ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the brutal energy of the crowd, rather than flashing them up as an indeterminate threat, focusing on the contestation of the meaning of the people that went on in Tahrir Square in 2011. Until January, Tahrir Square was dominated by the massive roundabout at its centre, but suddenly the space was redrawn. It manifested an affective intensity, opening the potentiality of the people. Activist and survivor Sally Zahoney explains that the sexual assaults aimed ‘to scare people and shame the girls that demonstrate, and ostracize the largest number of people possible from the political sphere’. In short, the affective intensities that are staged in the constituent moment fold into the mediation of the people, just as the mediated people has multiple affective intensities of its own. The public space produced by the crowd was secured by producing the crowd as an object of insecurity for women.
