My paper explores tensions between and within feminist studies and queer studies in the MENA, by surveying, and then complicating, recent ethnographic and historical production on remunerated sexualities. Feminist studies have a history of tension with prostitutional practices. Gender oriented historians of MENA often reproduce the normative visions anchored in feminist histories of activism for the abolition of regulated prostitution and situations of forced sexual labor often labelled “traffic”. These histories tend to be written through particular archives, which negatively moralize sex work, notably those of heteronormative European institutions historically charged with the surveillance and criminalization of sex work: medicine and the police. Some feminist scholars move away from these tropes, to highlight elements of choice in sex work, and women’s right to choose and not be stigmatized for their choice of work. Scholars intent on queering MENA studies have emphasized the importance of attending to non-heteronormative sexualities as part of the remunerative spectrum. The affect of this body of work contrasts with the polarized militant feminist narratives, highlighting the value of diversity, and the emancipatory potential of transgression. I will complement but also challenge these visions through my own historical ethnographic exploration of remunerative and concubinal sexualities in Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Lebanon during the first half of the twentieth centuries. I argue that the framing and segregation of sex work as prostitution by colonial authorities attempted to displace earlier and widely normalized practices of cohabitation and service, which fit into a complex local landscape of patronage, mobility and servitude. I investigate the role that accusations of whoredom played in moralizing women’s sexual liasons and the access they secured to resources, exploring the work done by prostitution defined as accusation rather than profession. I rely on colonial archives, memoirs and fieldwork, and set my work in conversation with the scholarship of feminist ethnographers working on questions of nonmarital sexualities and the production of love and desire against normative expectations in contemporary Egypt and Morocco.

Pharmaceutical companies are part of a translation process that moves health away from an embodied experience of wellbeing and disease towards capitalist interests. New materialism inspires this project by placing chemical compounds at the center of the story when looking at regimes of power that control the traffic of those compounds. Mifepristone and misoprostol are chemical compounds that the World Health Organization lists as essential to induce abortion. Medical abortion, or abortion pills, in Egypt results interesting to study pharmocracy —a formalized global regime of hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry (Sunder Rajan 2017)—, as it shifts and changes according to global political economies. It is an attempt to de-exceptionalize the region, by inserting it into global circuits of health management, while looking at the specific implications of a country that contests and re-codes different values of this chemicals to their own capital, ethic, normative and constitutional values. From a feminist perspective, however, it allows us to question the narratives and mechanisms of control usually ascribed to the state when managing women’s reproductive rights. It also helps us highlight the political economy behind women’s right over their capacity of labour. What does the pharmacratic control of abortion pills imply for women’s experiences of reproductive labor in Egypt? I argue that the intended control by pharmocracies implies a process of translation of value between pharmaceutical companies (who seek for profits), women (who seek for autonomy and safe healthcare), and opponents (who seek for diverging morals). Pharmaceutical companies translate the value of chemical compounds (mifepristone and misoprostol) into capital value that accrues with the abortion pill. First, I will provide a brief historical background of pharmaceutical and abortion regulations in Egypt since Ottoman times, tracing the formation of constitutional and moral values on abortion and abortifacients. Then, I’ll detail the pharmocratic rule of misoprostol and mifepristone in Egypt, which is embedded in a global health market, to reframe how we conceive the global not in terms of connections and flows, but through blocks and obstacles. The itinerary of abortion pills between Pfizer, Adwia, Sigma and Multipharma from the 1980s onwards serve as examples. Finally, I deepen into how the pharmocratic value production is translated by women who resist and challenge the hegemony of the government, pharmas and healthcare providers over their bodies by consuming a pill who has been labeled and legally bounded to uses that perpetuate stigmatization and disapproval.

In this presentation I will address the 'state of the field' by explaining the innovations incorporated into my latest graduate seminar that is structured by four objectives:(1) To examine globalizing gender and sexuality struggles that frame the “modernity” of the global and the “exceptional” status of the Middle East as a geopolitical region, object of area studies and region of feminist studies;(2) To think through questions of methodology and alternative epistemologies as they are troubled and animated by figures of gender and sexuality;(3) To explore the politics of citation, activism, and agency in our global research practice;(4) To identify new formations of feminist, trans and queer social, cultural and political formations in the region in relation to spheres of the state, rights, economy, and affect.

This paper investigates Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1966 visit to an Egyptian village, Kamshish to articulate how localities and bodies in the global South experienced global solidarity. I offer an analysis that links feminist and Queer theories of embodiment to histories of decolonization. The global Third World movement: a push for solidarity between third world countries and intellectuals, was supported by the International Left. As a site for expressions of global solidarity, Kamshish witnessed visits from Che Guevara and Simone de Beauvoir in addition to Sartre. While previous literature focus on intellectual North-South links, I describe how global connections do not just happen ‘out there’ in empty space between nation-states, but manifest through the local and the body. In doing so, I decenter the French left and western epistemology, and focus on knowledge and experiences coming from the global South. I contend that the Egyptian nation-state and mainstream intellectuals were not the only interlocutors to Sartre and Beauvoir’s bid to global solidarity since named and unnamed peasants and women changed the course of their ‘official’ visit. By looking at Kamshish as opposed to the entire nation-state, I unearth the historical roles of peasants and women in shaping decolonization; roles marginalized by both national and colonial discourses. I show how three bodies of Kamshish were entangled in global politics. A dead body murdered by feudal lords, the protesting body of his wife, and the chanting body of a peasant woman. Looking at Sartre’ visit to Kamshish contributes to our understanding of the postcolonial experience of global solidarity by detailing how three bodies in the village related to international rural politics, international left circles, and international feminism. I cast the body as a medium for expressing new modes of transnational dissent. Further, I reconfigure decolonization as an embodied relationship to land and not just a political and diplomatic act of its liberation.