Media sensations, contested sensibilities: Gender and moral order in the Egyptian mass media, 1920--1955.

Abstract

This dissertation is about the rise of the mass media in Egypt and its implications for the representation and production of gender between 1920 and 1955. It argues that the proliferation of Arabic language newspapers and magazines after WWI played an important role not only in the imagining of a geographically and politically distinct nation, but also in the gendering of this imagined Egypt as well. By examining the sensational crime stories found in the ubiquitous <italic>akhbar al-hawadith</italic> (literally news of occurrences such as crime) reports of the period, the dissertation demonstrates that real concerns about crime and immorality in Egyptian society were factored into important debates about the appropriate balance between Western modernity and notions of cultural authenticity in modern Egypt. Thousands of rape, murder, adultery, assault and suicide cases filled these columns, and commentators, among them some of the leading feminists, politicians, and religious conservatives of the period, often either understood or reevaluated their gendered notions of moral propriety in relation to these stories. The dissertation also suggests, however, that the most widely sensational cases also sometimes <italic>transcended</italic> the bounds of literacy that usually rendered print culture the province of elites. Photo essays, channels of gossip, public readers, music, and after the mid-1930's, through theatre, film and the radio, occasionally transformed sensational <italic>akhbar al-hawadith </italic> reports into a mass-mediated popular forum for the discussion of gender and morality. Media sensations of the first magnitude were thus moments when crises that seemed to threaten the moral order of Egyptian society became, in effect, shared experiences across class, religious and literacy boundaries. Five particularly sensational stories are examined here, and the dissertation demonstrates that sensational <italic>akhbar al-hawadith </italic> tell a uniquely important, if mostly forgotten, story in the gendering of modern Egypt: the elevation of local concerns about moral propriety into a discourse of national moral order, the transformation of this national concern with morality into a central part of nationalist rhetoric, and the relevance of these perceived crises in morality to particular constructions of Egyptian identity and citizenship.