num_pages: 208
description:  A haunting intimate account of the women and men who built a feminist revolution in the middle of the Arab Spring.In 2012 the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo the revolutions 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 20122013 - the final chaotic months of Egypts 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 Opantishs 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 womens resistance when all else has failed.
language: English
title: Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution
publisher: Verso Books