RT Article
T1 The Private Affairs of Public Officials: Mixed Marriage and Diplomacy in Interwar and Post-Mubarak Egypt

JF Die Welt des Islams
VO 54
IS 3/4
SP 483
OP 503
A1 Kholoussy, Hanan
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2014
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1561879878
AB This article examines the 1933 legislation that criminalized Egyptian diplomats abroad who married foreign, especially European, women. While this law emerged during a period of anticolonial nationalist struggle against British colonial rule, it continues to be implemented in contemporary Egypt. This article situates the law in the broader public debates about bachelorhood and mixed marriage that dominated the pages of the Egyptian press in the 1920s and 1930s. The diplomatic legislation served as an arena to define the rights and duties of upper-class Egyptian national men who represented the semi-independent nation internationally in its newly created foreign service. It was a vehicle for the state to shape the normative national subject vis-à-vis its intervention into the private lives of public officials. By exploring the various ways in which Egyptian legislators, journalists, and social commentators conceptualized mixed marriage and national service, this article sheds light on upper-class masculinity in early 20th-century Egypt and its intersections with new formations of gender, governmentality, and national identity.

K1 mixed marriage
 : governmentality
 : masculinity
 : national identity
 : bachelorhood
 : foreign service
 : diplomacy
 : Egypt
 : gender

DO 10.1163/15700607-05434P08