There is no difference between a bearded religious extremist who wants to kill you because he believes he ranks higher in the eyes of his god, and is therefore tasked with killing anyone who is different to him, and a non-bearded, well-dressed man with a new phone and a fancy car who believes he ranks higher in the eyes of his god, and so is tasked with torturing and imprisoning and inciting against anyone who is different.1
These are the words of queer Egyptian activist Sarah Hegazi, originally written in Arabic for Mada Masr in 2018. Hegazi suffered under the homophobic, violent, and corrupt militaristic regime of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi in Egypt. Imprisoned and tortured for waving a rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo, she fled to Canada where she continued to organize with fellow revolutionaries, especially to support Sudanese uprisings against then-president Omar al-Bashir. In June of this year, Hegazi took her own life, sending waves of grief across marginalized communities that stood by her, as well as waves of vitriol directed towards her, even in death. Hegazi’s life and work offer many important lessons for feminists committed to dismantling structures of power in all of their manifestations. For feminists today, it is a radically critical consciousness that is necessary in order to recognize not one or another specific form of oppression, but the way power interlocks with power. Hegazi posed a triple threat to the regime because she shouted from the margins of normative sexuality, religion, and nationalism. It was precisely her multiply marginalized position that lent her the ability to see power clearly and question interdependent forms of institutionalized oppression. Hegazi’s queer activism is an example for feminists today because it offers a model for dismantling false boundaries between seemingly discrete systems and listening for the silent collusions, those forces that stitch together the intersecting, overlapping, ever-mutating, and haunting forms of power.
Perhaps one of the earliest feminist authors to sound caution against selective feminisms that fail to recognize the mutual oppressions by systemic powers is bell hooks. Speaking against privileging particular interests over others, hooks painstakingly emphasizes the collusions between class oppression, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Skeptical that truly revolutionary politics could arise from such blindness to the whole, hooks questions whether people could be feminists “without fundamentally challenging and changing themselves or the culture.”2 She exhorts her readers to be especially wary of power that accumulates from the exploitation of other people, as is the case when systems of oppression are strategically employed to buffer one marginalized group against another. Similarly, then, to the ways that hooks warns against such hegemonic co-optations, in the form, for example, of power feminism, reform feminism, or lifestyle feminism,3 so too did Hegazi caution fellow revolutionaries against efforts at “reform” that change the face of authoritarian regimes while preserving their innermost oppressive mechanisms.4
Such too was the emphatic thesis of Audre Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” She writes of a feminism that looks upon differences as offering creative potential and cautions that the master’s tools “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”5 One of the master’s tools is division itself. In fact, Lorde describes this as patriarchy’s first lesson: to divide and conquer. Thus, a radical feminist politic must be to recognize these divisions as a strategy not only for the subordination of peoples, but also for manufacturing a divided consciousness that perceives economic issues as separate from the political, which in turn is separated from the religious and so on.
Thus, when Hegazi writes, “there is no difference,” she makes a statement about the sameness of religiously based oppression and capitalistic, state-sponsored violence—two forces that often abjure the other as corrupted. Radically, Hegazi points to their mutual corruption, borne of their most foundational similarity—their rejection of any departure from the normative, sanctioned, lawful, or permissible. “Whoever differs, whoever is not a male Sunni Muslim heterosexual who supports the ruling regime is considered persecuted, untouchable, or dead,” she writes.6 Here, Hegazi engages a queer politic, interrogating and deconstructing the normative model whether in regards to sexuality, religion, gender, or even political stance. Hegazi recognized the imbrication of such mutual and coercive demands for normality when recounting the questions asked during her arrest. Officers wanted to know what religion she followed and whether or not she was a virgin. Thus, she calls Sisi’s regime “puritanical,”7 subverting the conventional use of the term to describe a coercive state apparatus obsessed with an ideal.
In another example of the ways in which Hegazi’s queer politics are intimately intertwined with her revolutionary politics, she offered lessons from the Egyptian revolution to Sudanese comrades and discussed the ways that state actors contract their power in order to preserve it, making short-term sacrifices and concessions — never enduring and always at an ultimate cost to the most disadvantaged people — in order to maintain long-term control. She states, for instance, that a regime may dispose of Mubarak himself, and yet she cautions her peers to “be aware of the mini-Mubaraks.”8 Hegazi accounts for the many manifestations of power over subjugated bodies and the deeply entangled ways in which oppressive regimes adapt to contestations of their power. Perhaps an indication of her Marxist views, Hegazi points to the ways in which corrupt capitalistic states create conditions for an absence of many sovereignties—not only sovereignty over nationhood, but also sovereignty over one’s own body and land, both of which are endangered through systemic impoverishment, exploitative labor, and more acutely, through arrest and torture.9
Sarah Hegazi therefore leaves feminist thinkers a legacy that is worth our attention today. She lived with a critical agency arising from critical consciousness. In reflecting on ways of cultivating such a consciousness, Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi offers a helpful understanding of the industry of division-making. She also describes a creative form of dissidence that rejects such divisions:
To be creative means to connect the personal to the political, the economic to the sexual, the past to the present to the future, the individual memory to the collective memory, theory to action, the individual struggle to the collective struggle, or the self to the other. To be creative means to undo the fragmentation of knowledge, or the pseudo-knowledge which we receive from the dominant media and traditional schools and universities. To be creative means to undo the dichotomies which we inherited since the slave system or what we call the class patriarchal system. Such dichotomies as: divine-human, man-woman, master-slave, white-black, spirit-body, art–science and others.10
Thus, to break down boundaries becomes a creative and revolutionary feminist act. This is not so as to create a superficial global sisterhood, but an act of recognizing the profound ways that all systems of oppression co-conspire and thus all actions reverberate globally through dense webs of interconnected people and institutions.
Notes
1. Sarah Hegazi, “A Year After the Rainbow Flag Controversy,” Mada Masr, June 15, 2020, https://www.madamasr.com/en/2020/06/15/opinion/u/a-year-after-the-rainbow-flag-controversy/.
2. bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), 6.
3. hooks, 5. Lifestyle feminism is defined by hooks follows: “Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism.”
4. Sarah Hegazi, “What's Next for the Sudanese Revolution? -- Sarah Hegazi (October 19, 2019),” Spring Magazine, April 29, 2020, video, 20:07, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=oQW5KCX4KeU.
5. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 112.
6. Hegazi, “A Year After the Rainbow Flag Controversy.”
7. Hegazi, “A Year After the Rainbow Flag Controversy.”
8. Valerie Lannon, “Our Tribute to Comrade/Rafeqa Sarah Hegazi,” Spring Magazine, June 14, 2020, https://springmag.ca/our-tribute-to-comrade-rafeqa-sarah-hegazi.
9. Sarah Hegazi, “What's Next for the Sudanese Revolution?”
10. Nawal El Saadawi, “Creativity, Dissidence and Women,” Casa Árabe, accessed August 7, 2020 from https://en.casaarabe.es/documents/download/124.
Bibliography
El Saadawi, Nawal. “Creativity, Dissidence and Women.” Casa Árabe. Accessed August 7, 2020. https://en.casaarabe.es/documents/download/124.
Hegazi, Sarah. “A Year After the Rainbow Flag Controversy.” Mada Masr, June 15, 2020. https://www.madamasr.com/en/2020/06/15/opinion/u/a-year-after-the-rainbow-flag-controversy/.
Hegazi, Sarah. “What's Next for the Sudanese Revolution? -- Sarah Hegazi (October 19, 2019).” Spring Magazine. April 29, 2020. Video, 20:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQW5KCX4KeU.
hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2000.
Lannon, Valerie. “Our Tribute to Comrade/Rafeqa Sarah Hegazi.” Spring Magazine, June 14, 2020. https://springmag.ca/our-tribute-to-comrade-rafeqa-sarah-hegazi.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007.
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