“They Threw Her in with the Prostitutes!”: Negotiating Respectability between the Space of Prison and the Place of Woman in Egypt (1943–1959)

Les mémoires des prisonniers politiques articulent généralement la lutte de dissidents individuels et celle de groupes politiques pour atteindre plusieurs buts, simples et souvent récurrents : la liberté d’expression et d’association, la sécurité économique et sociale, des traitements humains et le droit de donner son avis sur les affaires de l’État et de la société. Cela est vrai des mémoires écrits par des hommes et par des femmes également. Toutefois, des échos de luttes particulières transparaissent dans les récits des prisonnières politiques, et donc des mu‘taqalāt : comment elles se sont efforcées de concilier leur expérience de prisonnières avec la construction personnelle et publique d’elles-mêmes comme étudiantes sérieuses, mères de famille aimantes, épouses consciencieuses, filles obéissantes et femmes respectables de la classe moyenne, parcourent l’ensemble de leurs témoignages. Les manifestations étudiantes de 1945-1946 ont confronté l’État égyptien semi-colonial à un problème unique et nouveau : jusque-là les prisonnières étaient considérées comme des criminelles de droit commun – revendeuses de drogues, prostituées (sic) et meurtrières. Il n’y avait aucune possibilité culturelle, ni même logistique ou infrastructurelle, d’incarcérer une femme de la classe moyenne comme révolutionnaire. De leur côté, les femmes de la classe moyenne, pénétrant dans l’espace de la prison pour la première fois, risquaient leur réputation et leur honneur si elles ne pouvaient affirmer le caractère spécifique de leur emprisonnement. Il s’ensuit par conséquent que le combat pour la respectabilité mené par ces pionnières mu‘taqalāt et le désarroi moral causé par leur emprisonnement se montra fondateur du paysage post-colonial des régimes de genre et de citoyenneté nationaux. Cet article pose deux questions qui sont liées entre elles : comment la prison fut-elle impliquée dans la production de régimes de genre nationaux et comment les mu‘taqalāt  défiaient-elles à leur tour ces régimes de genre nationaux depuis leur prison ? Je définis ici les mu‘taqalāt comme des femmes qui s’identifiaient elles-mêmes comme emprisonnées pour ce qu’elles-mêmes ou l’État considéraient comme des crimes liés à une identité ou une activité politiques.The memoirs of political prisoners generally articulate the struggle of dissident individuals and political groups to attain a set of basic and often recurrent goals: freedom of expression and affiliation, social and economic security, humane treatment and the right to have a say in the management of state and society. This applies to both men's and women’s memoirs. Still, echoes of certain ‘special struggles’ permeate the narratives of woman political prisoners, henceforth mu‘taqalāt: how they sought to reconcile their experience of imprisonment with personal and public constructions of their selves as hardworking students, doting mothers, dutiful wives, obedient daughters and respectable middle-class women are all underlying themes running throughout their testimonies. The student demonstrations of 1945-46 presented the semi-colonial Egyptian state with a new and unique problem: up until that point women prisoners were thought of only as common criminals – drug-dealers, prostitutes (sic) and murderers. There was no cultural, or indeed logistical and infrastructural possibility for incarcerating a middle-class female revolutionary. Middle-class women, entering the space of the prison for the first time, risked their reputation and honour if they could not assert the decidedly different nature of their kind of imprisonment. It follows, then, that the struggle for respectability mounted by these pioneer mu‘taqalāt and the moral panics ensuant on their imprisonment would be foundational to the post-colonial landscape of national gender and citizenship regimes. This paper asks two interrelated questions: how was the prison implicated in the production of national gender regimes and how did mu‘taqalāt in turn challenge these national gender regimes in prison? I define mu‘taqalāt here as self-identifying women incarcerated for what they or the state branded as crimes of political identity and/or activity

“They Threw Her in with the Prostitutes!”: Negotiating Respectability between the Space of Prison and the Place of Woman in Egypt (1943–1959)

The memoirs of political prisoners generally articulate the struggle of dissident individuals and political groups to attain a set of basic and often recurrent goals: freedom of expression and affiliation, social and economic security, humane treatment and the right to have a say in the management of state and society. This applies to both men's and women’s memoirs. Still, echoes of certain ‘special struggles’ permeate the narratives of woman political prisoners, henceforth mu‘taqalāt: how they sought to reconcile their experience of imprisonment with personal and public constructions of their selves as hardworking students, doting mothers, dutiful wives, obedient daughters and respectable middle-class women are all underlying themes running throughout their testimonies. The student demonstrations of 1945-46 presented the semi-colonial Egyptian state with a new and unique problem: up until that point women prisoners were thought of only as common criminals – drug-dealers, prostitutes (sic) and murderers. There was no cultural, or indeed logistical and infrastructural possibility for incarcerating a middle-class female revolutionary. Middle-class women, entering the space of the prison for the first time, risked their reputation and honour if they could not assert the decidedly different nature of their kind of imprisonment. It follows, then, that the struggle for respectability mounted by these pioneer mu‘taqalāt and the moral panics ensuant on their imprisonment would be foundational to the post-colonial landscape of national gender and citizenship regimes. This paper asks two interrelated questions: how was the prison implicated in the production of national gender regimes and how did mu‘taqalāt in turn challenge these national gender regimes in prison? I define mu‘taqalāt here as self-identifying women incarcerated for what they or the state branded as crimes of political identity and/or activity

“They Threw Her in with the Prostitutes!”: Negotiating Respectability between the Space of Prison and the Place of Woman in Egypt (1943–1959)

The memoirs of political prisoners generally articulate the struggle of dissident individuals and political groups to attain a set of basic and often recurrent goals: freedom of expression and affiliation, social and economic security, humane treatment and the right to have a say in the management of state and society.1 This applies to both men's and women’s memoirs. Still, echoes of certain ‘special struggles’ permeate the narratives of woman political prisoners, henceforth mu‘taqalāt: how they sought to reconcile their experience of imprisonment with personal and public constructions of their selves as hardworking students, doting mothers, dutiful wives, obedient daughters and respectable middle-class women are all underlying themes running throughout their testimonies. The student demonstrations of 1945-46 presented the semi-colonial Egyptian state with a new and unique problem: up until that point women prisoners were thought of only as common criminals – drug-dealers, prostitutes (sic) and murderers. There was no cultural, or indeed logistical and infrastructural possibility for incarcerating a middle-class female revolutionary. Middle-class women, entering the space of the prison for the first time, risked their reputation and honour if they could not assert the decidedly different nature of their kind of imprisonment. It follows, then, that the struggle for respectability mounted by these pioneer mu‘taqalāt and the moral panics ensuant on their imprisonment would be foundational to the post-colonial landscape of national gender and citizenship regimes. This paper asks two interrelated questions: how was the prison implicated in the production of national gender regimes and how did mu‘taqalāt in turn challenge these national gender regimes in prison? I define mu‘taqalāt here as self-identifying women incarcerated for what they or the state branded as crimes of political identity and/or activity

Roundtable: the archives of global history in a time of international immobility

Reading the acknowledgements section of any book that might be categorized as global history, one comes across a long and impressive list of archives, frequently spanning multiple continents. These books often historicize structures that facilitate or constrain global connections, mobility and interactions, and they often present narratives that are less Eurocentric than those they write against. But they rarely raise the question of who gets to be a global historian. After all, the use of multiple archives across national borders has always relied on the possession of a strong passport and the funding of a wealthy institution. When these once marginal issues suddenly gained traction in March 2020 amid national lockdowns and restrictions on international travel, we were puzzled. Why did such issues become ‘global’ only when they started to impact particular scholars – notably those who had previously enjoyed the greatest access to resources and freedoms? Why did funding bodies start to think about these issues only once the pandemic hit? What does it mean to ‘do’ global history in a deeply unequal world? It was during an e-conversation about these questions that the idea for a seminar series entitled ‘The archives of global history in a time of international immobility’ was born