“They Threw Her in with the Prostitutes!”: Negotiating Respectability between the Space of Prison and the Place of Woman in Egypt (1943–1959)
The memoirs of political prisoners generally articulate the struggle of dissident individuals and political groups to attain a set of basic and often recurrent goals: freedom of expression and affiliation, social and economic security, humane treatment and the right to have a say in the management o...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | fra |
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Association Mnémosyne
2020-03-01
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| Series: | Genre & Histoire |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/genrehistoire/5213 |
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| Summary: | The memoirs of political prisoners generally articulate the struggle of dissident individuals and political groups to attain a set of basic and often recurrent goals: freedom of expression and affiliation, social and economic security, humane treatment and the right to have a say in the management of state and society.1 This applies to both men's and women’s memoirs. Still, echoes of certain ‘special struggles’ permeate the narratives of woman political prisoners, henceforth mu‘taqalāt: how they sought to reconcile their experience of imprisonment with personal and public constructions of their selves as hardworking students, doting mothers, dutiful wives, obedient daughters and respectable middle-class women are all underlying themes running throughout their testimonies. The student demonstrations of 1945-46 presented the semi-colonial Egyptian state with a new and unique problem: up until that point women prisoners were thought of only as common criminals – drug-dealers, prostitutes (sic) and murderers. There was no cultural, or indeed logistical and infrastructural possibility for incarcerating a middle-class female revolutionary. Middle-class women, entering the space of the prison for the first time, risked their reputation and honour if they could not assert the decidedly different nature of their kind of imprisonment. It follows, then, that the struggle for respectability mounted by these pioneer mu‘taqalāt and the moral panics ensuant on their imprisonment would be foundational to the post-colonial landscape of national gender and citizenship regimes. This paper asks two interrelated questions: how was the prison implicated in the production of national gender regimes and how did mu‘taqalāt in turn challenge these national gender regimes in prison? I define mu‘taqalāt here as self-identifying women incarcerated for what they or the state branded as crimes of political identity and/or activity. |
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| ISSN: | 2102-5886 |