Gender and the National Imaginary: Contested Masculinities in the New Writing in Egypt

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
4418

About this event

Professor Hoda El-Sadda

It is widely agreed that the rise and development of the modern Arabic novel ran parallel to and intersected with projects of nation-building in the modern period. The novel, as a "modern" genre became one of the main venues/instruments for shaping the contours of the national imaginary, hence a contested site for competing ideologies. Literary historians have identified the "woman question", or representations of modern femininity in the new nation, as one of the main themes that occupied modern Arab writers. However, representations of modern masculinity have also prevailed, in fact, have always been a subtext in literary imaginings of the nation.

This talk examines the literary production of a new generation of writers who published their work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Egypt. Their work presents new ways for imagining modern masculinities, departing significantly from canonical nationalist representations that continue to dominate the Arab literary field. This talk will attempt a reading of Ahmed al-Aidy's Being Abbas al-Abd (2003) and Ghada Abdelaal's I Want to Get Married (2008).


Bio

Professor Hoda El-Sadda currently holds a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University. She is also Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW), a collaborative project between the Universities of Manchester, Edinburgh and Durham. In 1992, she co-founded and co-edited Hagar , an interdisciplinary journal in women's studies published in Arabic. In 1997 she founded (and was Director between 1997-2000; and 2004-2005) the Women and Memory Forum, a research organization based in Egypt.

She has co-authored and edited several books in Arabic on gender and Arab cultural history. Amongst her articles in English: "Imaging the `New Man': Gender and Nation in Arab Literary Narratives in the Early Twentieth Century" in JMEWS: Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 3.2 (Spring 2007)pp. 31-55; "Gendered Citizenship: Discourses on Domesticity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," in Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 4:1 (2006) pp.1-28; "Discourses on Women's Biographies and Cultural Identity: Twentieth Century Representations of the Life of `Aisha Bint Abi Bakr," in Feminist Studies , 27:1 (Spring 2001), pp.37-64.

She is Associate Editor of the Online Edition of the Encyclopedia of Women in Muslim Cultures published by Brill since 2006, member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) since 2005, a Consultant Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Second Edition , member of the Advisory Committee, The Anna Lindh Euro- Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures since 2004, member of The National Council for Human Rights in Egypt (2004-2005), member of the Advisory Board of the Global Fund for Women since 2005, member of the March9 Group in Egypt since 2003, and member of the Core Team of The Arab Human Development Report, UNDP in 2003.

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk