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WAYWARD SUBJECTS AND NEGOTIATED DISCIPLINES: BODY POLITICS AND THE BOUNDARIES OF EGYPTIAN NATIONHOOD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2013

Marilyn Booth
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Extract

Appearing on the back pages of the Cairo daily newspaper al-Muʾayyad in September 1891 and December 1889, respectively, these brief reports, juxtaposed, encapsulate some central arguments of the books under review. They exemplify everyday resort to state apparatuses for individual or collective ends, and invoke consumption practices viewed as inimical to national health and reputation at a time when the new nationalist press was beginning to voice senses of collective pride, political unease, and anticolonial antagonism. They entail perceptions of transgressed boundaries, wayward actions, or gender-inappropriate behaviors impervious to commonly recognized moral and political authority. They illustrate blurrings of “public” and “private” actions and spaces, whether in the name of public good or for ill, that might have threatened Egyptians’ felt values of moral propriety—the disciplining pull of “respectability”—in urban Egyptian society at that time. And the reportage, publication, and circulation of such stories illustrate (and make) an emerging “public sphere” of narrative, commentary, and reader consumption, simultaneously constructing and interrogating an emerging nationalist master-narrative that placed gender-marked acts and sexual practices, transgressive or not, at the center of national/ist efficacy and perceived threats to it.

Type
Review Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Special Issue 2: Queer Affects , May 2013 , pp. 353 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

NOTES

1 “Hawadith,” al-Muʾayyad 2, no. 519 (8 September 1891): 3; [untitled], al-Muʾayyad 1, no. 12 (25 Rabiʿ II/18 December 1889): 3. Quoted and translated in Marilyn Booth, “Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt's 1890s,” in Between Politics, Society and Culture: The Press in the Middle East before Independence, ed. Anthony Gorman and Didier Monciaud (forthcoming).

2 Kandiyoti, Deniz, Women, Islam and the State (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Scott, Joan, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28–50Google Scholar.

4 Numerous articles in the 1890s Egyptian press express interest in and anxiety about the 1893 Chicago Exposition's treatment of “Egyptians,” research I am in the process of conducting as part of a book-length project.

5 Booth, Marilyn, “Woman in Islam: Men and the ‘Women's Press’ in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001): 171–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also idem, “Before Qasim Amin: Writing Histories of Gender Politics in 1890s Egypt,” in The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance, ed. Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).

6 Marilyn Booth, book ms. in progress on Zaynab Fawwaz and discourses of gender and sexuality in 1890s Egypt; Efrati, Noga, “The Effendiyya: Where Have All the Women Gone?,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2011): 375–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Caird, Mona, “Marriage,” in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900, ed. Ledger, Sally and Luckhurst, Roger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 77–79Google Scholar, 95.

8 By using the Eve's rib simile I do not mean to project Old Testament figurations onto Arabic rhetorics of modernity, but it is not inappropriate either. Despite the absence of ribs in the Qurʾan and the very different rhetoric of creation there, in hadith and in popular understandings the allegedly derivative origin of Eve has remained a touchstone of masculinist understandings of gender hierarchy—one vigorously contested by reformists such as Muhammad ʿAbduh. On this see, amongst many other discussions, al-Ghannoushi, Rashid, al-Marʾa bayna al-Qurʾan wa-Waqiʿ al-Muslimin (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2012), 9–17Google Scholar (originally written 1984).

9 See the essays in the special issue on Egypt of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47, no. 4 (2011).

10 See, for example, Hatem, Mervat F., “Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 231–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For an extended critique see Bannerji, Himani, “Pygmalion Nation: Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies and the ‘Resolution of the Women's Question,’” in Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism, ed. Bannerji, Himani, Mojab, Shahrzad, and Whitehead, Judith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 34–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an instance of how this formulation is simplistic in an Indian context, see Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 44–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A cogent articulation and summary of the critiques (but too recent for these authors to have seen) appears in Chandra, Shefali, The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 24–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.