The Egyptian Revolution presented an opportunity for youth-based initiatives to employ new strategies for transforming social perceptions and practices around street sexual harassment. Prior to the Revolution, Egyptian Feminist NGOs employed a diverse range of approaches to combatting sexual harassment, including community-based awareness programs and political and legal advocacy. Within this early activism, anti-sexual harassment entities framed the problem in divergent ways. Organizations such as El-Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture challenged the state for commissioning sexual violence in protest and detention settings. Other organizations, such as the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR), which focused on everyday forms of street harassment, promoted the problem as social and psychological, thereby avoiding the state as harasser in its framing and analysis of the problem. Since the Revolution, a new generation of social initiatives, such as HarassMap, has employed street campaigns and technological platforms, including crowdmapping and social media, to challenge gender stereotypes and victim-blaming rhetoric, and to encourage people to speak-up against sexual harassment. This work has also largely avoided political engagement and direct challenges to state sponsored sexual violence. There has been debate among scholars about the way in which anti-sexual harassment activism has depoliticized sexual harassment by de-linking it from the political and, instead, promoting it as a social problem that requires community-based solutions. Prior to the Revolution, ECWR was criticized for failing to contextualize sexual harassment within the structural system of gender inequality and for reproducing neocolonial images of unruly Arab men needing reform. This paper blurs the boundaries of social and political engagement, arguing that the cultural work of the new initiatives represents a challenge to the political order. Drawing on theories of social movements and cultural politics, this paper explores the approach to social change employed by HarassMap that seeks to mobilize bystanders and build a critical mass around new social norms. By undermining patriarchal norms that blame victims and enjoining the public to intervene against sexual harassment, this paper contends that HarassMap is creating a new vision of social responsibility. When a tipping point is reached, HarassMap believes popular public outcry will then force more effective political and legal reform from the state to protect women in public. Here, such reform results only when there is enough public will for change.

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.

On February 6, 2013, Egyptian women marched in Cairo holding kitchen knives in the air to protest the sexual assault of 19 women –many of whom had suffered injuries inflicted by bladed weapons– during the celebrations for the second anniversary of the 2011 revolution. Following these attacks, groups such as Tahrir Bodyguard and Fouada Watch/I Saw Harassment (part of OpAntiSH), that had been intervening since late 2012 on Tahrir Square to deter and stop mob sexual assaults during protests, began to offer free self-defense courses for women, translating the experience gained on the square to the private spaces of neighborhood gyms and fitness centers. Away from the spaces of protest, these workshops stretched beyond the activist scene and addressed a broader section of Egyptian society, the “women of Egypt” who were regularly groped in public places. This approach was popularized by a series of events that, under the name Igmadi (Stay Strong) included Zumba classes, awareness-raising sessions organized by anti-harassment organizations and self-defense crash courses taught by women. This paper examines the popularization of self-defense courses among Egyptian girls and women since early 2013 and investigates the effects of this anti-harassment strategy at the individual and societal level. Drawing on feminist literature on sexual harassment and urban geography, it analyzes how self-defense courses help Egyptian women to overcome fear of rape in public places and to feel more confident when walking on the streets by providing a toolkit of potential reactions –including not only physical moves but also the use of the voice, the look, and body language– that can be mobilized to confront a harasser or, in more extreme situations, to free oneself and escape. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Cairo between September 2014 and May 2015, the paper explores how these emergent communities of women teaching self-defense to other women have become safe spaces where participants share and discuss experiences of violence and strategies for change. Finally, it reflects on the impact that the generalization of these strategies among Egyptian women can have for the spatial renegotiation of urban gender relations following the 2011 revolution.

In December 2010, HarassMap was launched as a Cairo-based interactive online mapping interface for reporting and mapping incidents of sexual harassment anonymously and in real time in Egypt. The project’s use of spatial information technologies for crowdmapping sexual harassment raises important questions about the use of crowdsourced mapping as a technique of global human security governance, as well as the techno- politics of interpreting and representing spaces of gendered security and insecurity in Egypt’s urban streetscape. By recoding Egypt’s urban landscape into spaces subordinated to the visual cartography of the project’s crowdsourced data, HarassMap obscures the complex assemblage that it draws together as the differentially open space of the Egyptian street – spaces that are territorialized and deterritorialized for authoritarian control, state violence, revolt, rape, new solidarities, gender reversals, sectarian tensions, and trans-sectarian cooperation. What is at stake in my analysis is the plasticity of victimage: to what extent can attempts to ‘empower’ women be pursued at the microlevel without amplifying the similarly imperial techniques of objectifying them as resources used to justify other forms of state violence? The question requires taking seriously the practices of mapping and targeting as an interface for securing public space.