Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt : : Navigating the Margins of Respectability / / L. L. Wynn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Wynn, L. L.,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

Cairo is a city obsessed with honor and respectability—and love affairs. Sara, a working-class woman, has an affair with a married man and becomes pregnant, only to be abandoned by him; Ayah and Zeid, a respectably engaged couple, argue over whether Ayah’s friend is a prostitute or a virgin; Malak, a European belly dancer who sometimes gets paid for sex, wants to be loved by a man who won’t treat her like a whore just because she’s a dancer; and Alia, a Christian banker who left her abusive husband, is the mistress of a wealthy Muslim man, Haroun, who encourages business by hosting risqué parties for other men and their mistresses. Set in transnational Cairo over two decades, Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt is an ethnography that explores female respectability, male honor, and Western theories and fantasies about Arab society. L. L. Wynn uses stories of love affairs to interrogate three areas of classic anthropological theory: mimesis, kinship, and gift. She develops a broad picture of how individuals love and desire within a cultural and political system that structures the possibilities of, and penalties for, going against sexual and gender norms. Wynn demonstrates that love is at once a moral horizon, an attribute that “naturally” inheres in particular social relations, a social phenomenon strengthened through cultural concepts of gift and kinship, and an emotion deeply felt and desired by individuals.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Foreigners Like Things Looking Old and Dark, Not Shiny -- 2. Mimesis, Kinship, Gift, and Other Things That Bind Us in Love and Desire -- 3. “Why Can’t You Study Respectable Women?” -- 4. Mimesis, Genre, Gender, and Sexuality in Middle East Tourism -- 5. Demimonde: Belly Dancers, Extramarital Affairs, and the Respectability of Women -- 6. Gift, Prostitute: Money and Intimacy -- 7. “Honor Killing”: On Anthropological Writing in an International Political Economy of Representations -- 8. Kinship, Honor, and Shame -- 9. Love, Revolution, and Intimate Violence -- Epilogue. Fifteen Years Later -- Notes -- References -- Index