“More and more I began to link these intense attacks which have clear objectification of women’s bodies with everything else that has nothing to do with Tahrir … with [female genital mutilation], with marital rape … I linked all of these things together. To me it was just another manifestation of this horrible thing called patriarchy and domination and objectification of women and not feeling that women are humans and not thinking about their pains … it was really clearly manifested in the attacks, but what’s the difference between this and cutting your daughter’s clitoris?”
— Yasmin El-Rifae in Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (2022, p.89)
In 2011, Egypt was held tightly in the grip of revolution. Protestors took to the streets and swarmed public spaces, demanding an end to the Mubarak Presidency, as well as the violence associated with the Egyptian state. Within the optics of the uprising, according to Hafez, eyewitness accounts attribute at least half the protestors in Tahrir Square to be women. Yet, their accounts, contributions and corporeal resistance are denied and excluded from the histories of the Revolution, mitigated by the revelations of mass sexual assault in public spaces. Yasmin El-Rifae’s debut work ‘Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution’ (2022) traverses the politics of political participation, both illustrating the work of Opantish—Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment—and itself negotiating room for the voices and needs of marginalised genders at the table (and it does so with gripping pace and style!) The book is ultimately both distressing and haunting, yet it unfailingly demands to be heard as an important work of modern Feminist literature.
‘Radius’ is self-described as a ‘gripping, intimate account of women and men who built a feminist revolution.’ El-Rifae’s work penetrates to the depths a slew of important themes from justice to public space, Women’s resistance to violent sociocultural patriarchal systems and state control, meticulously interweaving these together in a narrative of solidarity and resistance. Spanning the immediate years following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a non-linear patchwork of interviews, self-reflection, and recounts; Radius narrates the establishment and collective organisation of Opantish, a volunteer-led group dedicated to the prevention of sexual assault and harassment (SASH) and to the cause of increasing Women’s participation in protests.
At the beating core of the book is the re-imagination of public space, with El-Rifae and Opantish carving space for Women’s collective resistance. Women’s bodies in masculinist spaces innately occupy and embody a reconstitution of public politics, where disruptions of androcentric place and feminine domesticity are integral to social revolution and the dismantling of panoptic state control. The book, however, negotiates the line between these utopian and radical visions, and the manifest reality of danger for Women and othered bodies that participate in political action and organisation, denoting the specifically high prevalence of gender-based violence and sexual assault and harassment for those gender-diverse protestors. Readers must approach the book knowing the depicted violence is vicious and confronting, however, El-Rifae addresses these issues from a thoughtful and necessary standpoint that tables important and innately gendered issues that are seldom tabled by states across the globe because their willful ignorance enables the strict policing of Women’s bodies.
El-Rifae’s work is harmonious and impactful, with the form complimenting the themes of the work. The book’s structure is non-linear, frequently fluctuating between 2011-2016, and thus represents the internal fluctuations of El-Rifae as she revisits her time on the front line, organising Opantish. The work too oscillates between personal reflections on El-Rifae’s perspective as well as past and present experiences, while at the same time providing interviews and recollections on the cases and experiences of impacted others. The result is a comprehensive and holistic work that comments on the non-linear experience of memory, especially relating to traumatic events, while refusing to sacrifice a broader exploration of the context that makes the work accessible to all readers. At long last, we come to the title of the book itself; a meaning readers will find themselves questioning. The title, Radius, evokes circular images, and indeed the book centres around these. From the organisation and protection of female protestors, often requiring the breakage and penetration of a circle of men, to the connected circle of volunteers dedicated to the protection of these same protestors. The work ultimately gives power to those same people violenced by the revolution, and thus carves out its own feminist revolution that demands its spot in the public realm.
How do we classify such a work as this? It seems a generalisation is not possible. It is part memoir, part non-fictive historical, and adopts some conventions from the journalistic form (as per El-Rifae’s background) It is, however, within the genre-evasion that El-Rifae can concoct a narrative that is so powerful. Weaving self-reflections within the extensive narrative of her friends and co-organisers emphasises the collective nature of the work, breathing life into Opantish, as if it were a self-sustaining entity on its own. There is, perhaps, no coincidence then that the author refers to the organisation as if it were living. Yet, here is a broader critique of the neoliberal ideas of fortified individualism. El-Rifae rejects the colonial-capitalist paradigm through solidarity work and collective action; indeed it is this that is at the beating heart of the work. It tracks the activist burnout, the sense of helplessness and despair, and the continuous and communal return to action in the perseverance of social change. The result is a work that is both harrowing and inspiring, as well as truly necessary in a world that is still defined by colonial-capitalist power dynamics.
Reading El-Rifae’s work bearing witness to Women’s corporeal resistance, attests to the power of solidarity, and disrupts the masculinist and violent conceptualisations of resistance that purposefully render public spaces as dangerous for women. The book is, by all accounts, a work that necessarily documents an innately gendered account of the Egyptian Revolution, ensuring an important counter-perspective is not lost to the vestiges of time. Demanding its place in the sphere of Feminist works, it occupies a space that subverts the dominant re-imaginings of the state and the cultural apparatus that supports these innately masculinist visions. El-Rifae, and the Opantish organisers, are activists to be admired, to be remembered, and to be copied when we find ourselves and others around us to be at risk of arbitrary violence.
