Saida Sultan/Danna International: Transgender Pop and the Poly semiotics of Sex, Nation, and Ethnicity on the Israeli-Egyptian Border

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In the fall of 1994 one of my Egyptian graduate students at the American University in Cairo (AUC) handed me a music cassette which was sure I would want to hear given that, as explained, it was all the rage among Cairene youth. The tape contained two numbers, sung in English, Arabic, and (I thought) Hebrew, by an Israeli artist whose name my student did not know. It was poorly recorded and the lyrics hard to make out, so I filed it away in a drawer after listening to it a few times. Over the next months I would hear it occasionally blaring from cars and from a cassette player at the AUC snack bar, and I eventually learned, through conversations and various lurid articles in the opposition press here and there, that the singer's name was Danna International; was also known in Egypt as Sa'ida Sultan; was a Mizrahi, a Jew of Arab origin; and she was a transsexual.1 In August 1995 my interest in Danna was reignited by the discovery of a sensationalistic expose entitled A Scandal Whose Name Is Sa'ida Sultan: Danna the Israeli Sex Artist, penned by Muhammad al-Ghayti and published by a reputable nationalist (Nasserite) press. The book's cover features a photo of Madonna bending toward the camera in a metallic gold bustier and black net stockings, her cleavage and eyes blacked out, in the style of local scandal magazines. The upper left-hand corner announces, For Adults Only; the black cover informs us that although the Zionists failed