Reviving Solidarity: Opantish and Circles of Affect

Maša Mrovlje will be presenting one of the chapters of her book manuscript on the political potential of disappointment in resistance. The chapter draws on the grassroots knowledge of Opantish, a radical feminist intervention group, to address the challenge of reframing communities of solidarity broken by internal oppression. Opantish arose from an “extreme disappointment” feminist activists experienced over mass sexual assaults of women protesters that begun spreading through Tahrir square in the wake of the 2011 Revolution as well as the refusal of male revolutionaries to take these attacks seriously and tackle sexual violence as an essential part of the revolution. The focus of this chapter, then, is the disappointment of marginalized groups within resistance, in particular women, which arises from exclusionary or oppressive patterns of interaction within resistance.

This will be a pre-read session