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This study introduces a trend of Egyptian dance music called mulid that is named after festivals held in honor of the Prophet Muhammad, his family, and Muslim saints. Distinct from Islamic pop in its grassroots sound and ambiguous approach to piety, this trend draws musically and lyrically on mulids and the Sufi tradition of inshad (spiritual, ritual-focused singing) in a youthful, boisterous dance style. The range of approaches it takes in doing so is wide, from that of appreciation for the danceable musicality of inshad, to a quest to impart 'traditional' moral messages to youth, to playful fun-making of Sufi ritual and the mulid milieu. This study examines the content of mulid dance songs, the festive and social contexts in which they are used, and some of the cultural debates surrounding them. In doing so, it explores the ambiguous ways in which Egyptian youth culture is appropriating notions of piety in grassroots musical entertainment. It further discusses why this fusion of street-smart attitudes and spiritual-based motifs, existing as it does outside of the 'clean' Islamic pop current, nonetheless typically fails to incite religious sensibilities.

This essay analyzes Barbara Hammer's 1974 experimental nonfiction film Jane Brakhage. Both an homage and a rebuttal to the many films of Jane Brakhage made by her husband, Stan Brakhage, Hammer's film gives Jane the voice she never had in Stan's work. The article contextualizes Jane Brakhage's production at a moment when competing strands of feminist thought took different approaches to the fraught topic of nature. Hammer's films were criticized as essentialist by feminists in the 1980s, but this essay argues that Jane Brakhage complicates that reading of Hammer's work. The film documents Jane's creative life in the mountains, but critiques the limitations of her role as a heterosexual wife and mother. By locating this short film within a larger genealogy of feminist and environmental thought, we can better appreciate the extent to which Hammer's films explore the feminist and queer potential of nature.

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