a phone call or an SMS message. This data is then collated onto a virtual map presented on the HarassMap website, which flags ‘harassment hotspots’ around Egypt that are targeted directly through on-the-ground community activism. Using the political process theory as a basis, this work analyses HarassMap’s progress and evaluates its effectiveness. We will argue that two important developments in Egypt’s post-uprising context have been vital to HarassMap’s success: i.) the new opportunities for social dissent and political action made possible in the wake of the revolution, and ii.) the central role the internet and new media has claimed within the lives of Egyptians as tools of citizen awareness and engagement in post-2011 times. Together, these two factors have provided a ripe and opportunistic backdrop enabling HarassMap to raise the status of sexual harassment in Egypt, to rally participation, and more recently, to expand the medium of their message from a limited online platform to a nation-wide mass media campaign. Thus, although the women’s movement in Egypt has existed for decades, our discussion will provide evidence of how the ability to take advantage of timely political opportunities and to mobilize technical resources has allowed initiatives such as HarassMap to find a new impetus for collective action in post-2011 Egypt. Furthermore, the discussion on HarassMap will provide an important springboard to exploring the broader question of whether or not women’s initiatives that have proliferated post-2011 can be considered part of a collective feminist movement.
Sexual harassment (taharush el-ginsy) has been a recognized problem facing women in Egyptian public space for at least two decades. However, it is only within the last decade that civil society and grassroots movements have initiated public campaigns to end this problem. Prior to these public campaigns, discussions of taharush el-ginsy primarily existed within online Arabic discussion boards. Early conversations within these shadow publics on taharush el-ginsy focused on child molestation, fears of molestation leading to male homosexuality, solutions to heal homosexuality through intensified religious faith, with some attention to workplace sexual harassment targeting women. Public sexual harassment targeting women, to this point, had generally been understood as a form of “flirtation” (muaksa). A shift in sexual harassment discourse began in 2005 with the launch of an unofficial Safe Streets campaign organized by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR). In this campaign, informed by transnational discourses of women’s rights, taharush el-ginsy was strategically chosen to convey greater violence targeting women in public with the goal of effecting social change.
This paper explores online discussion boards and social media sites, such as Egyptian Talks (muhawarat masriyun) and Twitter, as both a space and an instrument for negotiating and refashioning an alternative, gendered conceptualization of taharush el-ginsy focused specifically on women. Analyzing messages, blogs, posts and tweets from Arabic discussion boards and social media sites from the beginning of the Arabic internet to today (2000-2013), this paper underscores how online worlds provided safe spaces for people to discuss and debate highly charged topics that were taboo in public discourse until the Egyptian revolution. It examines the strategic decisions made by Egyptian NGOs around the use of taharush el-ginsy to dispel notions of sexual harassment as harmless and welcome flirtation. Furthermore, data collected through participant observation, interviews, and surveys with organizations such as HarassMap, Anti-Sexual Harassment, the founders of ECWR Safe Streets campaign, and others, this paper emphasizes how online forums allow activist organizations to 1) shape new notions of women’s right to control their bodies and be safe from unwanted propositions or attacks in the public sphere, 2) define new forms of civic engagement through the mobilization of volunteer communities and members of the public to attend campaigns and events, and 3) provide real time reports on sexual harassment incidences for crisis response.
Asmaa Mahfouz is known as one of the founders of the April 6 Movement in Egypt that lead to the 2011 revolution. She is also knows as the woman who instigated the revolution on January 25 as a result of her video blog calling for action. This YouTube video, which was prepared on January 18, was posted to her Facebook site and went viral. Her speech is a very well articulated call for action in both the Egyptian context and an international context. Her rhetorical appeal to both religious and international Human Rights positions Mahfouz in a gendered place that is both grounded in Egyptian culture and reflects an understanding of the way Arab women are perceived by the international community.
This presentation rhetorically analyzes Mahfouz’s call for action. Her rhetorical positioning in her religion and her references to international norms articulate a constructed position in which Mahfouz is able to speak to Egyptian people and speak to an international audience simultaneously, positioning herself within an online space that allows for alternative political representations. Her political discourse uses both Islam and Human Rights ideological concepts to break down current existing dichotomy between them (religious vs. secular) and instead establishes a call that transcends the limitations of both in what Habermas calls a “postsecular” stance, further illustrating Charles Taylor’s argument for the need to revise our definition of secularism. By remaining grounded in her cultural and religious context, however, Mahfouz’s political cry is gendered. She draws from essentialist notions of gender ideology embedded in Egyptian society to represent a “feminine” call representing the nation. Mahfouz’s voice, drawing on pathological rhetorical appeals, thus becomes the voice of Egypt. Her cry for help and protection is heard in the public international context as such.
This paper will address the non-Western context in which political calls for action are made and the religious constructions of Mahfouz’s text. I argue that Middle Eastern feminists resist identifying with Western feminists because of their ideological differences, thus creating a rhetorical discourse purposefully situated outside of and in opposition to Western discourse. This analysis utilizes an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to texts in non-Western contexts and provides insights into a very neglected area in Rhetorical Studies and provides an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between religion and secular ideology in the public sphere.
Sexual harassment in the public sphere has been a growing concern in Egypt. The latest study commissioned by the UN women concluded that 99.3 %of the female participants has been subjected to some form of sexual harassment. Although this form of violence is wide spread and practiced on a daily basis in Egypt, yet there is no official numbers on these cases, as women rarely reports these incidences in the police stations.
The challenge of collecting data on sensitive issues, such as gender based violence, is a well-documented problem across the globe. Stigma and shame prevent many victims of harassment and other types of sexual assault from reporting these crimes or discussing them with researchers. New technologies and social media platforms open up possibilities to overcome some of the reporting barriers.
HarassMap is the first independent initiative to combat sexual harassment in Egypt. In 2010 it launched an online reporting system for individuals whom experience and/or witness sexual harassment. While crowdsourcing has increasingly become a valuable tool for many corporations, governmental and non-governmental organizations, it has not been without its limitations. There is considerable disagreement over the quality of the data generated via crowdsourcing . Lukyanenko and Parsons (2012) discuss the lack of domain expertise among individuals utilizing these platforms. In social science research, Schmidt (2010) looks at reasons why crowdsourcing has not taken off as a data collection strategy the way it has in other industries and mainly attribute it to two key point: sampling bias and the demographic make-up of the participant pool.
This paper will present that findings of the study that was undertaken by HarassMap to validate the crowdsourced data collected from 2010 on sexual harassment.This study aims to examine the usefulness of crowdsourcing as a method of data collection strategy for sensitive issues, such as sexual harassment, in developing countries. It aims to answer questions like : what is the utility of crowdsourcing as a data collection method for sensitive issues in developing countries? How does the content of crowdsourced data differ from the content of data collected through traditional qualitative and quantitative methods?. Using more than 1200 reports of sexual harassment collected via HarassMap online map since 2010, the research comparatively examines these reports against information derived through more traditional data collection methods, including surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews.
