Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt by Hanan Hammad (review)

Industrial Sexuality won the 2017 Association for Middle East Women's Studies Book Award.

Hanan Hammad's Industrial Sexuality is about the lives of proletarianized peasants who worked for the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company (MSWC) in al-Mahalla al-Kubra from the1920s throughWorldWarII. Thebookis auniqueresourcefor courseson gender and sexuality and the formation of the modern state in the Middle East and North Africa. Rarely have workers, not necessarily participants in organized labor movements, had their stories told with such detail and care. Through an analysis of archival records that includes court cases, official MSWC documents, and memoirs, Hammad weaves a historical account of how industrial work formed the modern Egyptian subject.

Chapter 1 investigates the making of industrial masculinities. While the state legitimated aggressive masculinity for middle-class men, it condemned as antinationalist male factory worker aggression in response to abuse and exploitation. The stress of dangerous and humiliating labor conditions in the MSWC forged both docile and volatile worker masculinities. Workers fought each other, management, hostile al-Mahalla native residents, police, and rival street gangs. Hammad describes the body disciplines and violence used by the MSWC to control workers. She shows, moreover, how the presence of female workers was crucial to men's masculinity. Male workers could enhance their status among other men by harassing and acting violently toward female workers, as well as by protecting women from other men. Either way, female workers offered male workers and managers opportunities to perform patriarchal masculinity. Hammad insists that class-based power relations, rather than culture, are at the root of gender-based violence. Her work poses a cogent challenge to hegemonic representations of Arab masculinity.

In chapter 2 Hammad contrasts the rigid hierarchy of the factory with the more relaxed settings of bars, cafés, and clubs where male workers bonded over shared work experiences. These homosocial and egalitarian social spaces became hubs of labor movement organizing. Men's clubs provided a support system that mediated violent encounters between male workers and between workers and management, and offered financial support to those in need. Hammad criticizes the "Western perception" that intimacy among Egyptian male workers is repressed homosexuality (74). While there are few descriptions of same-sex sexuality in the texts and records she examined to produce this historical account, there are occasional mentions of male homosexuality and homophobia. Hammad briefly discusses the apparently lesbian lifestyles of some of the female workers. The book would have been strengthened by further elaboration of what Joseph Massad argues is the Western imposition of a "gay international" lens to understanding sexualities in Arab societies, as well as the workers' understandings of their own sexuality.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine women, work, and the household division of labor. While factory women became symbols of modern Egypt during the interwar period, the gendered stratification of job positions also modernized industrial inequality. Despite the obstacles, some poor women of al-Mahalla undermined state and familial patriarchal systems through economic activities such as selling food to workers and buying property. Lower-class women, whose families could not afford to seclude them, had an advantage over middle- and upper-class women because they were part of public economic life. Owning property offered them status and honor. Middle- and upper-class feminists viewed their own seclusion as a central component of "women's oppression." These elite women, however, did not address the distinctions between their experiences and the lives of lower-class women. Hammad's research illustrates the cogency of class-based gender analysis. Her attention to the struggles of working-class women suggests that liberation for them meant being treated with respect in the public world they were already navigating.

Chapter 5 analyzes changing sexual norms and taboos in the urban industrial milieu of al-Mahalla. Women often rebelled against attempts by male kin to control their public presence. Hammad provides vivid accounts of instances in which boys and men responded to such rebellion with...