Legality of sex work as a national project in post-colonial egypt

This thesis will analyze the gendering of nationalism in post-colonial Egypt. The thesis will begin by explaining how the military occupation of Egypt led to the development of laws that governed women's sexuality and specifically sex work. It will then analyze how 20th-century Egyptian intellectuals used the institution of sex work to bolster nationalism. The last point the thesis argues is how Egyptian authoritarian leaders prosecuted the sexuality of women and sexual/gender-nonconforming people to assert national power in a postcolonial context. The paper will draw upon several texts by Egyptian intellectuals that explain dominant ideas/debates during the early twentieth in Egypt. The most seminal of these is Qasim Amin's Liberation which had a radical impact on how many Egyptian political elites saw the relationship between Egyptian women, sex, and Westernization. The thesis will also consider Deniz Kandiyoti's essay "Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation" which analyzes how post-colonial nations control/use women's bodies and sexualities to support nationalist projects. This work will be used to explain how the legality and prosecution of sex work specifically were used to centralize national power and reinforce a national Egyptian identity. The thesis will expand from this to analyze how these laws continued to affect Egypt in the postcolonial period where presidents like Nasser and Mubarak were seeking to destroy civil society and further centralize power in the government and executive offices. These attempts then outline how laws and codes that banned sex work originally are now used to police sexual and gender-nonconforming Egyptians (SGNs) up into the 21st century.