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Teaching How to Observe Bodies: Penetrating Women's Domestic Sphere in Inter-Revolutionary Egypt
Abstract
The paper studies Egyptian nationalist pedagogy of sexual and reproductive health targeted toward women in the inter-revolutionary period with an emphasis on the decade before the July Revolution of 1952. Mainly drawing on Egyptian health periodicals for a lay audience, the paper delineates the framework of the nationalist discourse on sex and reproduction which did not change much over the interwar period despite recurring political turmoil, economic crises and the growing sense of disillusion since 1919, but continued serving for the new regime of the Free Officers. The effendi medics equipped with modern medical training believed that the sex education was crucial for creating a new generation. Through publications, they indoctrinated the Egyptians of marriageable age with what they considered as scientific knowledge in the hope of preparing future parents physically and psychologically healthy and capable of producing and raising healthy sons. They utilized Western medicine as a “technology” in the process of self-fashioning. Unlike social sciences, the authority and scientificity of modern Western medicine was seldom questioned by educated Egyptians. But did the selected medical knowledge affect the life of the layman in a way that was not in the Egyptian nationalists' conscious design? Focusing on the medical and cultural discourses on venereal disease and pregnancy, the paper examines how the readers were instructed to diagnose themselves by observing their own bodies and how the objects of the clinical gaze transformed into subjects and came to assume responsibility for taking care of their own bodies for the sake of the nation. The paper argues that the modern Egyptian women were not left to freely assume the role of “the managers of the house,” but rather were unwittingly subjected to a closer scrutiny of the male gaze over their privacies, which was justified by modern medicine.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries