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A Story of Feminist Revolution

Yasmin El-Rifae

$34.99

Hardback

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English
Verso Books
10 January 2023
In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace.

This is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish - Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment - who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiraling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in the square. Organized and led by women during 2012–2013 - the final, chaotic months of Egypt’s revolution - teams of volunteers fought their way into circles of men to pull the woman at the center to safety. Often, they risked assault themselves.

Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish’s organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as “irrelevant” to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma.

Introducing a powerful new voice, a writer whose searchingly beautiful, spare prose cuts to the core of a story ever more urgent and relevant: of women’s resistance when all else has failed.

By:  
Imprint:   Verso Books
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 210mm,  Width: 140mm, 
Weight:   311g
ISBN:   9781839767685
ISBN 10:   1839767685
Pages:   224
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer and editor. She works with Mada Masr in Cairo, a progressive Egyptian newsmagazine, and is a co-producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, Lux, LitHub, and Guernica. This is her first book.

Reviews for Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution

This book is one of the most powerful reports on rescue work done in a revolutionary war zone that I have ever read; and the fact that it is work done by women on behalf of other women who've been sexually harassed (to put it mildly) not by the enemy but by their fellow revolutionaries makes it all the more gripping. I wish Radius a long life, with dazzling reviews and an ever-increasing readership. -- Vivian Gornick, author of <i>Taking a Long Look</i>


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