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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ghannam, Farha, 1963- author.
Live and die like a man : gender dynamics in urban Egypt / Farha Ghannam.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-8328-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-8047-8329-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Masculinity—Egypt. 2. Men—Socialization—Egypt. 3. Sex role—Egypt. 4. Social norms—Egypt. 5. Egypt—Social conditions—
1981- I. Title.
HQ1090.7.E3
[G43 2013]
305.310962—dc23
2013021485
ISBN 978-0-8047-8791-8 (electronic)
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond
Live and Die Like a Man
Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt
Farha Ghannam
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
To Abla, Hans, and Lena,
in appreciation of their love and support
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
Masculinity in Urban Egypt
1. Uncertain Trajectories:
The Joys and Sorrows of Boyhood
2. Plans and Stands:
The Challenge of Being Single at Forty
3. Women and the Making of Proper Men
4. Gendered Violence:
Local and National Articulations
5. Sickness, Death, and a Good Ending
Conclusion:
Masculine Trajectories and National Paths
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
A scene in al-Zawiya
A young boy carrying bread
Children at play
The barbershop
Young men at a wedding celebration
View from Tahrir Square, July 2011
A worker in a local workshop
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK is the product of many years of work and the support of many people, all of whom have
contributed to my way of thinking and writing. First and foremost, I would like to thank my friends
and interlocutors in al-Zawiya al-Hamra. I very much appreciate the hospitality, friendship, and
generosity of spirit that they have extended to me (and to my family members) over the past two
decades. I am grateful for the warmth, care, great meals, and many hours of conversation and
interaction that enriched my understanding of life in their neighborhood and Cairo more broadly.
Regretfully, to protect their privacy, I am not able to name each and every one of them.
Many of my colleagues and friends have been a tremendous help in shaping my thinking about
gender and embodiment, generously reading parts or full drafts of the whole manuscript, and
offering endless types of support. In particular, I am deeply indebted to Liz Braun, Maya Nadkarni,
and Christy Schuetze, the core of my writing anthropology group at Swarthmore College for the past
three years, who read all of the chapters and offered me wonderful comments and support. I would
also like to thank Sa´ed Atshan, Jennie Keith, and Steve Piker for reading full drafts of the manuscript
and offering very helpful comments. Ann Lesch, who was the Dean of Humanities and Social
Sciences at the American University in Cairo, was a terrific support throughout my research. Many
thanks to Fida Adely, Soraya Altorki, Miguel Diaz-Barriga, Maha Eladawy, Julia Elyachar, Lizzy
Falconi, Noha Gaballah and her family, Sherine Hamdy, Connie Hungerford, Montasser Kamal,
Karima Khalil, Moukhtar Kocache, Nadine Kolowrat, Rose Maio, Shana Minkin, Emilio Spadola,
Gregory Starrett, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Sarah Willie-LeBreton, and Jessica Winegar. Special thanks
to Sierra Eckert, a remarkable student and research assistant. I would also like to recognize the help
of Jane Abell, Ben Bernard-Herman, Lindsay Dolan, Zeinab Farahat, Lissie Jaquette, Karem Said,
Humzah Soofi, and Allison Stuewe.
I have presented parts of this book at Stanford, Georgetown, George Mason, MIT, Bryn Mawr,
Swarthmore, Colgate, Princeton, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Texas at
Austin. The audiences of these different schools have provided excellent feedback that helped me
think about the gendering process. A grant from the Ford Foundation’s office in Cairo allowed me to
spend the year of 2006–2007 doing fieldwork for this book. Swarthmore College has generously
provided financial support during different parts of this project, including a Lang Faculty Fellowship,
which enabled me to dedicate the time to complete the writing. Kate Wahl has been a terrific editor. I
appreciate her enthusiasm, support, and understanding. Her comments as well as the feedback of the
reviewers she selected for the manuscript have very much enriched the book. I am also thankful to
Richard Gunde, Frances Malcolm, and Mariana Raykov for their help in seeing this project come to
fruition.
My dear sister, Abla Ghannam, has helped me in numerous ways over the past ten years and I am
grateful for her generosity, thoughtfulness, and love. My husband, Hans Lofgren, has read all the
chapters of this book and shared with me invaluable feedback. I very much appreciate his love and
support for the past twenty years. Our awesome daughter, Lena, has been the joy of my life since she
was born twelve years ago. Her visits with me to al-Zawiya, the questions she asked, the observations
she made, and the impact of her wonderful presence on my relationships with others and my status as
a mother helped my research a great deal. I am especially grateful for her amazing ability to
understand the endless hours I had to spend doing fieldwork and then writing. Lanloun, I love you
very much and thank you for your help.
Hopefully, I did not forget to mention any of the people who were generous with their time and
energy. To any friends and colleagues whom I failed to mention by name, I hope you still know that I
very much appreciate your support and will be mortified when I discover that I forgot to mention
your name.
Introduction
Masculinity in Urban Egypt
ON JANUARY 25, 2011, thousands of Egyptian men and women began the now famous Egyptian
1
revolution. For eighteen days the number of protestors dramatically increased throughout Egypt,
putting tremendous pressure on the political system and ultimately forcing President Mubarak’s
resignation on February 11, 2011. The revolution was impressive in several ways: the speed of the
change, the quality of the resistance, the interplay between bodies and spaces, and the role of virtual
and physical space in enabling and sustaining effective peaceful opposition. One of the most
important aspects of the protests is that they were largely organized, publicized, and enacted by young
men and women. Asma Mahfouz, a 26-year-old woman, has been widely credited by many for
sparking the protests. On January 18, she posted a video urging Egyptian youth to participate in the
2
protests planned for January 25. Asma forcefully declared that she was going to protest in Midan al-
Tahrir on that day and asked others to join her. She used the masculine noun to direct her speech to
men: “Anyone who sees himself as a man, should go out to protest. . . . Whoever says that women
should not go down [to Tahrir Square] because they could be maltreated (byitbahdiluh), or because it
is improper (ma ysahhish) . . . , should show some honor (nakhwa) and manhood (ruguula) and go
out to protest. . . . If you are a man (raagil), you should go out to protect me (tihmeeni) and protect
any girl who is out to protest.”
This appeal to the man, who defines himself as a man, who could protect female protesters, as well
as the sense of partnership and interdependence that Asma emphasized, resonated in a powerful way
with my anthropological research on masculinity and embodiment in Egypt. Asma’s words and the
praise in various media for the “real men” who initiated and sustained the protests clearly paralleled
the ways that people spoke of the “real man” (raagil bi saheeh) in al-Zawiya al-Hamra, a low-income
3
neighborhood in northern Cairo, where I have been working since 1993. My ethnographic work in
Cairo helped me understand the mobilization of millions of men and women who continued to protest
before and after Mubarak’s political demise. The dispositions that structured their conduct; the
courage, solidarity, and determination they have shown; and the way their bodies became vehicles for
political protest were informed by dynamics I have studied in Cairo for nearly two decades.
This book was conceived and researched largely before the January 25 Revolution. However, much
of it was written during and after the massive nonviolent movement that has begun to change the face
of the political system not only in Egypt but in other Arab countries as well. My references to these
events throughout the book reflect their strong influence on how we think about contemporary Egypt
and analyze its current socioeconomic and political structures and imagine its future. At the same
time, against the backdrop of these events, it is productive to think of what my ethnography reveals
about the social and economic frustrations that shape men’s lives, particularly unemployment and
low-paying jobs, political marginalization, inefficiency of government services and bureaucracies,
and brutality of the police. More important, my analysis helps us understand some of the cultural
meanings that informed the reactions of men and women to the changing events and how “structures
of feeling” have been shaped by the interplay between local cultural meanings and values and broader
national struggles and events. The phrase “structures of feeling” was advanced by Raymond Williams
to capture the interplay between the social and personal, objective and subjective, fixed and active,
4
explicit and implicit, and thought and feeling. He chose the word feeling to “emphasize a distinction
from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ and ‘ideology’” and to highlight the need to account not
only for formally held and systematic beliefs but also for “meanings and values as they are actively
5
lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs.” This notion is
particularly helpful in accounting for how emerging ideas and feelings are being articulated within
existing systems of meanings. The story that emerges, I hope, helps us understand the massive
6
mobilization of millions of Egyptians and the unexpected magnitude of the changes that ensued.
Whenever possible, I draw attention to some parallels, overlaps, tensions, and contradictions
between local values and broader political and national projects, events, and discourses during and
since the Egyptian revolution. However, this book is first and foremost a study of masculinity
(ruguula) and embodiment in al-Zawiya al-Hamra. It aims to give the reader a sense of the meaning
of manhood and the multiple agents who invest time and energy in the making of men. Acquiring a
masculine identity is not simply an individual endeavor but is deeply connected to the recognition
7
granted by others. While this identity is embodied by the individual actor, this book shows that
masculinity is a collective project that is negotiated through interactions between the private and the
public, men and women, young and old, parents and children, neighbors and strangers, friends and
8
foes, community members and outsiders.
9
In order to give the reader a sense of how men and women in Egypt “do gender,” this book draws
on the daily practices and life stories of men and women in al-Zawiya al-Hamra whom I have known
for almost twenty years. Since I first visited the area in 1993, I have gotten to know several families
very well, keeping in touch with them over the years. In addition to fieldwork for two years between
1993–1994, eight months in 1997, and one year in 2006–2007, I have visited the area almost every
summer since 1993. The latest visit was in the summer of 2012. My long-standing relationship with
several families in the area allowed me to see babies born, infants become teenagers, children
become adults, and older people age and retire. Some of my close interlocutors got married, some
became sick, and some died. While both emotionally challenging and exhilarating, tracing their life
trajectories allowed me to see how, under different circumstances (such as sickness, unemployment,
debt, migration, marriage, and fatherhood), they struggled to meet the expectations of their families
and materialize the social norms that defined them as men (and women).
Gender and Embodiment
This book is an argument against the “over-embodiment,” especially in Western media, of the women
and “disembodiment,” both in the media and scholarly work, of the men of the Middle East. By
“disembodiment” I mean the tendency to equate men with mind (‘aql), culture, reason, honor, and
10
public life, while offering little (if any) discussion of emotions, feelings, or bodily matters. In
contrast, women are often equated with body, nature, passion, secrecy, shame, and the private domain.
Until recently, we have read about women mainly in the context of bodily functions and practices such
11
as veiling, segregation, birthing, and sexual control. In addition to the excessive focus on the hijab
(women’s head cover), a telling example is the attention directed to female circumcision. While this
practice has been the focus of much attention, evoking “images of child abuse and torture” and
“neocolonial visions of culturally disrespectful Eurocentric paternalism,” little scholarly attention has
12
been directed to male genital cutting. In the process, the literature (without necessarily intending)
continues to contribute to the over-embodiment of women and the disembodiment of men.
This is such a hegemonic view in Middle Eastern studies that I am struck by my own inability to
think of the male body as a subject of analysis until recently. Since I started my research in al-Zawiya,
I have heard young men talk with admiration about the strength and abilities of Arnold
Schwarzenegger (loved and referred to simply as “Arnold”) in The Terminator or True Lies, as well
as the ever-whitening skin of Michael Jackson. I have seen young men obsess over their hair, skin,
