Economies of the Male Body: Productivity, Pathology, and Pleasure in Urban Egypt - Hardcover

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by Carl Rommel (Editor), Karin Ahlberg (Editor), Samuli Schielke (Afterword by)

An intimate portrayal of masculinity in Egypt from lively, grounded, and fresh perspectives

Based on long-term research in Cairo and Alexandria and grounded in ethnographic stories and intimate portrayals, Economies of the Male Body takes up masculinity in Egypt from an important new angle: male bodies in conditions of overwork, illness, as well as pleasure and recreation.

The contributors to this volume center bottom-up everyday perspectives, in which the men appear as real flesh-and-blood human beings, embodying both their society's gendered ideals as well as their own personal trajectories and idiosyncrasies. They set out to substantiate how underlying economic and social conditions undermine non-elite men's ability to eat a varied diet, get proper rest, participate in sports, be loving and present husbands, and, more generally, lead rich, full, and worthwhile lives.

Economies of the Male Body shows how the health of Egyptian men, many of whom are overweight and overworked, and Egypt's grim health statistics of high premature male mortality among men of lower socioeconomic classes should be read not as a result of substandard awareness among the population, but as a record of visceral inequalities generated by late capitalism and a global economic system that disproportionately burdens underprivileged bodies.

Contributors:
Carl Rommel, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Karin Ahlberg, Stockholm University, Stockholm Sweden and Universität Bremen, Bremen Germany
Mariz Kelada, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
Mustafa Abdalla, The Robert Koch Institute, Berlin, Germany
Youssef Ramez Boktor, The City University of New York, New York, USA
Noha Fikry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Author Biography

Carl Rommel (Edited by) is a researcher at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University. His publications include Egypt's Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics (2021).

Karin Ahlberg (Edited by) is a researcher and (co-)PI of the projects BIOrdinary and The Environmental Afterlife of the Suez Canal at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. She is also a CRDF Advanced Postdoc at IFEK, Universität Bremen.

Samuli Schielke (Afterword by) is a research fellow at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin, Germany. He is the author of numerous publications including Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011 (2015) and Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (AUC Press, 2020).

Number of Pages: 204

Dimensions: 0.5 x 9 x 6 IN

Illustrated: Yes

Publication Date: August 18, 2026