Managing Gendered Marginality in Colonial Cairo, 1920–39

The presence of European sex workers selling themselves in Egyptian booming cities, as elsewhere in the Empire, forced colonial authorities to face the thorny question of gendered subalternity and how this called into question the very same idea of hegemonic racial and civilizational hierarchies. This paper argues that discourses on sexuality and gender constituted important facets of the colonial exercise of power, while specific bourgeois notions of gendered roles and decorum were at the base of exclusionary and stigmatizing practices stamping out economically and often unaccompanied women who were not conforming to such normative models. The embarrassment felt by imperial authorities and middle class reformers at the presence of such liminal characters, unaccompanied women roaming the world in search of a living, was but the imperial dimension of the veritable social hysteria which originated around the so-called “White-Slave Trade”, the symptom of a more profound social and political crisis. After a brief analysis of the emergence of metropolitan obsession around the White Slave Trade, this paper will explore the colonial dimension of social purity, to show how  a specific category of subaltern social actors, foreign prostitutes and ‘fallen’ women  in rapidly changing Cairo, came to play a very important role in the preservation of the besieged category of colonizers’ racial and civilizational superiority, through the creation of a specific apparatus of coercion, control and, possibly, regeneration managed by British purity and feminist movements, especially the British National Vigilance Association, from the beginning of the Twentieth century until the Second World War.