Theorizing situates bystander intervention approaches to combatting street sexual harassment as either an anti-carceral mode of social justice concerned with citizen responsibility and reshaping community norms or a carceral practice that shifts forms and sites of penal power. This article examines the intersection and effect of carceral and anti-carceral framing techniques in the 2015 “The Harasser is a Criminal” media campaign deployed by the Egyptian anti-sexual harassment initiative HarassMap to promote bystander intervention. Situated within a sphere of Egyptian gender activism that is transnational, secular, and feminist-oriented, and operating within a militarized, authoritarian political context, HarassMap’s campaign complicates how bystander intervention is instrumentalized as a technology of power to shape subjective and intersubjective responses to Egypt’s street sexual harassment problem. Carceral and anti-carceral currents flow together in their campaign not to promote a reliance on police or juridical structures for redress, but to cultivate new ethical dispositions as a means of mobilizing individuals to act. Through the figure of the bystander, HarassMap is engaged in a biopolitical project which seeks to create new neoliberal subjects who police themselves and assume responsibility for their own behavior in public space.
CITATION STYLE
Abdelmonem, A. (2022). Disciplining bystanders: (Anti)carcerality, ethics, and the docile subject in HarassMap’s “the harasser is a criminal” media campaign in Egypt. Feminist Media Studies, 22(2), 238–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1785911
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