P17-0290:1 Making and unmaking masculinities and religious identities through the politics of the ear in Egypt

The project is now finalized. There are no alterations, except less fieldwork between 2018-2021, but this fieldwork was instead conducted in 2017, 2022 and 2023. I conducted fieldwork for 5 months from September 2017 until the end of January in 2018, a couple of weeks in October 2019, 3 months from March until the end of May in 2022, and couple of weeks in March in 2023. I have not been able to focus on the category of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) men in detail (interviews), because they are forbidden, and because of security reasons for them and for me (the current regime’s current politics, targeting them as terrorists, and not least since the death of the former President Morsi who suddenly died in June 2019 (imprisoned since 2013) in court). However, I have written about the political tensions between MB and the military regime and previous interactions with the same category as well as about people’s perception about the same category during the years.

I have included ex-prisoners into the project, where I through my emphasis upon sound and listening, argue that we are able to move beyond conventional approaches to peoples’ experiences of prisons, opening up space to investigate also the non-conscious forces that have a profound influence upon our thinking and decisions in moments of intensity. Attention to the body, our senses, and public affect foregrounds the role of immediate and experience-based forces during times of insecurity and instability. To be forced into solitude for months or the opposite in crowded cells, denied family visits, constantly threatened, humiliated, and beaten with all the encompassing institutionalised acoustic violence or spaces of unwanted silences alter and destroy the bodies of prisoners. The sonic ambience and the lack of sound in prison contribute to an exaggerated sense of displacement long after prisoners are released, and to a collective and individual loss of hope of an imagined new national home, not least because sound systems operate at auditory, corporeal, and sociocultural frequencies. The sonic infrastructure of torture in prison under today’s autocratic regime provoke emotional responses of not only loss and non-belonging but also paranoia, depression, and even death-worlds. The disciplining effect of walls, torture, controls, and armed personnel permeates the body, and the sound of violence produces an ambience of uncertainty. Hence, the forces of affect are materialised in the bodies of prisoners long after they have left detention—the affect of sonic infrastructures produce porous and broken bodies (in every sense). Furthermore, things have lingering affective power, embodied memories are preserved and communicated through affective relations to specific objects—things that might appear in another context than the prison context when the men in focus least suspect it. Thus, the revolution remains and endures in the body of these men. This is biopolitics of the senses (Howes and Classen 2014). This is also an example of what Achille Mbembe entitles necropolitics (contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death), which is ‘new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead’ (2019: 92). Obviously, aspects of both agency and victimhood are active parts, for example, through making, avoiding sound, or listening to sounds inside and outside the cell. As I have written before, in the context of violence and masculinities in Palestine, it is impossible to talk exclusively about agency or victimhood or to draw rigid lines between these categories—they are blurred (Malmström 2015). Various kinds of sounds of the state are forces that continuously mould and order the bodies, the senses of these specific masculinities, senses, and their consciousness. It is almost impossible to resist or to forget the power of sound from the state because of daily sonic reminders in and outside prison. Charles Hirschkind, in his discussion of the tension between the nationalist and political Islamic discourses that compete to produce a modern citizenry through pious sounds, refers to an ethical soundscape, arguing that ‘contrasting regimes of aural sensibility structure public debate and political life in Egypt’ (2004: 132). Similarly, in the context of today’s Cairo, the shift in Cairo’s masculine soundscape from the revolution and onwards leads to an exaggerated tension of the sort Hirschkind describes. However, this soundscape can be linked not only to modern citizenship (and ‘proper’ Islam) but also to uncertain stigmatised porous political masculinities (Malmström 2019). It certainly reshapes manhood, and it reshapes nationhood. But it does something additional—it kills the potential self. Former political prisoners are both traumatised and terrified of being detained again, so they do not live a life in dignity or navigate the cityscape of Cairo as they did before the prison experience. They must, for example, avoid the atmosphere of silence at coffee shops and bars (where the ear of the state is always present), avoid silent dawn streets since these men may forcibly disappear by the assistance of security forces, or simply avoid the cityscape since some sounds remind the ex-prisoners of earlier hostile environments, including torture and earlier trauma. What is worse, the men in focus do not feel safe at home. When someone unexpectedly knocks on the front door, especially early in the morning or very late, it might be the state security. The ex-prisoners instead try to stay as invisible as possible, both in a metaphorical and concrete sense. The sound of life for these men is continuously transformed into the sound of death; where the desire to disappear in order to not disappear again produces ‘ghost bodies’ alienated from not only the ‘new Egypt’ (encompassing a permanent loss of hope of an imagined new national home) but also from the family and the self too.

After discussions with Eva Stensköld, I have spent time in New York City (NYC) as a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, thereafter Memeac, CUNY, GC where I have been able to develop my theoretical framework and I have followed seminars like the Affect Studies seminar and Boas at Columbia University. I have also collaborated with scholars like Brian Boyd, Brian Larkin, Lila Abu-Lughod, Beth Baron, Marc Michael, Talal Asad, Maria Jose de Abreau, Abou Farman, Helga Tawil Souri, Jared S McCormick, Arjun Appadurai etc. in relation to sound, materiality and affect studies, as well as in relation to regional studies (Egypt, but also MENA region in general), not only at Columbia University, but at New York University, The New School, Bard College and CUNY, GC as well. The international dimensions that have developed through this visiting period in NYC, as well as through for example one sound workshop I have organized (see below, including new research cooperation with Professor Jonas Otterbeck) at Aga Khan University in London have clearly developed into extraordinary fruitful networks, further knowledge as well as spin-off-effects.

After an open-heart surgery in December 2021, I was forced to be on a sick-leave for three months. Lund University did not accept that delay/extension of the project, so after discussions with Eva Stensköld and Frederik Persson-Lahusen I was accepted to move the remaining grant to Aga Khan University in London.

There are no major economic alterations other than less fieldwork costs (I have financed later fieldworks from my own pocket) and more Visiting Professor period costs in NYC (a project change Eva Stensköld has accepted).

Furthermore, I have also used my time for writing drafts and finalizing articles as well as chapters and one pod, I have finalized one book, organized one workshop and finalized one experimental sonic piece, including photos and text (where of course the politics of sound and Cairene masculinities are included) with the help of Brian Boyd at the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University (he teaches Museum Anthropology M.A. Program, as well as is a professional musician and sound engineer. He is also Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies).

The journals I have selected for publication are committed to innovation in scholarly communication, including open access.

In 2018, I published the pod Sounds of Economic Collapse in Egypt at Cultural Anthropology: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/sounds-of-economic-collapse-in-egypt essential for the RJ project, not least to understand today’s context of economic crises and repression of political bodies. In this episode of AnthroPod, I was a guest producer and I invite the listeners to listen to the everyday sounds of Egyptians experiencing economic change in Cairo. My recordings take the listeners through the city’s streets, where it is possible to hear the sounds of vendors, protesters, and passing motorists as well as the sonic dynamics of life at home. I aim here to confront listeners with the materiality and the affective experience of sound, even as spoken narratives remain a dominant medium for conveying the sound of economic collapse.

In 2019, the book The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt was published by Unversity of California. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520304338/the-streets-are-talking-to-me I have explored the dramatic differences after the Egyptian revolution and their implications on society—the lack of sound in the floating landscape of Cairo after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the role of material things in the sit-ins of 2013, the military evocation of masculinities (and the destruction of alternative ones), how people experience pain, rage, disgust, euphoria, and passion in the body. In relation to the RJ project, especially the chapter about the autocratic regime’s evocation of masculinities and the destruction of alternative ones, are of special importance as well as the development of my mode of analysis in relation to sound studies, not least theories of listening.

In 2019, I published (invited to write one chapter) in the book Handbook for Cities in the Middle East (editors Haim Yacobi and Mansour Nasasra, together with Professor Mark LeVine. The article “Understanding the Materiality of Suspicion: Affective Politics in Mena Cities”, co-authored with Mark LeVine. As we discuss in this chapter, cities today have too often become places of suspicion, repression and death. The description above of downtown Cairo years after the attempted Egyptian Revolution of 2011 tells a tale of a city whose future was unceremoniously foreclosed, spaces where, only a short time before, different vibrations, sounds, smells and sights had evoked sensations and sentiments of joy and possibility, where the crush of untold thousands of people carried you back and forth into the future – but now was without hope. We argue that a focus on affect in urban settings across the MENA both attenuates existing approaches to the field and offers new methodological tools and analytical lenses with and through which to explore the historical and contemporary experiences of city life in the region and globally.

In 2019, I organized one sound workshop Touching sound: Politics and Passion in London together with Professor Jonas Otterbeck at the Aga Khan University, London. We invited international top sound scholars, composers, and musicians where our focus was to find new ways of describing and analyzing global politics with the point of departure of touching sound. In this workshop, we discussed how the sonic affects us, touches us, moves through our bodies and alters our emotions, vibration and rhythm. We reflected upon in what ways the materiality of sound, the emotions connected to the sonic, the censorship of sound or the propaganda with sound help us understand important aspects of power, counter power, claims to authenticity, authority, resistance or deviance. CMES sponsored the workshop in London with 150 000 SEK (and Aga Khan University contributed with 150 000 SEK as well). This is the same university where I transferred after my open-heart surgery (circumstances described above). I have also integrated my findings and the RJ project into a conversation series on passion in relation to contemporary global politics, with a focus on the Middle East, North Africa and citizens in the Diaspora that took place during the fall of 2019. See participants above. After the workshop I wrote one report together with Mark LeVine, see below.

In 2021, I published one report together with Professor Mark LeVine “Touching Sound: Passion and Global Politics Workshop Report” for Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Papers No. 7. The Aga Khan University (International) in the United Kingdom. Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC). In this report we explored how does sound shape and/or constrain the actions of individuals and groups? In what ways does “touching sound” constitute important stimuli within everyday experiences and how/why does sound induce strong affective states? How does listening to noise as well as to silences, screeches and songs, clicks and pops, affect us? By focusing on the under-studied realm of sound we will increase our understanding of the politics of the sonic, helping scholars move beyond conventional approaches to studying spaces in motion as well as spaces where motion has been forcibly stilled – by curfew, war, disease, etc.; opening up space to investigate the non-conscious forces that have a profound influence on our thinking and decisions in moments of intensity. From the perspective of research, this text opens an interdisciplinary conduit that should enable cross-fertilizations between the disciplines of anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, cultural studies, religious studies and political sociology, bringing together studies of aesthetic production, the environment, sub- and countercultures and technologies and affective dimensions of state as well as societal power and contestation.

In 2021, I published one chapter (was invited to write one chapter) in the book Methodological Approaches to Societies in Transformation: How to Make Sense of Change (editors Aymon Kreil, Yasmine Berriane, Annuska Derks and Dorothea Lüddeckens). The article “The Affects of Change: An Ethnography of the Affective Experiences of the 2013 Military Intervention in Egypt” is part of a book focusing on rapid change and methodology. The overall subject of this book was how to study change. While other contributions used narratives, objects, institutions or particular events to make sense of change, I wanted to take a different approach and explored the role of emotions, feelings and ambience in the way change is experienced, embodied and materialized. With the inquiry into the events of 2011 and beyond in Egypt this chapter discusses and reflects on the affective consequences, including rhythm theory, that resonate with the various phases of political crisis and transform everyday engagement with the material world. As shown in this chapter, sound is of particular interest for grasping affects. Instinctively we understand the sounds of violence, aggression, and fear; we run away, take cover, protect ourselves, retaliate. We also intuitively recognize the sounds of tranquillity and safety. We move through these forces of affect as we move through the world. In looking at resonance, vibration, energy, and sound, we are simultaneously profoundly material and intensely ethereal. Furthermore, if we are attuned to vibration, sound is all a question of motion and rhythm.

In 2021, I published one article (was invited to write one article) “Making and UnMaking Masculinities in Cairo through Sonic Infrastructural Violence.” for the Urban Studies (Special Issue Infrastructural Stigma and Urban Vulnerability, edited by Hanna Baumann and Haim Yacobi). In this article, I explored the Egyptian state’s production of desired manhood and destruction of unwanted masculinities in relation to home and displacement through audio-focused analysis and a focus on sonic infrastructures. While sonic infrastructures can be used as a form of political control and violence, my work in Egypt also shows how people, through sound and sonic resistance, navigate and shape sonic landscapes of insecurity, violence and liminality, as well as resisting displacement and claiming space. In Cairo, where political unrest over the past decade has produced new imaginaries and maps of belonging, men opposing the politics of the current regime have been expelled by the state from their own city; deprived of rights, safety, status and dignity. The institutions of state power employ sound as a political representation, and control, monitor, limit as well as threaten the population through the sonic. All these sound systems operate at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. There are countless examples of how materialized sonic experiences are consciously constructed and used by the autocratic military regime in Egypt to discipline and ‘produce’ its subjects, through for example forbidding particular music; monitoring its residents and thereby employing control by listening; using unbearable loud sounds during torture; or closing downtown bars, cafes and bookshops and thereby sonically controlling and limiting parts of the cityscape of Cairo. These sonic materialized experiences are connected to how gendered bodies are excluded, un/remade, produced, expressed and negotiated.

In 2021, I published one article (was invited to write one article) “The Desire to Disappear in Order Not to Disappear: Cairene Ex-Prisoners after the 25 Jan “Revolution” for The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (Special Issue: Beyond Revolution: Reshaping Nationhood through Senses and Affects, edited by Myriam Lamrani). This article tells a story of the aftermath of the ‘failed revolution’ in Egypt through the prism of sound and gendered political prisoner bodies. It created embodied reactions among Cairene men—years after their lived prison experiences—in which depression, sorrow, stress, paranoia, rage, or painful body memories are prevalent. Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations—important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states—mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. The sound of life is transformed into the sound of death; the desire to disappear in order not to disappear again produces ‘ghost bodies’ alienated from the ‘new Egypt’, but from the family and the self too.

In 2022, I published one sonic piece, photos, and text, “Ghost City, Tear Gas, Novel Rhythm, Nowhere to Go” together with Professor Brian Boyd (sound engineering) for Sonic Worlding: Norient. I argue that by thinking about and with sound, we experience the world through embodied practices. In this sonic essay, based on field recordings in a protest-struck Cairo, I ask: How are bodies, things, and cityscapes interconnected? My intention in the sound essay was to invite readers/listeners to use several senses at the same time and to think with sound instead of about sound. I wanted to touch the relationally porous skin of people’s bodies and to move sonic bodies through aural communication and let people sonically understand specific forces of sound. How do sonic vibrations mediate consciousness? How does sound shape/constrain the actions of individuals/groups? How can sound tell us more about being human and about imagination? How are bodies, things, and cityscapes interconnected? How do they produce sensations in relation to intense and slow times (temporality and frequency)? How will collective bodies of trauma, like the sonic bodies of Cairenes, but also in relation to the global body, navigate? How will they cross the street into the unknown future as one relational collective body? Is it possible to find stillness in the movement? The sonic body can act, tell a larger story, be evidence and be de/re-formed. The loud and silent body may also signify contradictions, since it is capable of both reaffirming and transforming forms of domination. By using the senses instead of words alone, one may be able to grasp what is beyond language in language.

In 2023, I published one article for Public Culture. “Navigating the Ocean of Suspicion: Affective Politics and Materiality in Sisi’s Cairo”. This article explores the ambiguity of familiar materialities and the relationships between material and affective experiences. Those flows and interactions are crucial sites for interrogating social meanings, valences, and effects of suspicion. It explores how politically active Cairenes navigate suspicious spaces, bodies, and nonliving things in the cityscape and how materiality shapes and is shaped by the emotional-aesthetic responses of individuals and groups to the stimuli it provides. In this specific context, the distinct form of what the author calls agential ambivalence, where feelings of control apply to tactics for managing surveillance and to reckless risk-taking are key. Agential ambivalence is required to “stay alive” in Cairo. The activists the author knows still take extreme risks and sometimes even make seemingly careless decisions. Ambivalence in face of suspicion is a given, but it takes specific shapes and dynamics.

Conference and Workshop Organisation

In 2019, I organized “Passion and Global Politics” Conversation Series with the following Professors: Arjun Appadurai, Farha Ghannam, Charles Hirshkind, Stefania Pandulfo, and Jessica Winegar. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden, September 30, October 16 and 31, November 7, and December 17.

In 2019, I organized the workshop “Touching Sound: Passion and Global Politics” with the following Professors, artists and musicians: Cristina Moreno Almeida, Tom Rice, Sama Alshahibi, Michael Frishkopf, Robert Saunders, Deborah Kapchan, Anja Franck, Darci Sprengel, Anne-Mette Kirkegaard, Martin Sköld, Marc Michael, Ziad Fahmy, Mark LeVine, Ted Swedenburg, Shayna Silverstein, Lara Baladi, Steve Lyon, Torbjörn Ebbot Lundberg, Stefan Williamson Fa and Michael Muhammad Knight. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden and the Aga Khan University, London, U.K., October 10-12.

Two forthcoming articles will be published during 2023 and one is submitted:

1. One is written for Anthropology Now. The article “The Seismic Quieting of the World: Abrupt Altered Rhythm in Cairo and in New York”. In this piece I compare Cairo with NYC. In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic left New York City a radically transformed urban space, shifting from the ’normal’ cacophony of a global city to thick silence. The resulting sonic alteration was similar to the quieting of Cairo following the dispersals of the Rabaa’ al-Adawiya and el-Nahda sit-ins of August 14, 2013. During what became the largest massacre of demonstrators in protest history, Cairenes experienced a loss of navigation in the cityscape that altered our bodies for life. Yet, in 2013, people perceived this abrupt change in rhythm as something ’concrete.’ It was the side effect of a national trauma, where the military state killed its own unwanted citizens, especially male activists. This time, in 2020, both in New York City for me and in Cairo for Cairene male activists, the lack of sound felt more nebulous and abstract.

2. Another one is written for JMEWS, Third Space Section. The name of the article is “Sacral Sound, Unbearable Noise and Cairene Activist Masculinities”. This article discusses how the call to prayer functions as a sonic reminder of a sacral community. I also explore how sound is also connected to activists’ masculinities and space where the soundscape of the adhan in Cairo transforms from desired sacral sound to unwanted noise atmospheres. The aim is also to understand the “subjective, ‘political’ attribute of noise” in relation to gender and belonging. Focusing on sound or noise in relation to gender makes it possible to see how sensory knowledge develops through ongoing interaction with the environment. Listening can create community or dissolve it. Understanding gender through the prism of sound unfolds the tensions among (and ongoing creation of) specific gendered subjects in relation to state power, communities, and space.


3. I have one last article, soon submitted to the Journal of Material Culture, that covers the state in a particular way, where I am listening to images (comparing election posters of President Sisi in 2014 and in 2018), inspired by the scholar Tina M. Campt’s book Listening to Images: https://www.dukeupress.edu/listening-to-images It is a collaborative project, where I am using an Egyptian activists’ photos and where we have analysed them together with help of the Campt’s theoretical framework. In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. In this experimental article, I use the lens of vibration and sensory qualities of the visual to explore masculinities, politics, and power in Egypt and argue for the significance of nurturing a reflexive sonic act of images. I employ different modalities of power, expressed and exercised through images, sounds, and violent acts in post-revolutionary Egypt. Hence, I try to expand the sensorial register of images for the reader/viewer by exploring a visual archive of President Sisi’s election posters from 2014 and 2018, as well as other images of Sisi (such as those found on objects) during the same period, through affective frequencies (as resonant forces of affect distributed across the frequency spectrum). By engaging the haptic sonic frequencies of photographs and listening to the sound of the images of Sisi, we can feel the vibrations of sound of an autocratic regime at the same time as we can feel the infrasound (ultra-low frequencies) of its political opponents.

Conferences

In 2022, RoundTable. Session Title: On Digital Ethnography & MENA Landscapes (Anthropology). Participants: Carl Rommel, Farha Ghannam, Hsain Ilahiane, Karem Irene Said, Heba Ghannam (and organizer), and Sa’ed Atshan (organizer), Denver, USA.

Dr. Farha Ghannam -- Presenter
Dr. Hsain Ilahiane -- Presenter
Dr. Karem Irene Said -- Presenter
Dr. Sa'ed Atshan -- Organizer
Dr. Maria Frederika Malmström -- Presenter
Mrs. Heba Ghannam -- Organizer, Presenter
Dr. Carl Rommel -- Presenter

In 2021, “Navigating the Ocean of Suspicion: Affective Politics and Ambivalent Cairene Masculinities”. Gender and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa: A Decade after the Arab Uprisings. The Program on Governance and Local Development at the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, Virtual Workshop.

In 2019, “Urban Bodies in the Cityscape of Cairo: Passion, Despair and Entanglement. Affective Societies.” Affective Politics and Political Transformation in Turkey and Egypt. Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany.

In 2019, “African Cities and Materiality of Suspicion”, roundtable. Co-organizer and chair: Lucia Sorbera (The University of Sydney), Mark LeVine (University of California, Irvine), Maria Frederika Malmström (Lund University/Columbia University), Lucia Sorbera (The University of Sydney), Michael Uwemedimo (King’s College London). The 4th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference, Lagos, Nigeria.

In 2019, “Navigating the Ocean of Suspicion: Affective Politics and Materiality in Cairo.” SIEF2019 14th Congress: Track Changes: Reflecting on a Transforming World. Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

In 2018, “‘The Streets are Talking to Me’: The Embodied Aftermaths of the Egyptian Intense Revolt.” BASE Meeting: Bodies, Affects, Senses and Emotions. Barcelona, Spain.

In 2018, “‘The Streets are Talking to Me’: The Embodied Aftermaths of the Egyptian Intense Revolt.” WOCMES, Seville, Spain.

Invited Talks/Presentations

In 2023, “Masculinities, Bodies and Necrocapitalism in Today/s Cairo.” May 3, Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London, UK.

In 2023, “The living dead or the sonic story of male bodies behind bars in Egypt.” April 19, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, USA.

In 2023, The Listening Academy workshop together with Brandon LaBelle et al. March, 10-18, Cairo, Egypt.

In 2022, “The living dead or the sonic story of male bodies behind bars.” December 15, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.

In 2022, “The living dead or the sonic story of male bodies behind bars.” November 23, Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London, UK.

In 2022, Guest speaker about anthropological methods. November 8, The Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London, UK.

In 2022, Book Conversation “Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution” between the author Yasmin El-Rifae and Professor Lucia Sorbera and me. October 25, Memeac, CUNY, GC, NYC, USA.

In 2022, “The Living Dead or the Sonic Story of Male Bodies Behind Bars.” May 25, Oxford Middle East Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

In 2022, “The National Prison of Politics: Masculinities, Affect and Everyday Authoritarianism.” April 28, Arab Crossroads, New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

In 2022, “Urban Bodies in the Cityscape of Cairo: Passion, Despair and Entanglement.” April 27, Arab Crossroads, New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

In 2022, “The Living Dead or the Sonic Story of Male Bodies Behind Bars.” April 19, The American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon.

In 2021, The Listening Academy together with Brandon LaBelle et al. July, 19-23, Berlin, Germany.

In 2021, Book Talk and Discussion with graduate students The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt:, May 13, University of Sydney, Australia (zoom).

In 2021, Book Talk and Discussion with graduate students The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt:, April 21, Cornell University, Cornell, USA (zoom).

In 2021, Book Talk and Discussion with graduate students The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt:, April 13, NorthWestern University, Chicago, USA (zoom).

In 2021, Book Talk The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt:: University of Columbia University, NYC, USA, April 9 (zoom).

In 2021, CMES Public Seminar on the Arab Spring 10 Years On. Panel discussion together with Mohammed Almahfali, Mark LeVine, Kholoud Mansour, Charlotta Sparre, Moderator: Karin Aggestam, The Centre for Advanced Middle-Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden (zoom).

In 2021, Book Talk The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt:: University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA, March 23 (zoom).

In 2020, Book Talk The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt: New York University, Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE, November 4 (zoom).

In 2020, Book Launch The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt: New York University, Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE, April 22 (zoom).

In 2020, Book Launch The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt: CUNY, GC, February 19; (canceled because of covid-19: Swarthmore College, March 26; Columbia University, April 1; Cornell University, April 9; New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE, April 13-20).

In 2019, Book Launch The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt: Göteborg Book Fair, September 28; Oxford University, October 8; Uppsala University, November 6; Stockholm University, November 11; The École Normale Supérieure, December 3; University of Gothenburg, December 9, Lund University, December 16, Ghent University, December 18.

In 2019, “Urban Bodies in the Cityscape of Cairo: Passion, Despair and Entanglement. Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations.” The Aga Khan University. London, UK.

In 2018, “Navigating the Ocean of Suspicion: Affective Politics and Materiality in Cairo.” Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, The Aga Khan University. London, UK.

The most important result so far is that since the fall of 2017, it is possible to grasp lost confidence and hope, as well as chronic states of political exhaustion, fear, suspicion, and mistrust at all levels, including in relation to the self. It has been possible to grasp the high level of stress and hopelessness, the daily panicking, and the new feeling of “If you touch me, I will explode”. My argument is that bodies have changed. From collective (in 2011) to individual ones (today). From a collective confident body of change and an imagined bright better future to an individual insecure body of control, suspicion, and protection. These men have not only lost hope, but lost faith as well. What I experienced during the fall of 2017 and in the winter of 2018, was an unprotected and “politically mutilated” male body that was in a constant state of panic, because of the collapse of the everyday economy and political repression. This was a depressed, stressed out, sprained, and dejected masculine body, stripped of voice, and was trying to control the only thing to control: the flesh, either by building muscles in the gyms or by working harder than ever before, to cope with dominant ideologies; to be a breadwinner, to be a proper “real” man. The combination of a collapse of the everyday economy and a total repression of political bodies, especially male bodies, seems to be the perfect recipe to destroy any united opposition or imagination of an alternative better future.

Furthermore, soundscapes can be used as a form of political control and violence, my earlier fieldwork in Egypt has showed how people, through for example sound and sonic resistance, navigate landscapes of insecurity, violence, and displacement as well as making room for alternative versions of gender. My female and male friends in Cairo claim space through playing cassette-tape sermons in public spaces or through political discussions at home gatherings. Moreover, since 2011, the explosion of alternative sounds in Egypt has become an imperative political transformative tool, but also therapeutic tools. In a conversation with the ethnomusicologist Darci Sprengel, also working in Egypt, she told me that she has explored “sound as a sort of artistic therapy to transform public feeling. One of my interlocutors even uses music to go into a state of trance in order to get rid of the panic attacks he started having since 2013 as a result of the political and social violence” (conversation, December 9, 2018). Hip hop, punk, and heavy metal, even rock, are part of the current avant-garde movement, in which some musicians are forced to work in the Diaspora whereas others anonymously upload the sonic political messages on YouTube. Politically active women and men listen to these songs at home and even in public (via their earphones) or are themselves part of such music (also theatre, film, and poetry) constellations. These sound systems operate at auditory, corporeal, and sociocultural frequencies. Even if the state’s aim is to produce specific masculinities and eradicate unwanted ones, the ‘old revolutionaries’ are not passive. These men try to listen to their own created worlds and stay deaf to the sounds of the regime as much as is possible. But that is not a straightforward process, and even if they consciously try to resist dominant discourses, it is not easy to resist sonic affective politics. If we compare some men’s experiences with others’ experiences, they both expose immediate embodied responses to the call of prayer for example. We can follow how sacral sounds transforms into noises and noises turns into sacral sounds. It is a consistent, yet an ambivalent affective flow. Even if men belong to the same category of downtown Cairenes, they strive for somewhat different manhood, and they experience the sonic call of prayer in different ways. Hence, the sonic permeates the bodies of all men, but these sonic urban experiences are experienced differently, depending on individual and collective political bodies in relation lived experience as well as to time, temporality, and context. The outcome of the transmission of affect is therefore always unpredictable – the effects may be sensed as state abuse or relational individual relief or just chaos.

One critical inquiry that has emerged by engaging in sensorial ethnography of urban exclusion in Cairo and how the sonic material infrastructure operates on the bodies of men I have collaborated with. Sounds in participatory democracy depend on collectivities (Kunreuther 2018), so are societies ruled by dictators. This does not only work towards elaborating our understanding of sonic infrastructure, urban stigma and porous masculinities–but also how these forces, in turn, influencing these men’s sense of belonging as well as of displacement. The Cairene men in focus navigate the increasingly state controlled cityscape, but also claim space, not only to be able to resist and stay as safe as they can, but from their point of view, to make themselves into desired personas and respectable men. However, how citizens are daily disciplined to listen to the military’s distinctive shaped cityscape influence how these places and spaced sound and resound (Ree 1999). The question is how much power is the listening repressed collective political body capable of? The current military regime of Egypt employs sonic (as well as other) strategies to unmake the alternative masculinities that became explicit and grow during and after the 25 January revolution. The Egyptian regime makes all its efforts to create an environment that “gives rise to a sonically constituted sense of self (as Rice phrases it, but in the hospital context, 2003: 4). I assert that the state apparatus, in order to stay in power, strives to discipline these bodies into obedient military nationalist masculinities. Simultaneously, why are the sonic atmospheres perceived differently by different men, who belong to the same category, class and generation? Other questions that have developed are: How do sonic vibrations mediate consciousness? How does sound shape and/or constrain the actions of individuals and groups? In what ways are touching sounds important stimuli within everyday experiences and how/why does the sonic induce strong affective states? How does listening to noises, silences, click or pops affect us?

Masculinity is not only produced through ideology, but through affect, as we all know. My project has worked towards elaborating our understanding of how the materiality (or vibrations) of sound and displacement plays a central role in the processes of masculine subjectification. I have also shown that engaging in the sensorial ethnography of urban displacement in Cairo makes explicit the development of a neo-patriarchal state, its repressive politics and how the sonic infrastructures not only are sonic instruments of biopower (Cardoso, 2019a, 2019b) but also operate on the bodies of the men I have collaborated with. Sounds in participatory democracy depend on collectivities (Kunreuther, 2018), but so too do those in societies ruled by dictators. Through its emphasis on sonic infrastructures as a lens for approaching displacement, this article helps us move beyond conventional approaches to peoples’ experiences of displacement, opening space to investigate the non-conscious forces that have a profound influence on our thinking and decisions in moments of intensity. Attention to the body, our senses and public affect foregrounds the role of immediate and experience-based forces during times of chaos, insecurity and political instability (Malmström, 2014) or forced statis. As we know by now, the institutions of state power in Egypt employ sound as a political representation while controlling, monitoring, limiting, threatening and making certain men through sonic infrastructures. It is an ongoing sensory process produced through the politics of the ear, to use Hirschkind’s (2004) terminology (cf. Trnka et al., 2013), while at the same time the men in focus are constantly contesting and negotiating normative state-desired tractable gendered bodies (cf. Anand, 2017; Von Schnitzler, 2016). My argument here is that the Egyptian military state employs sonic (as well as other) strategies to unmake the alternative masculinities that became explicit and grew during and after the 25 January Revolution. The Egyptian regime puts all of its efforts into creating an environment that ‘gives rise to a sonically constituted sense of self’, as Rice (2003: 4) phrases it in the hospital context. I assert that the state apparatus, in order to stay in power, constantly strives to discipline and shape these particular male bodies into obedient military nationalist masculinities through sonic infrastructure. The institutions of state power in Egypt employ sound as a political representation while controlling, monitoring, limiting, threatening and making its citizens through sonic infrastructures. Even if the state’s aim is to produce specific masculinities and eradicate unwanted ones, the men in focus are definitely not passive, as I have shown by different examples throughout this project. These Cairene men sonically navigate the increasingly state-controlled cityscape; they claim space, they produce distinct urban spaces and thereby they reclaim and maintain what has always been their space (until the state’s displacement of movement). They do so not only to be able to resist and stay as safe as they can, but also – from their point of view – to make themselves into desired and respectable men and to make home, through the sonic, while being displaced at the same time. As Appadurai (1986) put forward, in the context of displacement, home emerges as a significant trope. The Cairene men I know try to listen to their own created worlds, to stay silent and deaf to the sounds of the regime as much as possible. The aim is to constantly resist by vocalising their existence, re-making themselves through listening to their fellows and acting through an embodied social self through the sonic. Yet, it is impossible to make oneself into the person you were at the point of the 25 January Revolution, as Butler (1990, 1993) and other scholars have taught us: it is impossible to cross the street exactly like you did last time, which means that alterations are continuously made (for better or worse). The way in which activist males in Cairo are disciplined daily to listen to the autocratic regime’s distinctively shaped cityscape influences how these places and spaces sound and resound (cf. Ree, 1999).