Industrial Sexuality : : Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt / / Hanan Hammad.

• VerfasserIn: Hammad, Hanan,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Millions of Egyptian men, women, and children first experienced industrial work, urban life, and the transition from peasant-based and handcraft cultures to factory organization and hierarchy in the years between the two world wars. Their struggles to live in new places, inhabit new customs, and establish and abide by new urban norms and moral and gender orders underlie the story of the making of modern urban life—a story that has not been previously told from the perspective of Egypt’s working class. Reconstructing the ordinary urban experiences of workers in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, home of the largest and most successful Egyptian textile factory, Industrial Sexuality investigates how the industrial urbanization of Egypt transformed masculine and feminine identities, sexualities, and public morality. Basing her account on archival sources that no researcher has previously used, Hanan Hammad describes how coercive industrial organization and hierarchy concentrated thousands of men, women, and children at work and at home under the authority of unfamiliar men, thus intensifying sexual harassment, child molestation, prostitution, and public exposure of private heterosexual and homosexual relationships. By juxtaposing these social experiences of daily life with national modernist discourses, Hammad demonstrates that ordinary industrial workers, handloom weavers, street vendors, lower-class landladies, and prostitutes—no less than the middle and upper classes—played a key role in shaping the Egyptian experience of modernity.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Abbreviations -- Introduction. Townspeople, Company People, and Textiles: A Woven History -- PART 1. Gendered Experiences -- 1. Competing Masculinities: Docile Workers, Aggressive Afandiyya, and the Mechanization of the Modern Subject -- 2. Urbanizing Masculinity: Workers, Weavers, and Futuwwat in Violent Alliances and Fluid Identities -- 3. Mechanizing Women: Industrial Workers or Women Adrift? -- 4. Ladies in Urban Times: Work, Property, and Gender in the Modernity of the Poor -- PART 2. Industrial Sexuality -- 5. Sexually Speaking: Unveiling the Harassment of Women, Child Molestation, Homosexuality, and Hetero-intimacy in Industrial-Urban Space -- 6. Striking and Sex-Working: Living with Tuberculosis, Syphilis, and Other Monsters -- Conclusion. The Anxiety of Transition -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index