Gender Politics, Debility, and Violence

Abstract

Gender Politics, Debility, and Violence Zainab Saleh (bio) books discussed in this essay Women of the Midan: The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries. By Sherine Hafez. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. By Salih Can Açiksöz. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan. By Sima Shakhsari. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. By Jasbir K. Puar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. in her foundational work on piety, the late scholar Saba Mah-mood critiqued feminist theory for too often perceiving the subject as either constituted through subjugation or as a site of resistance to power.1 Her work examines how devout women in Egypt carved out pious selves by embodying the Islamic virtue of modesty. These women, she explains, drew ”an ineluctable relationship between the norm (modesty) and the bodily form it takes (the veil) such that the veiled body becomes the necessary means through which the virtue of modesty is both created and expressed” (23, emphasis in original). For Mahmood, the question is not whether a norm — modesty — was subverted or enacted, but how it is lived and inhabited. Aiming to move away from the binary of doing and undoing the subject, Mahmood is interested in the different modalities of moral-ethical action, which contribute to the constructions of certain [End Page 557] types of ”subjects whose political autonomy cannot be grasped without applying critical scrutiny to the precise form their embodied actions take.”2 However, Mahmood does not detail how neoliberal reforms or increased militarization of public spaces in Egypt have impacted the construction of pious subjectivity or the formation of gendered bodies. Her work focuses on the individual’s efforts to define a pious self. In the past two decades, scholars of the Middle East, influenced in part by interventions such as Mahmood’s, have begun to pay attention to questions of gender and embodiment in relation to broader political contexts. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar argue that this new literature approaches the body in relation to colonial, medical, and modern projects of subject formation and ethical engagement.3 Farha Ghannam and Sherine Hamdy, for example, approach embodiment and piety by situating Egyptian body politics within neoliberal reforms and the privatization of health care, staggering inequality, the management of toxic waste, and increased surveillance and police brutality. Hamdy explores the religious and medical debates over body integrity related to organ donation and brain death [End Page 558] through the lens of bioethics.4 Meanwhile, Ghannam employs Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of bodily hexis— that is, the ways that bodies reflect their socioeconomic positions — to show how men in Egypt embody a masculine self that is not individual but constructed by both men and women under evolving economic, social, political, and religious norms.5 Here, masculinity is embodied and materialized through different regimes of governmentality, including the family, the community, the school, the military, the state, and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. These works emphasize how the state — whether through neoliberal reforms, increased police brutality and surveillance, or failure to deal with toxic waste — shapes the body by producing it as a site of governance and violence. In The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir Puar offers a new reading of the role of the state in shaping bodies through debility or through bodily injury and social exclusion engendered by political and economic realities. The state perceives bodies as sites of intervention in order to debilitate and govern them. Puar critiques disability studies, which often uses a universalistic human rights framing of the usefulness and uselessness of the body, for its failure to consider the specificity of location and the ways that bodies defy identities (xiv). Puar calls attention to how postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, and Indigenous studies have long examined the impacts of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and environmental degradation in producing disability and debility for certain populations. To Puar, connecting critical race theory and postcolonial studies with disability studies unveils the fact that while many bodies might not be labeled as disabled...