This article examines the ways in which Egyptian legislators and reformers drafted and debated new regimes of monitoring male sexuality in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Egypt. An exploration of the state's legislation on marriage, prostitution and venereal disease reveals that the state assumed an unprecedented role in monitoring and medicalising the sexuality of Egyptian men. Its goal was to create 'healthy', disciplined men who would create fit and modern families that would serve as the foundation for a postcolonial nation free of socio-medical ills. In their attempts to medicalise male sexuality and regulate female prostitution, legislative reformers were delineating and gendering the normative heterosexuality of the healthy male colonial subject for the emerging nation.Recent scholarship has brought much-needed attention to the medicalisation of reproduction, prostitution and venereal disease in colonial and contemporary Egypt, but it has overwhelmingly focused on the health of females since they were the ones who bore and raised the future citizens of the nation. 1 In contrast, this article analyses legislation that concentrated on the sexual practices of male colonial subjects to demonstrate how a new heterosexually normative male body became inextricably linked to the success of the emerging Egyptian nation. It highlights how Egyptian notions of sexual diseases were gendered and explains why certain diseases were an issue of concern only if men had contracted them. Specifically, it briefly reviews the Ottoman and colonial legislation related to female prostitution before it analyses Article 9 of Egyptian Personal Status Law 25 of 1920 -the last successful attempt of the interwar state to regulate male sexuality -which granted a wife the right to divorce her husband if he contracted a chronic ailment such as venereal disease. This article argues that the Egyptian monitoring and medicalisation of male sexuality was part and parcel of the larger worldwide eugenics movement in the early twentieth century that resulted in the medicalisation of sex, marriage and reproduction in many other parts of the world like colonial India, Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany and the American south. Not only did Egyptians participate in the international movement by cautiously deploying its various models in eugenics; perhaps more significantly, they departed from the global movement by localising various eugenic examples and drawing inspiration from medieval Islamic religious texts rather than western scientific treatises to fit their own unique socio-political and medico-legal context.

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This paper explores the multiple ways in which Egyptian women and men conceptualized mixed marriage between Egyptian men and European women from 1909 to 1923. It argues that mixed marriage in colonial Egypt was a contested site of national identity formation that attracted the growing attention of writers. The debates on mixed marriage provide convincing evidence of the political and cultural anxieties which often underwrote experiments in colonial modernity. I aim to situate mixed marriage—where these anxieties particularly coalesced—as a place in which notions of colonial modernity were produced and reproduced as a condition for the enlightenment and progress of the Egyptian nation and its citizens, most notably its women. As the sources make clear, tensions about marriage between Egyptian men and European women evolved out of the particular circumstances of the British occupation. These anxieties coalesced particularly in critiques that often portrayed mixed marriage as endangering the marital futures of Egyptian women, and the political and cultural identities of mixed marriage offspring, the family, and the Egyptian nation by extension. An analysis of these debates will reveal that mixed marriage was often portrayed as an impediment—and sometimes as a facilitator—to Egypt's path of modernity. I argue that these writers used mixed marriage to critique Egyptian men's and women's gendered roles as fathers, husbands, mothers, and wives. In doing so, they aimed to construct a new vision of the family and society as sites of modernity where the Egyptian colony could reform and prove to be 'modern' and, thus, worthy of political independence.

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