Technology, Gender Respectability, and Music in Twentieth Century Egypt
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Technology, Gender respectability, and Music in the Twentieth Century Egypt
Bio: Hammad is a social and cultural historian whose work focuses on working classes, gender and sexuality, childhood, and popular culture in the modern Arab World and the socio-cultural interaction between Arabs and Iranians in the twentieth century. Her research received support from Fulbright Hays, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany), Woolf Institute in Cambridge (UK), the Crown Center of Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, among others. Her books, articles, and research have received recognition and won prizes from the National Women's Studies Association, the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, MESA, the Arab American Book Awards, and the Journal of Social History, among others. Before joining the University of Houston, Hammad was a professor at Texas Christian University where she founded and directed the Middle East Studies Program and chaired the Department of Women and Gender Studies.
Abstract: This presentation discusses how technical innovation played a crucial role in developing and preserving the gender respectability of women entertainers and elevating the status of some of them to become national sociocultural icons. I do so through the career of three women; the legendary singer Umm Kulthum who had an exceptional career over six decades, the most celebrated singing movie star Layla Murad, and the pioneer filmmaker and music composer Bahiga Hafiz. Their careers coincided with the utilization of the microphone, record, and sound cinema. I argue that technology helped those talented women to solve the contradictions inherited in their high visibility as entertainers and gender respectability by keeping satr as understood in the Egyptian social culture.