The Nordic Africa Institute – Publications

This paper is concerned with the significance of ordeals as connected to constructions of female gender identity and morality among the popular classes of Muslim women of Cairo. The text is structured around pain and suffering as social experience, but also concerns pain as individual and embodied. The thrust of this paper is how the lived experiences of pain and suffering, as narrated by women in Cairo, are shaped and challenged by the social and political changes that impinge on these women’s lives. Thus, how the subject is constructed through the intricate interplay of the global hegemonic structures of power, where the most intimate sphere has been exposed in the international arena, and the lived experience of female circumcision, defloration and childbirth.