Un/safe/ly at Home: Narratives of Sexual Coercion in 1920s Egypt

Abstract

This paper takes up an Arabic narrative genre that appeared in the 1920s. Its distinctive narrative properties included adoption of a first‐person female experiental voice and a focus on `impolite' social realms. Combining confessional exposé and social polemic in what I am calling `simulated memoirs', these narrating voices offered readers the narrative authority of first‐hand experience in Cairo's underworld and critique of elite politics and spaces of behaviour from the constructed perspective of subaltern social figures. I argue that these text's inscriptions of bodily coercion trace an anxiety about growing female visibility throughout urban space. Construction of feminine narrative voices apparently wrests authority to speak about gendered bodily violence away from elite, mostly male commentators and representatives of the state, transferring that authority to the figure of the `fallen' female who `speaks'. But this is an act of ventriloquism: complex layerings of authorial and narrative attribution recoup that authority, reasserting the disciplinary power of the patriarchal father over the lives and vulnerabilities of the young.