Urbanizing Masculinity: Workers, Weavers and Futuwat in Violent Alliances and Fluid Identities

In this presentation, I employ urban violence to examine how men constructed, performed, and struggled for their masculine identity. I argue that gender identity, performing masculinity, and the construction of manhood were important sites of the adaptation to industrial urban life in crucial years of interwar Egypt. On the backdrop of rapid urbanization and industrialization, the town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra attracted thousands of poor peasants to become factory workers and urban dwellers. Violence broke out between townspeople, who called themselves Mahallawiyya, and the newly arrived peasant-workers whom people of al-Mahalla called Shirkawiyya, or people of the company. The competition among tough men (futuwwat) from both sides fed into that violence and communal division. Inflation, the high prices of food and housing, professional competition and cultural differences, anxiety over living with strangers and adapting to an alien place fueled and fed violence among workers and between newcomers and urbanites. In their competing and fluid communal loyalties, working class Mahallawiyya and Shirkawiyya developed their notion of the ideal masculine and created social locations for peer bonding and friendship.