Struggles of Distinction: Young Women Constructing Their Class Identity in Egypt’s Americanized Milieu

Abstract

In urban Egypt, class is omnipresent in structuring people's lives and social sphere as well as being operative in selfdescription. For understanding an individual's position within horizontally and vertically stratified society, however, usual distinction of three classes needs to be refined. Based on biographical interviews, I reconstruct what my interviewees consider their Society and try to grasp their self-categorization as upper middle class. In line with much of Bourdieu's thinking on social stratification, I treat their self-positioning as upper middle class as a form of discursive categorization which can only be understood if contextualized by negative image of the poor and the rich. The Americanized Society, on other hand, can best be conceptualized as a milieu where different classificatory principles intersect.