Almost as soon as the Egyptian satirical press came into being, negative visual images of Egyptian women began to appear in the popular press: sometimes the images were of evil temptresses and harlots; of domineering, aggressive, and obsessed wives, and sometimes of overly westernized modern women - not sufficiently Egyptian; not sufficiently Islamic. The criticism crossed boundaries of age, social affiliations, marital and economic status. Although important changes in the content and context of the debate on women's roles and rights in Egyptian society had taken place in the Egyptian public sphere, debates which culminated in the 1920's with the formation of women’s organizations, as well as educational and legislative reforms, in the imagined caricatured world created by men and directed mainly to a male audience, women were still being belittled, laughed at, and reduced to objects of ridicule. Skimming through the satirical press of the Interwar Years, one might have assumed there was no ideal Egyptian model of womanhood; only impure, unworthy, unwomanly, malicious, debased ideas of women. The stereotypes demeaning Egyptian women can be read, and have been partially debated by some researchers as mainly reflecting an Islamic-Egyptian reaction to Western stimuli. In other words, since this imagery was constructed in the context of Egypt's efforts to modernize and compete with the West, the caricatures of women have been discussed as reflecting Egyptian-Islamic tendencies to cling to the past in an attempt to block change and preserve the status quo. At the same time, Egyptian social institutions and customs hindered women's ability to create alternatives to men's images of them. The artist's role was considered male, and the tools of the pictorial image were built and operated by men. Men were the producers and controllers of art, and their graphic representations perpetuated a male-centered view. However, as this paper will show, visual satirical imagery in the Egyptian press (mainly from al-Lata?if al-Musawwara, Ruz al-Yusef and al-Kashkul al Musawwar) reveals a close resemblance to western visual debates on women's rights – such as the nineteenth century French satirical reaction to social changes accelerated following the French Revolution, or the American imagery of the suffrage campaign (1907-14). Hence, the Egyptian visual imagery demeaning women should be contextualized as part of a phenomenon which crossed boundaries of space, society, culture, and religion - a gendered reaction to social change, and not necessarily an Islamic nor an Egyptian one.

I examine bodybuilding and gym-going in Erbil (Hewlêr) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq as ethical practices concerned with formation of both self and collective identities in the Iraqi state and in the Kurdistani statelet. Much scholarship has explored the role of sports in the modern Middle East in producing "fit" and patriotic citizen subjects and in creating new spaces of intimacy. In this literature the state often appears as strengthened through citizens' contributions to the nation through sports. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, however, the state is largely experienced as fragmenting and possibly reforming, and sports constitute an ethical practice in response to, and sometimes counter to, the state. In this paper I draw upon anthropologies of the state, morality, and the self to consider how physical training in a state that is said to have become "weak" or "failed" reflects citizen-subjects' preoccupations with forging self and collective identities in the wake of a fragmenting state. The paper is based on 20 months of ethnographic research in Erbil, primarily participant-observation and interviews at gyms, during which time I also coached indoor cycling ("spinning") at one of the popular "mixed" gyms (for both men and women). The common discourse which emerged across communities of exercise in Erbil was that exercise is 1) an agentive practice, 2) practiced in the gaps left by a "failed" state, such as inadequate education, healthcare, employment, security, etc., which 3) is part of becoming, foremost, an ethical self, and secondly a responsible member of a community. Many gym-goers in Erbil embody one or more types of marginalized identity in the Kurdistan Region, being IDPs, members of the Kurdish diaspora, immigrants from neighboring Syria or Iran, youth, or women. By analyzing marginalized gym-goers’ narratives of stress, violence, and displacement, we witness the bodily effects of the state. For example, some gym-goers shared stories of fleeing Baghdad or Mosul to Erbil, where they began exercise programs to combat adverse effects of violence, or similarly, the effects of difficult pregnancies and surgeries which are said to evidence inadequate government healthcare. Some exercise communities remained informal, such as women who happened to exercise together in group fitness classes; others were formalized, such as body-building collectives and private security men who trained together. Gym-goers' projects to cultivate the individual body foster the body politic, revealing how embodiment of self and citizen-subject emerges through participation in sports in Iraqi Kurdistan.

My paper will explore the history of French colonial mandate Lebanon (1918-1946) through the prism of prostitution. While prostitution pre-existed the arrival of the French, the rise of international organizations and presence of the French army brought public scrutiny of the profession to the forefront. The character of the practice of prostitution was transformed from a relatively unregulated to a highly-regulated one under colonial order. The newly-established system under the 1920 administrative order signed by General Gouraud , whereby prostitutes registered with the local police, carried identification cards, complied with obligatory medical examinations, and worked at designated brothels, had the effect of “professionalizing” prostitution. Tensions concerning public morality grew over how to deal with the “vice”, varying from moralists and feminists calling for an outright ban to others who begrudgingly accepted its presence. Prostitutes were the subject of heated debate because they represented socio-political transformations of the period. These transformations included: the oversight of new international bodies; unease related to colonial rule and in particular the “civilizing missions” of missionaries; elite feminist organizations and publications; and new laws. Ultimately, international organizations, colonial administrators and missionaries, feminists, and public moralists grappled with questions surrounding the increasingly public role of prostitution. This concentrated the debate on the regulation of women’s bodies with little consideration of the lives behind the practice. Through the examination of archival sources in France and Lebanon, my paper will investigate the public and private debates around prostitution in three main sites: the metropole, colonial Lebanon, and new international bodies. Thus, it will show how these debates were connected to the increasing regulation of prostitution in Lebanon in the period under study. By so doing I will be connecting with a broader historical literature that understands the development of public morality in colonial states through the lens of “imperial networks”.

This research project looks at the impact of HIV/AIDS in the construction of hegemonic and marginal masculinities in Egypt, since the 2011 revolution. I argue that the government of Abdelfattah al-Sisi instrumentalized this intersection between health and gender to enhance his military regime against a “deviant” group of sexualities, bodies and moralities. Thus, the hegemonic masculinity, as understood in the gender hierarchy theory, is limited to the heterosexual, healthy and morally appropriate men. On the contrary, the marginal masculinity encompasses those men who, due to HIV/AIDS, are perceived as a failure, unable to perform roles of strength and that practice sexually deviant behaviours (sexual intecourse outside marriage, men who have sex with men and use of injected drugs). I bring into conversation Gender studies with International Relations, Anthropology and Sociology to produce a research on intersectionality and masculinities in Egypt. Notions of gender hierarchy that structure my analysis are indebted to R.W. Connell’s work. They interact with the notion of “human-security state”, named by Paul Amar, as well as Farha Ghannam’s “masculine trajectories”, when referring to the structure and the agency of masculinity. Robert Morrell and Sandra Swart’s argument on hyperheterosexuality surrounding HIV/AIDS to show the problematics behind attributing its affliction to MSM, instead of looking at injected drug users, to problematize the elements encompassing the hegemonic masculinity. I extend my study from the revolution that toppled Mubarak in 2011 until the current government of Abdelfattah al-Sisi. I follow Connell’s revision of her own theory to look at the configuration of masculinity through three levels of analysis —local, regional and international. I compare the country's legislation targeting queer subjects, the national HIV/AIDS programmes that have been implemented along with UNAIDS, and local NGOs reports on the subject. I have special interest on Caritas, due to its pioneer work on MSM living with HIV/AIDS, without excluding significant cases from the local, national and international scenarios.