Mada’s feminist roundtables 01 | Justice now: A feminist moment of reckoning

The Egyptian feminist movement is currently undergoing a moment of profound transformation, which comes as the culmination of two decades or more of agitation, organization and mobilization. The current moment, which once again raises the issues of sexual violence, asymmetrical power arrangements and issues of body autonomy and choice, builds on a long history of feminist work and struggle.

Believing in the crucial importance in creating a space for women to come together and share, discuss and reflect on this pivotal moment, Mada Masr is organizing a series of virtual roundtables to provide a space and platform for feminists and women from across the board to think together collectively and reflect on what these tremendous changes might mean for women at large, here and now, in Egypt.

Each roundtable invites feminist activists, intellectuals, academics, lawyers, etc, focusing on one of the pressing issues at the moment, hopefully sustaining a continued dialogue that consolidates efforts and builds on what has already been done.

In the first virtual roundtable, held on August 18, Ghadeer Ahmed, a researcher, Lobna Darwish, the gender and human rights officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Dina Wahba, a researcher, Hind Ahmed Zaki, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, Dina Makram-Ebeid, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, and Lama Abou Oudeh, a professor of law at Georgetown University, sought to raise questions on what it means, now, to try to redefine the notion of justice, examining its limits and possibilities and what a survivor-centered justice can mean in our context.

The discussion generated by the panelists and some of the participants centered around three main concerns: the relation of the current feminist mobilization to the history of the movement since the early 2000s, the issue of operational and organizational limitations and opportunities, and the possibility of redefining justice according to a feminist perspective. 

The panelists reflected on milestones and cataclysmic events relating to a history of sexual violence, such as the attack on female journalists on the stairs of the Journalists Syndicate in 2005, the first recorded mass harassment event on Eid in 2006, and Noha al-Ostaz filing and winning the first sexual harassment case in 2008. All of these events, which happened in complicity with the state and society at large, and should have instigated a very different response, in terms of policy, intervention and legal reform, can be seen as several links in a chain that ultimately led to the Tahrir gang rapes and assaults of 2012–2013. The question of sexual violence that is being raised again now cannot be divorced from this historical trajectory and all the mobilization that it resulted in. This continuity is central in understanding how the feminist movement in Egypt is evolving and how, in spite of generational difference, networks, initiatives, and alliances that were formed two decades ago, this history and awareness still continues to resonate in different ways.

The second point of the discussion was the question of tactics and strategies. As new actors and new groups started to be politicized and mobilized, a variety of tactics emerged, ones that might not have been readily available to women 15 years ago (such as speaking up on social media). A related concern for many panelists was how the current mobilization has moved from outside the usual circles of activists and political groups into areas and social segments that were not part of such mobilization before. Many panelists raised questions about the limits of organizing in light of the extreme crackdown that Egypt has been facing since 2014, and accordingly the limits of what can be done online. That is of course, not to undermine cyberactivism and the role it played since 2011 in radicalizing many young feminists into developing a politicized conception of what it means to be a woman in Egypt. It is a testament to the current mobilization, which has largely remained virtual, and yet managed to stir enough outrage to force society to have the difficult conversation about sexual violence and to embarrass the state enough to take some measure of intervention (even if still not enough).

The third point of the discussion was what possibilities of justice were available to women. Over the past two months many questions were raised as to what tactics did women employ to manage to achieve some sense of justice. The panelists agreed that each survivor had all the right to decide what mechanism of redress suits her best and how collectively we must support those choices, even if we disagree with some of the tactics. For many, public exposure of rapists and men who assault women and the subsequent shaming and defamation is one of the most effective and swift tactics that spares women the usual patriarchal and oftentimes misogynistic procedures that conventional legal channels might entail. Other feminists point to the need to continue to pressure the state to amend its laws to take into account the power imbalance when it comes to women. And lastly, a feminist conception of justice recognizes the embedded inequalities in real life that make women unable to achieve the same sense of justice that men might be privy to, despite being technically “one before the law.” Sometimes, it’s not just about the law, but who has the power to invoke and implement the law. 

Over the coming days, we will publish some of the panelists’ reflections from the roundtable.

This event was organized by the Mada Membership Program. To learn more about the program and subscribe, click here.