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  • Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940
  • Nadia Guessous
Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 Wilson Chacko Jacob . Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2011. 440 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4674-6.

Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 by Wilson Chacko Jacob is a genealogy of bourgeois masculinity in Egypt that treats subject-formation as a historical question and pays attention to its constitutive repudiations. Inspired by poststructuralist and feminist theories of gendered subject-formation, as well as by postcolonial critiques of history writing, the book traces some of the contingencies that contributed to the normalization of a bourgeois or effendi masculinity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. Working Out Egypt is based on extensive archival research and a wide array of materials including British and Egyptian official documents, Olympic archives, biographies, magazine and newspaper articles, letters from readers and advice columns, novels, films, postcards, cartoons, and photographs. The book is framed by an equally impressive range of scholarly debates on empire, postcoloniality, nationalism, modernity, orientalism, liberalism, subject-formation, gender and sexuality, historiography, and representation.

The book is divided into an Introduction, eight chapters, and almost 100 pages of footnotes. After laying out the theoretical and disciplinary stakes of the project in the Introduction, Jacob explores imperial discourses about masculinity, especially the claim that it was "England's [End Page 119] virile and virtuous masculinity that made possible its imperial victories and guaranteed its future" (40). This claim depended on a contrast effect with educated Egyptian men, who were seen as lacking in strength and discipline and therefore in need of tutelage. Popularized through magazines, newspapers, and novels, this imperial self-representation played a crucial role in justifying empire and sustaining enthusiasm for it. Set against the background of this imperial conflation of masculinity with civilization, the book goes on to describe how tropes of heroic and virile men became salient in Egyptian nationalist discourse, with nationalism becoming "a prerequisite for manhood and vice versa" (62).

Based on the assumption that "devotion to sports and exercise was a cause of a nation's greatness, while its neglect was a sign and cause of its decline" (76), physical culture, or al-riyada al-badaniyyya, occupied center stage in this Egyptian discourse. The expansion of the press in the late nineteenth century played a key role in promoting physical culture "as an exemplary modern practice having a national value for Egypt" (69). Chapter 3 provides examples of this form of "cultural production" by analyzing two popular cultural and scientific journals that prescribed exercise as "a cure for laziness and indolence and as a prophylactic against common ailments that result from a lack of physical activity" (74). With the muscular male form now celebrated as a model for emulation (80), these magazines particularly advocated bodybuilding and weightlifting. The chapter also discusses the establishment of the National Club for Physical Culture and the institutionalization of physical education in school curriculums as other sites for disciplining male bodies. In a similar vein, Chapter 4 argues that the Boy Scout movement operated as a pedagogic and performative site of subject formation that contributed to the reconfiguration of Egyptian masculinity. Chapter 5 further situates the emergence of physical culture within an international context by analyzing the debates that surrounded the participation of Egyptians in international sports competitions including the Olympics. It argues that the desire for muscular bodies cannot simply be understood in nationalist terms. While Chapter 6 suggests that sports magazines contributed greatly to producing a desire for "perfect" bodies, Chapter 7 focuses on the realm of fashion and dress as yet another "crucial site in an ongoing process of working out Egypt and its subject in colonial modernity" (187). [End Page 120]

By locating idealized notions of effendi masculinity within the colonial, national, and global conditions of its emergence, the author argues for the necessity of going beyond the national context in the study of modern subjectivity. Effendi masculinity emerges both as a challenge to colonialist representations of the East as feminized and degenerate and as a response to the nationalist...

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