The project centers the testimonies of three Egyptian women: Samira Ibrahim, Yasmine El Baramawy, and Ola Shahba. Their accounts expose three forms of sexual violence during the revolution’s first two years, including so-called virginity inspections in military detention, organized mob rape in Cairo’s streets, and sexual assault during detention by Islamist groups. These women are strong revolutionary leaders who reveal truths of many erased elements of the revolution, including their role. Their testimonies were intentional political acts. They spoke publicly to name the forms of violence and their perpetrators, challenging the systems of domination that enabled it, and insisting that women’s participation in the revolution was pivotal.

To bring these accounts into visual form, three feminist artists, Salma El Tarzi, Rim Naguib, and an artist using the name Fatma, worked with the women whose testimonies they were drawing. Hamzeh participated as an Arabyya feminist academic researcher based in the United States. The outcome was more than a conventional process in which a researcher collects information, disappears to interpret it, and later presents a finished product. Instead, the collaborators talked, listened, drew, revised, disagreed, reconsidered, laughed, and built trust over time.

Prof. Manal Hamzeh describes her research approaches through Arabic concepts that resist easy translation into normalized academic language. Shahadat are public testimonies that tell truths about oppression and expose those responsible. Haki means conversation, but here it carries a richer sense of intimate, everyday storytelling through which people make meaning together. A testimony can lead to conversation, and conversation can uncover details, memories, and feelings that reshape the testimony. Knowledge emerges through relationship rather than extraction.

Trust is important because the testimonies shared were intensely personal and politically dangerous. The collaborators came from different backgrounds, with different experiences of class, religion, education, family life, artistic practice, and political activism. However, guided by feminist values, those differences invited them to collaborate with transparency, care, reciprocal responsibility, attentive listening, and trust.

The collaborative art process offered possibilities that academic writing alone could not. The artists could make viewers encounter bodily memory, fear, anger, and resistance through color, line, pacing, and perspective. But every aesthetic choice carried ethical weight. How do they depict sexual violence without turning it into spectacle? How do they show terror without reducing a woman to what was done to her? And how do they create an image preserving the survivor’s authority over her own story?

Those questions pushed the collaboration beyond illustration. The graphics became part of the research itself, a way of thinking together about violence, memory, power, and representation. In the process, the women began creating a visual language for refusing silence, while opening a public space in which revolutionary women could be seen as thinkers, creators, witnesses, and political actors.

One striking example is the decision to preserve Arabic reading direction even in the English editions. Readers move through the pages from right to left, rather than having the work reformatted to suit English conventions. That seemingly simple design choice asks English-speaking audiences to adjust themselves to the work, instead of demanding that the work adjust to them. Color, monochrome drawing, page layout, and perspective were similarly political choices, designed to convey the women’s bodily experiences without eroticizing sexual violence.

Another crucial idea emerged from the conversations themselves: fadhfadhah. The Arabic word describes opening up to a trusted person and pouring pain from the heart. In this project, that openness allowed memories and emotions that had remained difficult to express to surface. It brought fear and grief, but also moments of lightness. Humor became especially important. The collaborators asked not whether joking was permissible, but who should become the target of the joke. Their answer was the perpetrator, not the woman who experienced the violence.

This matters because survivors are often expected to tell painful stories in normative ways, not admitting patriarchal complicities. They chose not to elicit images of women as solemn, damaged, or silent. Here, laughter could coexist with horror without diminishing it. Humor became a means of survival, communication, and resistance. It also helped create enough trust for more difficult feelings and details to emerge. Fadhfadhah therefore became more than conversation. It was part of how knowledge was revealed.

For Prof. Manal Hamzeh, this unexpected dimension helped expand the project’s methodology. Shahadat led to intimate conversations; haki opened into fadhfadhah, and that process circled back to produce deep truths, another testimony. Rather than treating emotion as something that de-neutralizes research, the project uplifted feeling, vulnerability, memory, and relationship as sources of understanding.

The finished graphics also challenge assumptions about who academic knowledge is for. Journal articles usually circulate among specialists, while visual storytelling can cross boundaries of education, language, and discipline. By bringing research and graphic art together, the collaborators created public scholarship that can be encountered emotionally as well as intellectually. The work also offers universities an example of research in which participants are more than simple sources of data, but co-creators of meaning.

This shift is especially significant when the subject is gender-based sexual violence. Conventional research can unintentionally reproduce violence when researchers claim authority over other people’s experiences. Hamzeh’s project instead emphasizes answerability, reciprocity, and the women’s power to shape how their experiences appear. The final images preserve injury, but also resistance, political commitment, humor, friendship, and dignity.

This is ultimately why the project reaches beyond the history of Egypt’s 2011 Revolution. It asks a larger question about how difficult truths are maintained in public memory. Remembering violence is not enough if the people who endured it lose the truth of their own stories in the process. Through testimony, conversation, art, and the difficult intimacy of pouring one’s heart out, these women created another approach to knowledge creation. Their graphic stories refuse disappearance. They insist that women were not peripheral to the 2011 Revolution, and that their bodies, voices, creativity, and political knowledge belong at the center of its history.

In that sense, making the work visible is itself an act of resistance. The graphics keep open a conversation about justice, responsibility, memory, and the conditions required for genuine liberation.