Week 13: Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?

         Paul Amar in his piece Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out scrutinizes the sexual harassment happened in Egypt protests from 2003 until the recent 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Originally the harassments are victimized working-class and impious women (often prostitutes) and demonized working-class young male while in fact there were a role of the authority (police) in assuring security state. As an effort to create change to the situation, a women movement called El Nadeem performed intervention by putting middle-class honorable women which has been hypervisiblized as pious and respectable to the street and do protests.   

    Focusing on the concepts of parahuman subject, hypervisibility and politics of respectability, Amar threaded out how El Nadeem successfully shifted the “campaigns against torture in custody and sexual harassment in the street into a political movement against the repressive policing practices of the security state” (Amar, 313), by turning the gendered politics of the security inside out, and gained their victory through the case of Nuha Rushdi.

          This piece fascinated me in a way of the horrifying threats women has endured in the activism space such as protesting in the street. In another way, I am also amazed by the fact that women movements such as El Nadeem can be so persistent in critiquing the practice of security state instead of focusing on other agendas like other women organizations which may have been influenced by the UN doctrines. It makes me think about how many NGOs which are focused on women and gender issues can really be free and true to their own mission instead of ending up serving interests of bigger parties? How pure is the motives of the NGOs we have now in the society for the purpose of social justice and gender equality?