Sexual governmentality and the woman at/as risk in revolutionary Egypt

Abstract

How can a collective sexual assault that took place in the mid-1990s in front of a private school in a middle-class neighborhood of Cairo help us reconsider the “circles of hell” that proliferated in protests during the Egyptian January 25 Revolution? This article weaves together three past and contemporary instances of sexual harassment and assault in educational settings to counter the social/political dichotomy that has dominated scholarly discussions about public sexual violence in Egypt and to situate these forms of violence in relation to broader historical processes, including the development of women’s education and mass public transportation and the emergence of the modern city in the late nineteenth century. Building on the work of Michel Foucault and Fatima Mernissi, the essay regards public sexual violence as a mechanism of sexual governmentality aimed at shaping and managing women’s conduct through the conceptualization of women as simultaneously at risk and a risk in public space. Drawing on research conducted in Cairo in 2014–15, I examine the ways in which the activist initiatives OpAntiSH and HarassMap subverted these notions through projects of direct action and community intervention that challenged notions of feminine vulnerability and masculine protection while creating horizontal structures of care in the spaces of protest and in the neighborhood. I conclude by discussing how these approaches can contribute to decolonizing feminism and reinvigorate anti-sexual-violence organizing in the current #MeToo moment.