Human Rights as Space-Making: Bodily Performative Activism Against Sexual Violence in Egypt

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of space-making as a form of human rights activism. To develop the concept, I use the example of contentious street activism against sexual violence in post-2011 Egypt. My research has found that feminist activists utilised human rights as a legal tool for improving legislation and policy and as a linguistic strategy to challenge derogatory discourse. Using human rights in these two ways required that activists identify violations of rights and articulate their demands. Yet the contentious street activism in Egypt against sexual violence did not contain verbal utterances, so it cannot be captured through these two dimensions of human rights. In this article, I explore how to capture and analyse activism that sits within a human rights framework, but which is devoid of specific rights claims or clarified motives, where the focus seems instead to be on the public space. By engaging with theories of performativity, vulnerability, rights claiming, and subjectivisation, I argue that through modes of activism against sexual violence that take the form of performative bodily enactments of space, people convert themselves into the human rights subjects they are told they cannot be.