Moving between places can be a functional act. People move from their housing units to the streets, using transportation to go to other places. The movement itself is gendered, and varies from one geography to another. A lack of walking infrastructure arose with the rising of mechanised machines of motion. The modes of production made place-making favouring the fastest ways of moving, and walking is the slowest motion of them. In 1905, there were 110 motorised vehicles in Cairo, while in 2016, the licensed vehicles in Cairo reached 3.5 million. The population was 400,000 and became 21 million. The minimum walking infrastructure people use is two: one is from their own housing unit, to the entrance of the building, which is the basic architecture design level of residential buildings and housing units. The second is the walking infrastructure on an urban design level, that speaks to the walking distance from the building entrance to the vehicles, whether public or private. Gendered-based-violence forces people to make choices about their pathways to ensure safety to their own bodies. Women and LGBTQ+ groups are the most vulnerable in terms of gender-based- violence. Since the designers are not ensuring the safety of gendered subjects in many walking distances; in this paper, I analyze designs of neighbourhoods and residentials buildings where gendered vulnerable groups have to make choices of how to avoid violence. In this paper, I analyze the walking infrastructure, on both architectural and urban design levels, and how gendered subjects make decisions of their walking pathways to ensure safety to their everyday errands and functional movements between places. In this paper, I analyze urban fabrics of neighbourhoods and communities inside the boundaries of the core of Cairo and Giza. The neighbourhoods I will analyze, and its population do belong to social classes of middle-class, middle-upper-class, and lower classes, who live at the central Greater Cairo i.e., Mohandseen, Doki, AlHaram, Bulaq, DownTown, Garden City, and ElMounira.

This article takes on courts in Egypt as a public space and investigates their gendered politics and affects. Egyptian courts are daily packed with different vulnerable bodies awaiting critical decisions. Gender battles are particularly salient in courts, whether these have to do with issues of divorce, custody, debt, and inheritance, or cases around rape, sex work and ‘morality’ on social media. But in all these cases, one group takes on daily battles to do their work: women lawyers. Women lawyers are consumed, infantilized, and undermined daily by male lawyers and judges. The male gaze of judges dismisses female bodies as unprofessional, deviant, and out-of-place, and often challenges women lawyers and litigants with patriarchal performances, including shouting and silencing. The precarity of women’s bodies is paralleled by the precarity of the law itself, and its disorderly applications by largely male, conservative, and elite judges. Court spaces are not merely sites of oppression and sexual domination; they are also a stage for performing subversions and resistance. This article shows how simple subversive actions of female lawyers, like smoking, shouting, or dressing in ways considered non-normative, are acts of claim-making that have consequences on their court cases. When performed collectively, these acts can be disruptive, and produce affects of hope and resilience in the face of injustice. This research is based on an 18-months multi-sited court ethnography, in addition to several interviews and focus groups with lawyers in Egypt.

This paper is an attempt at reading 1970s -1990s Cairo, through the banal object of bathroom tiles. The decades of 1970s-1990s are when the Egyptian state had its protracted flirtation with Infitah, the open market, and later the full espousal of neoliberalism in its multiple mutations. A lot of important literature has documented the transformation of the city through tracing neoliberal urbanism. Yet, in this paper, I want to foreground banal material fragments in reading this transformation aesthetically. I do so through tracing the ceramic bathroom tile in three registers. First, archival research that traces advertisement material of new domestic material. Second, literature and film that looked used these tiles as an object of desire, and a marker of class aspiration. Finally, I look at how this recladding of spaces of domesticity became an urban aesthetic through Cairo of the 1990s.  My purpose in this paper is to pause at this ordinary, everyday and even banal object of desire as a scene of attachment to the neoliberal everyday (following affect theorists Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart), and to unpack the constellation of promises it gathered. In doing so, I use an approach that attends to materiality and affect, specifically on recladding the spaces of domesticity, and I argue that it is intertwined with Cairene aspirational urban aesthetics. 

A woman’s role in the home and its upkeep is usually taken for granted, naturalised, and accepted. Women have had to take on responsibilities that they do not get accounted for and do not become recognized for. More centrally, through this naturalised labour of care and responsibility, women make significant sacrifices for their family that affects their choice of marriage, children, career, and personal choice. While this is a common phenomenon largely addressed in the literature on gender, I choose to focus this presentation on a personalised story of invisible women’s labour, my grandmother. My grandmother Laila, or Mama Lolla as she is named by her grandkids, has many characteristics that cannot be contained in one abstract, let alone one presentation. However, through her life history, I will reveal more than only women's invisible domestic labour. I will shed light on a story of a woman who was born and grew up in landed gentry family in Beheira governorate who got married at seventeen, before finishing her school education and moved to live in another village in Beheira governorate when she got married to my grandfather, the village Omda (government appointed village headman). After his death over a decade later, she got married to his younger brother who took over the Omodeya (village headman role), he also died two decades later. She bore six children, four from the first marriage (including my mother) and two from the second marriage. For the last four decades the family home in Beheira is where she resides with my maternal uncle, the present-day Omda. She spends her days tending to the chickens, goats, and cows, cooking for the family members who are present, and serving meals and beverages to the tens of village members who appear daily at the house to solve their disputes with the Omda, my uncle. Mama Lolla was also a central figure in my own doctoral research when I had to resort to conducting my research in my family village midway through my fieldwork period after losing access to another Nile Delta village where I was initially conducting my fieldwork. This presentation aims to address the invisibility of female labour in Egyptian households through the lived history of the invisibility of an Egyptian woman in the countryside and essential to the sustenance of the rural political structure of the Omodeya. An intimate family story but equally a broader familiar story.