Dressing the Feminine Body in Modern Egypt: Fashion, Faith and Class

Abstract

There is an intimate relationship between clothes and identity. Clothes express our ideas, values and social norms to others. Therefore, dresses can be utilized to explore and explain the identity transformation from an older to a newer socio-cultural context. This dissertation reads the shifts in Egyptian Muslim women's attitude towards modern dress and clothing style and their entanglement with gender, nationalism, faith, and socio-economic contexts starting from the 19th century from a post-colonial perspective. I rely on fashion and post-colonial theories to address three sets of questions: (i) to what extent do the shifts in socio-economic and political discourses construct gender norms and redefine the feminist quest concerning clothing choice in modern / post-colonial Egypt? (ii) Can we read fashion as a resistance strategy to Egyptian patriarchal forces and hegemonic Western secular modernity in contemporary post-colonial Egypt? (iii) How does fashion disrupt the claimed monolithic Muslim women's identity? Finally, I discuss how Leila Aboulela's literary texts deconstruct the claimed fixed relationship between modernity and its assumed emancipating values and Western dress in her texts Lyrics Alley (2010) and BirdSummons (2019). The term "clothes" is used mainly to refer to the process of veiling and unveiling as an expression of a feminist quest of Egyptian women in the public sphere.