Masculinity, Ideology and the Human in Post-2011 Egyptian “Thug” Films

This presentation examines a genre of popular “thug” (baltagi) films that emerged since the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The films are condemned by the middle class and feminists for encouraging immoral and thuggish values. The paper examines two of these films for their masculine enactments and ideological sensibilities, Al-Almany (The German 2012) and Qalb al-Asad (Lion-Heart, 2013).  Frances S. Hasso's analysis is structured around a number of questions: What ideological baggage and revolutionary traces do these films carry? What meaningful conclusions can we draw from their popularity? What masculine pedagogies, ideal types, performances, and embodiments do the films offer? How can we understand the films’ engagement with the “human?”



Frances S. Hasso is Associate Professor in Women’s Studies with a secondary appointment in Sociology at Duke University. She is an affiliate faculty in the Duke Middle East Studies Center and an Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. She is author of Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan (Syracuse U Press 2005) and Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford U Press 2011). A forthcoming volume she co-edited with Zakia Salime, Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions, will be published by Duke University Press in 2016. She is working on a series of articles based on fieldwork in post-revolutionary Egypt, including the recently published, "Civil and the Limits of Politics in Revolutionary Egypt." She is considering theories and practices of archival research and working on a new book-length historical project on Palestine. She has been a Rockefeller fellow, SSRC/ACLS fellow and Columbia University Visiting Fellow.

Cost : Free and open to the public.

Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies