Gender history has a history proper to itself. This is not only to say that the study of gender as a scholarly and institutional practice is bounded by space and time, and that it has an archive of its own, but also that “gender history” as a relatively recent disciplinary innovation is properly gender history to the extent that it exists in relation to and distinct from other histories of becoming man, woman, trans, and so forth. In other words, gender history, regarded as a discursive formation in its own right, constitutes its object in ways that overlap but remain distinct from other conceptions of being and becoming gendered that are spatially and temporally diverse. Seen in this light, it can be said to map onto a history of sovereignty that has privileged particular forms of life and that acts as a limit on gender's analytical and critical value.
This is a realization that has come from my work on masculinity in Egypt and my recent research into the problem of sovereignty in the Indian Ocean world of the 19th century viewed through the life of Sayyid Fadl b. ʿAlawi.Footnote 1 The “limit” is not the same as saying that gender is partial or inadequate to the task of representation; rather, a limit marks the horizon at which any concept falters in its capacity to disclose truth about its object or to render it legible. The limit of sovereignty is intimately intertwined with languages of religion, law, politics, and the subject—all of which have been shown in voluminous detail to be gendered domains that in turn and often in concert have produced gender as a field of power.Footnote 2
These studies of gender, which traverse regional contexts and intersect at the global, have demonstrated that gender is indeed a “useful category of historical analysis.” Their success, however, has meant that gender's critical value has often come to be taken for granted, especially in other disciplines. Joan Scott began her seminal essay on gender history by noting that “Those who would codify the meanings of words fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history.”Footnote 3 In spite of Scott's cautionary note, a certain codification of gender's meaning is precisely what its broad “disciplinarization” has effected.
Whatever one's approach, the study of gender predicates and examines boundaries, hierarchies, and the (im)possibility of crossings. The latter, as Saba Mahmood has demonstrated, drawing from her research on the women's piety movement in Egypt, normally engenders feminist concerns to track a movement from submission or subjection to freedom. Even in poststructuralist accounts of the performative resignification of gender, the temporality of iteration is grounded in an ineluctable emancipatory progression that presupposes in the end a liberal subject of freedom.Footnote 4 Such a presupposition makes gender a normative category, which Scott acknowledged in her definition of gender as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”Footnote 5 The problem here is power: who has it, who doesn't, and who cares. The latter is not a flippant query but intended to set the two usual questions within a specific economy that distributes matters of concern across an international division of labor that includes and locates the work of academics.Footnote 6
In my book, Working Out Egypt, I tracked two forms of power, which normally make for different kinds of gender history, as part of my inquiry into the place of masculinity in the (inter)national order emerging between the late 19th century and the end of the interwar period. Bridging the gap between gender histories of the nation and a nearly absent gender history of the international made legible the global lines along which the sovereign subject of politics was elaborated in terms of masculinity. Gender as a “biopolitical technology” and as a “juridicodiscursive” formation simultaneously shaped the internal/domestic and external/foreign spaces of a new world ordered in terms of what I called colonial modernity, marking “nothing less than the entry of life into history.”Footnote 7 In colonial modernity, sovereignty constituted a paradoxical politics of submission and emancipation, drawing lines around territories and populations, even as those lines were breeched by globalized modes of economic exchange, law, and subject formation. Mapping that sovereign order and its topology of exception meant that it was perhaps inevitable the book would end with the paradoxical figure of an outlaw that was also the figure of an ethical masculinity: al-futuwwa.
Al-futuwwa as criminal ontology and as a model of youthful masculinity, or form of life, became in the interwar period a site of the exception whereby inclusive exclusions were worked out in the making of a properly modern Egypt and its effendi subject. The form of life represented by al-futuwwa began to vanish as the concatenation of economy and government through the figure of law established the sovereignty of state within the emergent international order. The space of politics demarcated in and by the new dispensation did not merely constitute and proliferate the Other within and across spatiotemporal and geographical boundaries; sovereignty engendered Identity as a vehicle for the homogenization or standardization of legal, economic, and governmental bodies within a new international politics of recognition. Those bodies approached and were approached by gender in particular contexts in universalist terms.Footnote 8
The vanishing futuwwa sparked my current research into sovereignty as it pertained to forms of life. Ironically, although gender had gotten me to that point through the analytical openings it made possible, as my excavation of the life of Sayyid Fadl progressed gender disappeared. The narrative centered on the life of a noble mystic rabble-rouser, dubbed the “Moplah Outlaw” by the British and held captive by the Ottomans, seemed to have an obvious conclusion: state sovereignty becomes an absolute principle of global historical reality demanding the identification of more outlaw types and the shrinking or destruction of their prior worlds, worlds that, as I argue for al-futuwwa in the last chapter of Working Out Egypt, had engendered other terms of intelligibility.
However, when invited to step back from that history of state sovereignty and consider the relationship between gender and religion, life muscled its way through the thickets of imperial archives and scholarly accounts in its glorious and gendered plenitude.Footnote 9 The time had come, I thought, to leave Giorgio Agamben and the boys aside and return to my original muses, such as Saba Mahmood, Cynthia Enloe, and Judith Butler, in order to make sense of this life that bespoke gender yet in a language that defied translation into the terms of modern sovereignty. Agamben and others who turned to a reexamination of sovereignty in the wake of Soviet collapse and American-led globalization, could not find sex or gender relevant to, or even present in, the serious matters of state to which they dutifully attended, at times in a prophetic mode and an apocalyptic tone. Similarly, recent histories of sovereignty seem to trace if not a direct European line then a globally circuitous one from Westphalia, or a bit earlier, to the League of Nations and the UN, which also in the main make gender invisible.
Enloe noted in her preface to the 2000 edition of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, which originally appeared in 1989:
In the first decade of the new century we more than ever need to make sense of international politics. If we don't take women's experiences—in all their diversity—seriously, if we act as though manipulations of ideas about femininity and masculinity are not political, but merely “cultural,” we risk, I think, underestimating how much of our lives are indeed political. We thereby risk being globally naïve. That is, we are naïve if we underestimate how much effort and how many political resources are invested every day in shaping international politics. Underestimating the amounts and kinds of power operating in the world is the hallmark of nonfeminist analysis.Footnote 10
Despite her oversimplified readings at times, particularly of the Middle East, Enloe's attention to how masculinity and femininity relate in the formation of national sovereignty and international relations since the 19th century remains a source of insight. Judith Butler's recent attentionFootnote 11 to often invisible networks of support—whether in the Occupy Movement, in Tahrir, or in Gezi Park—as crossing private/public boundaries in the activation of political possibility was anticipated by Enloe in her historical and contemporary analyses of sex workers, domestic servants, and diplomatic wives. Extending the feminist adage “the personal is political” to the domain of international politics and reading it both forwards and backwards as, “the personal is international and the international is personal,” she observes: “Read forward, the ‘personal is international’ insofar as ideas about what it means to be a ‘respectable’ woman or an ‘honorable’ man have been shaped by colonizing policies, trading strategies and military doctrines.” She continues that while this perspective advances empirical scholarship it cannot disrupt and displace the narrowly bounded domain of international politics, whereas, when read backward, the “international is personal” demands analytical and critical scrutiny of the gendered/sexualized supports needed to carry on interstate relations, thereby opening a space for conceptual and political challenges. She writes:
“The international is personal” implies that governments depend upon certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs. Governments need more than secrecy and intelligence agencies; they need wives who are willing to provide their diplomatic husbands with unpaid services so those men can develop trusting relationships with other diplomatic husbands. They need not only military hardware, but a steady supply of women's sexual services to convince their soldiers that they are manly. To operate in the international arena, governments seek other governments’ recognition of their sovereignty; but they also depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain that sense of autonomous nationhood.Footnote 12
Those supports that appear or rather disappear into the everyday and less ethereal realm than that in which scholars of various disciplines typically locate sovereignty, were very much central to the expansion and persistence of the ʿAlawi Way in the vastness of the Indian Ocean world with its diverse social, cultural, economic, and political forms. The stranger king or sayyid sovereign could never have succeeded in East Africa, across South Asia, in Java, and elsewhere without the support given by local women in all of these places, or for that matter without negotiating the terms of masculinity across temporal and spatial divides. In that way the Hadhrami sayyids were not utterly dissimilar from Enloe's white fur traders in the Pacific Northwest.
The life of Fadl and his father Sayyid ʿAlawi demonstrate clearly and dramatically that gender mattered to the politics of advancing colonial rule, on the one hand, and to the propagation of Islam on the other hand.Footnote 13 This is not revelatory for most gender historians. However, it seems that when sovereignty is centered and one stares into its face, so to speak, gender disappears. Perhaps that is its mystique, which must be interrogated and overcome if life is to be released from its annihilating grip. An excavation of gender's hidden constitution authored in the terms of modern political sovereignty reveals a site where the analytical and critical collide—with generative potential. Samera Esmeir's recent treatment of gender and the human at the turn of the 20th century points to a way forward. She parses the distinction between an Islamic conception of the human as relational to all beings and things and a juridical human with a gendered dimension that requires the law for its secular redemption or salvation. Within the context of Egypt's occupation and the restructuring of its state to conform to the terms of a modern imperial sovereignty, the gendered human appeared on stage bound to the juridical terms of the new order. However, as Esmeir writes, “if the human is the teleology of modern law, as the gendered colonial history of Egypt shows, the human status of the now-included gendered subjects also introduces relationships of bondage with the law, making gender politics that rely on the figure of the human ever more juridical.”Footnote 14
Thus, releasing life from the thrall and subjugation of sovereignty cannot occur in terms of a gender politics, or any other politics, that repeat its terms. These were lessons I had only partially learned in writing Working Out Egypt, which may explain why they were forgotten in the initial quest to write a history, however alternative, of sovereignty. The lessons I have learned again or anew bring back into sight a gender history that is at once a disciplinary relation-to-sovereignty with its implied conceptual limit and a terrain of difference beyond. The resemblance to the topology of “the exception” is hard to miss, but it is a limit that does not in itself necessitate despair for it cannot exhaust life's power in all times and places emanating from life's glorious and interruptive heterogeneity. Releasing gender and by extension life from the modern condition of relation does require that analytical and critical moves are made at once; in other words, gender history must always also be a history of gender.Footnote 15
