Saving Egypt’s Village Girls

Abstract

Bridging literature on modern governance with youth subjectivity, this article examines the globalization of female youth in contemporary Egypt through transnational humanitarian interventions. Drawing on over twenty-seven months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Egypt and France with non-governmental organization workers and village girls, it demonstrates how humanitarian work is rendered meaningful by specific actors, its effects coexisting alongside, rather than supplanting, other forms of sociality. In tracing the ways in which a youth habitus based on rights is “made” through the daily work of intervention, I suggest that girl initiatives of this kind constitute a transnational “regime of care” centered on the protection and politicization of particular kinds of adolescent life in Egypt and the broader Arab world.