Caoimhe O’Regan
A Foucauldian exploration of the politics of sexuality and sex work in 19th century Egypt
Today biopower is everywhere. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, biopolitical infrastructure has framed our existence, even dictated it. We depend on our politicians and our world leaders to incorporate critical aspects of human biology, including contagion, into their political agendas in order to keep society alive. Nevertheless, biopolitical motives are not always directly employed in a positive alliance with human welfare. Throughout history, biopower has acted as a mechanism for creating and preserving power-knowledge relationships which have consequently come to define social order and moral discourse. By employing a Foucauldian perspective of biopolitics in reference to the historical development of public policy and social evolution, one can reveal a greater understanding of the ambiguities of social norms and societal order.
“As modernization of societies across the globe continued, the fact of life started to become more important than the threat of death.”
‘Biopower’ is a concept that is as hard to define as it is to confine. Essentially, ‘biopolitics’ refers to the incorporation of biological processes within political agendas (Adams, 2017). Biopower, then, is the mechanism through which biopolitics are employed within a society. Biopower simultaneously disciplines the individual body and indirectly regulates the collective consciousness through political discourse. Through this regulation of political discourse, biopower and biopolitics instruct the evolution of knowledge, which is socially determined. This power also manifests in a self-regulating governance that exerts itself over society in infinite ways, including throughout the realms of sexuality, familial relations and social behaviour. Consequently, biopower solidifies societal order in such a way that specific hierarchical and power relations reproduce socially constructed taboos and can promote a form of state racism. Michael Foucault coined the term ‘biopower’ in order to explain the historical transformation of power which began to take shape in the seventeenth century, but which became most significant throughout the nineteenth century (Foucault, 1976). As nations across the world began to enter the modern age, new technologies were beginning to emerge and social mobility was accelerating. Traditional social orders and hierarchies were becoming threatened. As this human ecology evolved, so did the means of governing and controlling people. Systems of sovereign power were metamorphosed by this new form of governmentality. While sovereign power once ruled societies as collective bodies through a more absolutist disciplinary manner, biopower indirectly controlled society through the regulation of the individual body (Biancani, 2012). As modernization of societies across the globe continued, the fact of life started to become more important than the threat of death (Foucault, 1976). Illness and risks of mortality were becoming more manageable and even more preventable. Therefore, society became more focused on improving and modifying elements of society’s livelihood rather than solely existing in avoidance of death. Power became focused on the governance of how people live, rather than on how their lives were to end. This was not to suggest that governance no longer dictated society’s right to live and die, they just did so differently. Whereas sovereign power imposes a social order in which the state could take life or let live, biopower assumed the role of modifying life and exposing death (Foucault, 1976). The employment of biopower wasn’t always beneficial for society. This was particularly evident in relation to the social construction of sexuality and its associated taboos. In modern Middle Eastern states, which existed as part of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, biopower often hindered human life and stripped people of their agency over their own bodies, particularly women. Sexual taboos infiltrated the collective consciousness and often prohibited public health measures against illness linked to ‘illicit’ behaviour. Prime examples of these biopolitical determinants of public health included the perception of homosexuality and the regulation of sex work. Accounts from colonial Egypt note the denial of many venereal diseases primarily linked to these sexual phenomena. While social taboos were pathologized, biological issues such as venereal diseases were often ignored or manipulated in accordance with political agendas and social hierarchies. This is not, however, just a memory of historical societies. As new technologies have developed, one could even argue that the biopolitical manipulation of sexuality has intensified. An extreme example of this is the treatment of homosexual people in Iran. Homosexuality is significantly pathologized and many young people have been sent for sex reassignment surgery as a ‘cure’ for their unconventional and illicit sexual orientation (The Economist, 2019). A fatwa was even issued in 1980 concerning the provision of this surgery, marking an official pathologization of homosexuality by the state (Hamedani, 2014). This pathologization of sexuality is also evident in the history of Egyptian sex and entertainment workers. While Iranian homosexuals today are characterized as ‘ill’ due to their sexual orientation, sex workers in nineteenth century Egypt were incorporated into the political agenda as the source of the illicit social behaviour and promiscuity which had supposedly been infecting the entire society. Biopolitical processes have been an essential factor within the trajectory of our social evolution and the production of knowledge. One must distinguish between scientific development and normative discourse driven by scientific terminology. Therefore, an investigation of historical and contemporary developments through this Foucauldian perspective is a valuable means of investigation. A biopolitical analysis of the woman’s body in the modern Middle Eastern state can expand our understanding not only of political currents but of the lives of the ordinary people within the society and how they lived.
The Case of sex work in 19th Century Egypt
According to the World Health Organisation, sex work is ‘the provision of sexual services for money or goods’. Sex workers therefore include people “who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services’’ (Global Network for Sex Work Projects, 2010). Employing this term instead of ‘prostitution’ or other increasingly derogatory designations is a deliberate attempt at tackling the prejudice and injustice faced by the profession both today and throughout history. The term ‘sex work’ therefore marks the work of the individual, rather than the gender or social status.
In the case of nineteenth and twentieth-century Egypt, how we refer to women involved in sex work and entertainment is increasingly important. During this time, in Cairo most significantly, women involved in sex work were socialised and dehumanised by a series of patriarchal and capitalist regimes. Both the French and British colonial powers, as well as the Egyptian authorities, subjected female sex and entertainment workers to a form of state racism and repeatedly exploited women’s bodies within their political agendas (Martín, 2019). A Foucauldian perspective of nineteenth-century Egyptian sexual and entertainment regulation allows us to investigate the biopolitical and even necropolitical implications of this kind of governance, public health provision and direct control over women’s bodies. While the politics of sex and entertainment work in nineteenth century Egypt may seem arbitrary within the larger realm of colonial history, it is the lives of ordinary people as such that highlight the underlying power dynamics that existed within society. An ontological investigation of these women and how they were affected by biopolitical agendas therefore reveals a lot about the social order of nineteenth-century Egyptian society. The regulation of sex work and entertainment in nineteenth-century Egypt was characterised by capitalist, patriarchal, and discriminatory power structures. The fundamental premise of these measures did not consider public health, or even the general welfare of women in these lines of work (Martín, 2019). Prior to the nineteenth century regulationism imposed by the British occupation of Egypt, attempts to outlaw and control prostitution had already been made by both Egyptian and colonial powers. Under the French occupation, French military troops who employed sex workers could be sentenced to death. Under Muhammad Ali Pasha’s regime, sex work was completely outlawed and civic abandonment (the process of banishing certain people or groups from urban centres) was imposed. This was first concentrated on Cairo’s sex trade but in 1837 was extended on a national basis, thus completely outlawing the profession. In 1882, the first regulatory decree relating to sex work was put into place by the ‘general decree’ under the authority of the British occupation (Biancani, 2012). This law would enforce the medicalisation and spatial organisation of commercial sex in Egypt. British occupied Egypt was described as being ordered by ‘public boy classism’ in which urban life was defined by ‘endless soirées which went on around the fringes of the court’ (Aldridge, 1970). This veiled protectorate, which extended from 1882 to 1914, was characterised by structural economic inequity which allowed British residents of Egypt to live tax-free while extorting natives and even the poor of society (Aldridge, 1970). In the midst of this colonial-dominated economy, many women were faced with poverty and in turn resorted to sex work as the only means of available income (Aldridge, 1970). The capitalist control of sex and entertainment workers therefore operated in a vicious circle which both reinforced the subordination of such workers and cemented state racism into the social order. The designation of sex work as a regulated profession is therefore not only highly linked to capitalist structures of power and inequity but is also extremely decentralised from the welfare of the sex workers themselves. The French imperial presence imposed a ban on the military’s use of sex workers due to the endemic venereal disease which had infected their troops and thus weakened their security. The medicalised and spatial regulation of sex work imposed by the British was thus founded primarily upon the interests of its military, who indeed showed no sign of parting with their public school-boy classism and illicit means of entertainment (Biancani, 2012). The imperial regime nevertheless disciplined the realm of sex and entertainment in Egypt by controlling the function and medicalisation of these women’s bodies and health. As such, sex and entertainment workers became subordinate objects within the larger biopolitical and panoptic control of society and social order. Regulation of sex and entertainment work acted as a form of panoptic discipline, which prompted the collective incentive to monitor social order (Biancani, 2012). Sex workers and belly dancers in particular became linked to the perception of illicit sexuality and moral malaise in Egyptian society. Instead of condemning the wealthy or more powerful individuals who employed the women involved in these professions, the bodies of the workers themselves became subjected to state racism and medicalised regulation. In essence, these means of control under the British occupation created social norms which marginalised sex and entertainment workers into an impermeable subordinate status that stripped them of their physical and social agency. The relationship between these workers and the state racism imposed upon them is nevertheless ambiguous. Women involved in sex and entertainment work in Egypt destabilised and reinforced social hierarchies by infiltrating more powerful levels of authority by engaging with colonial troops and middle-class men, while simultaneously being subjected to subordination (Arvizu, 2004). It was due to this destabilising effect that prompted authorities to regulate and control these women and consequently their bodies. To tackle this threat to the societal order, British occupation imposed regulatory measures on marginalised sex workers not only in terms of their social status, but also their spatial status. In nineteenth century Cairo, these women were geographically segregated in specific parts of the city, which consequently allowed for the choreographing of spatial order and therefore moral hierarchy (Biancani, 2012). Sex and entertainment workers were banished from ‘respectable’ areas of the city. Three decades prior to this British super presence, the region of Ezbekiya had been a fashionable and well-respected area of Cairo (Aldridge, 1970). By the late nineteenth century, its streets were lined by the fellahin (peasants) crying out to trade with the imperial residents, and the local fish market transformed into a brothel-like environment (Aldridge, 1970). The redesignation of the urban spatial order prompted a multifaceted medical discourse of ‘social hygiene’. The medicalisation of sexuality which was imposed by the British occupation can be analysed in reference to broader relations of power and knowledge through a Foucauldian lens. While on one hand, the nineteenth century witnessed the development of biological knowledge regarding sexual reproduction, the medicalisation of sex leaned more on the pseudo-scientific end of the epistemological spectrum. The ‘corpus of knowledge’ which evolved throughout this time was fictitious and, significantly, it was founded upon socialised theories of morality and order rather than upon scientific or public health concerns (Foucault, 1976). In this way, biological aspects of sex workers’ lives, such as their sexuality, were incorporated into a wider political infrastructure which was founded upon this corpus of power and knowledge. The repressive hypothesis surrounding sexuality is therefore more so embedded within dynamics of power rather than in scientific fact. The regulation of sex work and entertainment became a means of biopolitically controlling the entirety of society within a panoptic concoction of morality and normative behaviour. The medicalisation of sex was a means of consolidating power relations, social order and state racism, rather than preserving public health, especially that of the sex workers. Ultimately, the medicalisation of sex in nineteenth century Egypt was a normatively legitimised means of controlling the bodies of sex workers.
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