Paper short abstract:

The paper explorers the actions and articulations of a group of men in Cairo who consume locally created pornography featuring veiled women.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on a long term fieldwork project this paper explores the consumption of locally produced pornography featuring veiled (muhajabat) women in Cairo, Egypt. Seen as part of the complex and ongoing interweaving of the everyday and the extraordinary, rather than as something extraordinary in and of itself, my work presents and analyzes Cairene men's conflicting and often ambivalent moral and social stances surrounding pornography, desire and sexuality.

For many of my informants, pornography, masculinity and sexuality are closely connected; pornographic material holds value beyond the obvious outlet for sexual desire. It can serve as sexual education and initiation, as way to confirm and conform to hyper-masculine ideals, or even function as social capital. However as the popular, governmental and religious treatments of pornography unequivocally characterize it as haram (forbidden) or even as zina al-'ayn (adulterous, lit. adultery of eye) the consumption of such material places the men in a moral and social bind. Following Samuli Schielke (2008, 2009) among others, I hope to depart from the current approach to the anthropology of Muslim societies that focuses on idealized forms of subjectivity, religiosity, and morality. Rather, I am interested in how ambivalence and ambiguity in the everyday allows for a seemingly contradictory bricolage of practices to take place.