Deliberately Disturbing the Patriarchal Peace(s): On the Precedent of Criminalizing Feminist Solidarity in Egypt

This paper examines the in-person and digital feminist solidarity campaign in response to two 2022 cases brought against Egyptian feminist journalist and activist, Rasha Azab and filmmaker Salma El-Tarzy with the charges of insulting, defaming, and deliberately disturbing filmmaker Islam Azazi. In 2020, the Egyptian feminist blog Daftar Hekayat posted six anonymous testimonies by five survivors accusing Azazi of sexual assault, and one survivor accusing him of rape. Azab and El-Tarzy tweeted their solidarity with the survivors, leading them to be effectively convicted for their feminist solidarity. This paper draws on participant observation I conducted at a Cairo courthouse in 2022, content analysis of local and international media coverage of the cases, and a life history interview with Azab. I theorize the concept of deliberately disturbing the patriarchal peace, which I argue is a feminist strategy, to understand why Azab and El-Tarzy were convicted, while none of the testimonies were investigated, and how Egyptian women and feminist activists responded to this legal crackdown. Furthermore, I argue that these women deliberately disturbed the patriarchal peace in five different ways: anonymity when (organizing) speaking out, believing survivors, feminist solidarity, vile femininity and unsolicited female joy. This paper is in conversation with Ahmed’s (2010) figure of the feminist killjoy, hooks’ (1989) concept of “talking back,” and Spivak’s (1987) “patriarchal voice” being suppressed by women relocating their voices “from the periphery to the center” (107). It is also embedded in feminist literature that highlights the Global South’s women different forms agency and resistance (Jabiri 2016; Mahmood 2001), interrogates the rise of Egyptian “virtual revolutionary spaces” (Hafez 2016) and an “Egyptian feminist counterpublic” (Elsheikh and Lilleker 2021), and theorizes feminist counterpublics and women’s citizenship in general (Fiig 2011; Fraser 1990). This is a case study that makes a unique contribution to the study of (digital) feminist activism under authoritarian regimes as it offers a theorization of a rare on-ground, material feminist resistance in post 2011 Egypt. During Egypt’s most recent feminist wave erupting in 2020 and its aftermath, social media was the main, if not the only, platform for and tool of activism, until Azab and El-Tarzy’s cases revived in-person feminist activism, while still relying on social media. Indeed, this paper highlights the materiality of feminist counterpublics among literature on digital feminist/women’s activism in the Arab world that has either focused on “bodiless” counterpublics or misdiagnosed them as such (Elsheikh 2021; Thorsen and Sreedharan 2019).