Gender Trouble: What feminists can learn from Egypt's revolution

Two years after the 2011 revolution in Egypt brought down former president Hosni Mubarak, another wave of protests erupted against his successor, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi. This time, the demonstrations were actively supported by the military. As debates raged about whether the protests should be called a coup or a fresh wave of revolution, there was an uptick in mob attacks against women, which had been plaguing Tahrir Square for

months. Between June 30 and July 3, 2013, Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment and Assault (OpAntiSH), an Egyptian group dedicated to combating sexual violence, documented 186 such cases. A petition by women's organizations attributed the spike to the "trend of targeting female activists, to punish them for participating in the public sphere and to exclude them from political life." With the #MeToo movement sweeping the world, OpAntiSH organizer Yasmin El-Rifae spoke with writer and activist Sarah Leonard about the challenges in fighting for gender equality, and the future of the feminist left.

Sarah Leonard:

You wrote an article for The Nation about what the #MeToo movement can learn from the Egyptian revolution. In it, you started off by saying that you were paying attention to #MeToo when it was initially all over Facebook, but that you didn't immediately feel moved to be part of it. Why do you think you felt that way?

Yasmin El-Rifae:

I think part of my first reaction might have had to do simply with fatigue. We were tweeting and posting stuff on social media about harassment and sexual assault in the late 2000s in Egypt, so I found the idea that we were still doing this to be a little discouraging. But also, like I said in my article, there was a lot of outrage when the Harvey Weinstein story first broke, which I found kind of disingenuous.

I didn't like feeling pressured to be part of that. #MeToo became more interesting to me as the way it was being used became more diverse, and as it opened up conversations about consent—and about inclusivity, or lack of it.

Leonard:

I'm interested in what you were doing with online activism in the late 2000s, and in the relationship between that moment and the Egyptian revolution, when you were involved with OpAntiSH. The revolution, which began in 2011, saw massive protests against the government of Hosni Mubarak. The demonstrations continued in opposition to the next president, Mohammed Morsi. It involved a lot of social media, which the Western press covered in a somewhat exaggerated way. Through OpAntiSH, you were also doing on-the-ground work during that period, even physically intervening in assaults and getting women to safety.

El-Rifae:

Sexual harassment of women in public spaces is a widespread and endemic problem in Egypt. People talk about it openly now, and it's a common experience for women here. But what happened in the mid-2000s was an explosion of blogs. That was a new thing; activists and citizens were discussing taboo subjects and criticizing the government in writing in ways they hadn't been able to before. Women started writing about sexual violence and blogs on that topic began taking off. Back then, this was just not an issue that was thoroughly discussed in the media. When the topic would come up on a studio TV show, for example, it was always in crude, victim-blaming language.

The issue of gender-based violence is especially complicated in Egypt because of the state's complicity. Police use of sexual torture has been widely documented, and the assault of female protestors by riot police and state-paid thugs has happened over and over again. And on another level, women commonly feel that they can't go to the police to report incidents of sexual assault or physical violence. I've heard testimony from women who said that police officers told them that men were just joking when they assaulted them in public, or that police blamed them for being assaulted...