| Περίληψη: | <p>This thesis charts the history and evolution of a mass-incarcerating regime of detention, disappearance and torture in Egypt between 1948 and 1981. In seeking to explain Egypt’s carceral present, it traces, for the first time, the history of the Egyptian Mu‘taqal [political prison], from its emergence as a powerful instrument of government in the aftermath of the Second World War, through to its entrenchment as a mainstay of post-colonial governance by the newly independent state and by successive regimes thereafter.</p>
<p>Drawing on archival sources in Cairo, London, Aix-en-Provence and Amsterdam, organisational and party records, prisoners’ memoirs and testimonies, literary and visual cultural production, and over 250 interviews with members of various communist and Islamist organisations, in Egypt and in exile, it tells the history of the Mu‘taqal from the perspective of its chief protagonists, the political prisoners themselves.</p>
<p>The thesis critically examines the operation of power and resistance in contestations over the gendered identities of prisoners. Interrogating the idea that confinement and torture in authoritarian regimes reflect the workings of an irrational or brutish state, it illustrates that power contestation in the Mu‘taqal extended far beyond the limited and clichéd repertory of torture and hunger-strikes. Rather, emergent public discourses on respectability, ideals of ‘real manhood’, and the tenets of the nuclear family as the basis of the nascent Egyptian nation, were all distilled by the Mu‘taqal into a panoply of gendered disciplinary discourses and acts which sought to deny its inhabitants the label, recognition and identity of ‘political prisoner’.</p>
<p>The thesis argues that the state’s subjection and subjugation of incarcerated dissidents fundamentally relied on the state’s ability to debase mu‘taqalin’s gender identities, and that gender served as the primary terrain on which political prisoners’ sought to assert their autonomy and (re)constitute themselves as agents in the historical process.</p>
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