CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Elsayed, Yasmeen |
|---|---|
| Title | Constructing Womanhood in Egypt's Hammams and Beauty Salons |
| Summary | This thesis demonstrates that hammams and beauty salons in Egypt are not merely spaces for bodily care or aesthetic services, but rather sites saturated with gendered, political, social, and class-based meanings. Within these spaces, womanhood is constituted on a daily basis through emotions and embodied practices, where it constantly interacts with gender, power, religion, and class. Grounded in feminist methodology and ethnographic fieldwork, and drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks—including intersectionality, gender performativity, biopower, postcolonial critique, and theories of resistance—this thesis analyzes the formation of womanhood within these sites. Across its three chapters, the thesis reveals how these spaces reproduce patriarchal norms while simultaneously offering women tools for negotiation and everyday resistance. The first chapter traces the historical, religious, and socio-political contexts that have shaped these spaces, uncovering how the oppression of women in both public and private spheres intersects with modern state projects characterized by capitalist consumerism and securitized control over the female body. The second chapter explores how beauty standards become tools of symbolic violence, enacted by women upon themselves and others within patriarchal and class-based structures. The third chapter highlights women’s everyday acts of resistance through storytelling, emotional solidarity and support, bodily liberation, and informal sexual education—positioning these spaces as sites of solidarity, bodily emancipation, and daily resistance. In doing so, the thesis argues that womanhood is not a fixed or given identity, but rather a shifting gendered, political, social, and class-based project, continually reconstituted through the body and daily practices—even within semi-public - private spaces such as hammams and beauty salons. These spaces, while informed by patriarchy, the state, the market, and religion, also emerge as complex terrains: simultaneously governed by systems of patriarchal power and functioning as arenas for resistance, where identities are reimagined and womanhood is actively shaped. |
| Supervisor | Main Supervisor: Prof. Qubaiova Adriana Support Supervisor: Prof. Desperak Izabela |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/elsayed_yasmeen.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2025, Central European University