This article explores the Egyptian state’s production of desired manhood and destruction of unwanted masculinities in relation to home and displacement through audio-focused analysis and a focus on ...sonic infrastructures. While sonic infrastructures can be used as a form of political control and violence, my work in Egypt also shows how people, through sound and sonic resistance, navigate and shape sonic landscapes of insecurity, violence and liminality, as well as resisting displacement and claiming space. In Cairo, where political unrest over the past decade has produced new imaginaries and maps of belonging, men opposing the politics of the current regime have been expelled by the state from their own city; deprived of rights, safety, status and dignity. The institutions of state power employ sound as a political representation, and control, monitor, limit as well as threaten the population through the sonic. All of these sound systems operate at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. There are countless examples of how materialised sonic experiences are consciously constructed and used by the autocratic military regime in Egypt to discipline and ‘produce’ its subjects, through for example forbidding particular music; monitoring its residents and thereby employing control by listening; using unbearable loud sounds during torture; or closing downtown bars, cafes and bookshops and thereby sonically controlling and limiting parts of the cityscape of Cairo. These sonic materialised experiences are connected to how gendered bodies are excluded, un/remade, produced, expressed and negotiated.
The Streets Are Talking to Me MARIA FREDERIKA MALMSTRÖM
MECW: The Middle East in the Contemporary World,
11/2019
eBook, Book
This sophisticated book presents new theoretical and analytical insights into the momentous events in the Arab world that began in 2011 and, more importantly, into life and politics in the aftermath ...of these events. Focusing on the qualities of the sensory world, Maria Frederika Malmström explores the dramatic differences after the Egyptian revolution and their implications for society-the lack of sound in the floating landscape of Cairo after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the role of material things in the sit-ins of 2013, the military evocation of masculinities (and the destruction of alternative ones), and how people experience pain, rage, disgust, euphoria, and passion in the body. While focused primarily on changes unfolding in Egypt, this study also investigates how materiality and affect provide new possibilities for examining societies in transition. A book of rare honesty and vulnerability,The Streets Are Talking to Me is a brilliant, unconventional, and self-conscious ethnography of the space where affect, material life, violence, political crisis, and masculinities meet one another.
The percentage of woman aged 15-49 in Egypt who have undergone the procedure of female circumcision, or genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) stands at 91%, according to the latest research carried out ...by UNICEF. Female circumcision has become a global political minefield with 'Western' interventions affecting Egyptian politics and social development, not least in the area of democracy and human rights. Maria Frederika Malmström employs an ethnographic approach to this controversial issue, with the aim of understanding how female gender identity is continually created and re-created in Egypt through a number of daily practices, and the central role which female circumcision plays in this process.
This article explores the ambiguity of familiar materialities and the relationships between material and affective experiences. Those flows and interactions are crucial sites for interrogating social ...meanings, valences, and effects of suspicion. It explores how politically active Cairenes navigate suspicious spaces, bodies, and nonliving things in the cityscape and how materiality shapes and is shaped by the emotional-aesthetic responses of individuals and groups to the stimuli it provides. In this specific context, the distinct form of what the author calls agential ambivalence, where feelings of control apply to tactics for managing surveillance and to reckless risk-taking are key. Agential ambivalence is required to “stay alive” in Cairo. The activists the author knows still take extreme risks and sometimes even make seemingly careless decisions. Ambivalence in face of suspicion is a given, but it takes specific shapes and dynamics.
Abstract
This article explores the ambiguity of familiar materialities and the relationships between material and affective experiences. Those flows and interactions are crucial sites for ...interrogating social meanings, valences, and effects of suspicion. It explores how politically active Cairenes navigate suspicious spaces, bodies, and nonliving things in the cityscape and how materiality shapes and is shaped by the emotional-aesthetic responses of individuals and groups to the stimuli it provides. In this specific context, the distinct form of what the author calls agential ambivalence, where feelings of control apply to tactics for managing surveillance and to reckless risk-taking are key. Agential ambivalence is required to “stay alive” in Cairo. The activists the author knows still take extreme risks and sometimes even make seemingly careless decisions. Ambivalence in face of suspicion is a given, but it takes specific shapes and dynamics.
INTRODUCTION MARIA FREDERIKA MALMSTRÖM
The Streets Are Talking to Me,
11/2019
Book Chapter
What becomes of one who dared to simply exist in the aftermath of the largest massacre of demonstrators in protest history?
August 17. The dusty Cairo streets were eerily empty and quiet, as during ...the 6-to-6 curfew. The mistrust of the uncanny stillness of the streets was palpable. But at last we were able to go out to a totally new city— a ghost city. I helped Leyla for food, since we were out of everything. We managed to buy some groceries, including large amounts of chocolate, despite all the closed shops around us in this new, empty, unfamiliar, and
Constructions of gender, embodiment and agency among male Hamas youths in the West Bank are discussed in this article through the prism of violence. It focuses on the constructions of uncertain ...masculinities in a complex interplay of violence, political Islam, suffering and loss, and the importance of analyzing the body in such processes – both as agential and as victimized – is highlighted. To be able to move away from the sensationalist Western media that often portray Middle Eastern Muslim men as “violent,” and as terrorists, we need to understand the motivations and the meanings of violence. The method of analysis is to use a discourse-centered approach and to use experience-near ethnography that begins with men’s own practices and attends to how they understand themselves, how their bodies are involved, and how they live out norms and ideologies in their everyday lives. Thereby we are able to understand how men’s realities and identities are interpreted, negotiated and constructed and how the body is actively involved in these processes. This approach is relevant since it is possible to analyze the singularity of experience, not only as a form of social interaction, but as linked to social structures and discourses, which implies negotiations of tensions, conflicts, and uncertainties.
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