Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940

This rich cultural history of the formation of an Egyptian national subject in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth is also a compelling critique of modern Middle Eastern historiography. Wilson Jacob argues that during British colonial rule (1882Ð1936), attempts to create a distinctively modern and Egyptian self free from the colonial gaze led to the formation of an ambivalent, performative subjectivity that he calls Òeffendi masculinity.Ó He traces effendi masculinity as it took hold during the interwar years, in realms from scouting and competitive sports to sex talk and fashion, considering its gendered performativity in relation to a late-nineteenth- century British discourse on masculinity and empire and an explicitly nationalist discourse on Egyptian masculinity. He contends that as an assemblage of colonial modernity, effendi masculinity was simultaneously local and global, national and international, and particular and universal.