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The Social Life of Objects: Materiality, Class, and Gender in Urban Egypt
Abstract
Daily life in Cairo is full of human/object interactions; from the cup many people use to drink their morning tea to the bus they take to return home after a long day of work, objects are an integral part of urban life. How are some of these objects used and to what end? How do they relate to broader structures such as class and gender? Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in a low-income neighborhood in northern Cairo and informed by new material feminism and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper looks at the social life of some objects that are key to the daily life and the making of men and women. Focusing on materialities like curtains, appliances, weights, and protein powder, this paper explores the relationship between gender, class, and matter. It seeks to complicate simple assumptions about the agency of matter and explores how the making of gendered and classed subjects is linked to how objects are used, circulated, and reused in daily life. It shows that young women are socialized into the cult of domesticity through an emphasis on cleanliness and aesthetics as key to their making as women and the boosting of the standing of their families. Through being charged with caring for their housing units and their functionality, cleanliness, and stylization, young women are oriented towards the inside and the domestic. In contrast, young men are oriented towards building a body that could be converted into other forms of material and social forms of capital. The use of weights and protein powder to build muscles orient them to the outside, to the market, and the eye of the other and produce them as potential workers, protectors, and partners. By coupling new materialist approaches with Bourdieu’s work, this paper aims to highlight the importance of looking at the inseparability of gender and class in how objects are used and integrated in daily life. Rather than giving “agency” to matter, as argued by some new materialists, my discussion highlights the importance of contextualizing relationalities between objects and humans, accounting for their effects and affects, and exploring how they are structured by and structure social inequalities.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None