Anexos

Hadia was 16 years old (at the time), and an 11th grade student living with her family in Al-Basatin. She attended some of my events and discussions but she mostly remained silent and did not participate. Whenever I saw Hadia in the school, she was walking alone. As I understood later, Hadia approached Ms. Sanaa, the psychology worker, to talk to her. Ms. Sanaa suggested to Hadia that she might like to talk to me. Over a number of interview sessions, Hadia explored her day to day challenges with her family and teachers:

Hadia: My father is originally from Upper Egypt and moved to live in Al- Basatin, and got married to my mother who is from Saida Zeinab39. He is an artisan working in manufacturing bags, and my only brother (Ahmed) finished

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his high technical (vocational) education and is working temporarily as a salesman. My mother doesn’t work.

I attend private lessons in four subjects: Arabic, English, Mathematics, and Italian. History is the only subject I study on my own. I like studying history – it’s like reading a story, and I like stories.

I am not allowed to go outside the house without my mother, and I am only allowed to go to school and private lessons after school. I can't talk to neighbours because my mother doesn't like them. Mum is always nervous and doesn't listen to me at all. I feel am useless with no value. Nobody cares to know what I think, even at school.

I'd like to be a normal girl, laughing, and going out with friends, but I am mostly alone and frustrated. Home is frustrating, school is frustrating. Nobody cares about what I want. Even if some people ask about me, they do it sarcastically, so. I lock myself in my room and cry. The only refuge for me is music.

I am a shy person and don’t have many friends. Actually I only have one close friend (Farida). Farida is my age and also in grade 11 but she goes to another school now. We used to go to school together until grade 10. I used to go to her house and she used to visit me. I like her so much, and I miss her. We haven't met recently.

I wish that my parents would pay more attention to my needs and my studies instead of keeping on watching over me and my behaviour all the time. MF: What makes you think that they watch over you all the time?

Hadia: I am sure they do. My mother reads my diaries, and spies on my mobile to see who I am talking to or texting.

Ahmed cares for me and talks to me when he is home and not tired from work. However, he wants to control me. He keeps watching over me, where I go, who I talk to, ...etc.

The worst thing is that Ahmed refuses to let me see or even talk to my only friend Farida. My mother agrees with Ahmed and tells me to obey him. Ahmed thinks that my friend is impolite because she is never shy about telling anyone what she wants or dressing the way she likes. She is veiled also, but she puts a nice veil. They want everyone to be speechless like me. My brother claims that he saw her walking with a boy. I don’t believe him. But even if she meets boys, it’s not his business. I use every opportunity to call her on the mobile when they are out, but I am not free to answer her calls if they are around. I am planning to visit her next week but I won’t tell my mother. MF: What about your father. Why can’t you ask for his support?

Hadia: I know that my father cares for me but he doesn’t talk to me at all. Even if I try to talk to him he tells me to ask my mother or Ahmed.

Hadia was struggling with the familial rules, and pleaded for more attention and equity. Rules imposed by the family regarding relationships and socialisation were not suggested in Hadia’s narrative as being religious but were seen rather as social norms. Ahmed (Hadia’s brother) retained a traditional notion of masculinity through exercising repressive control over Hadia. The notion of being “useless” was used repeatedly by Hadia to refer to her position within the family. Being in contact with her friend and having a peer friendship was of great value to Hadia, to the extent that she would take the risk of seeing her friend while hiding this from the family. This was the making of Hadia’s gendered subjectivities as the lonely, shy, obedient, quiet young woman. She was being taught by her family what it means to be a “young woman” living in an informal neighbourhood. The same processes were relevant for Ahmed (Hadia’s brother) who was being trained to become the man responsible for guarding his sister. Such masculine social norms represented another element of the patriarchal legacy facing young women within Egyptian informal communities.

Being economically dependent on their families, young people at the ages of attending high school and university are subjected to communal and familial pressures and control over their socialisation and aspirations. The older generations are in control of many decisions concerning young peoples’ lives, such as education, friendship, marriage, practising religion, as well as simpler things like choosing clothes and even going out with friends. Among informal dwellers, young women in particular – upon reaching the age of adolescence and in addition to the daily pressures of being young – are subjected to official and informal measures to regulate female sexuality, the way they dress and the roles they are permitted to adopt within the public sphere.

Hadia was also struggling with her marginalisation within the schooling system, both the formal and informal. By informal, I refer to the private tutoring system that emerged as a parallel and informal educational system:

MF: Tell me about school.

Hadia: I come to school every day in order to escape home. However, here in the school also, nobody cares or is willing to listen. You know what? I was forced to take private Maths lessons with Mr. Ashraf, my Maths teacher at school. He passed by our house and told my parents that I needed help with Maths and that I should join his after-school tutoring class. My mother forced me to join his private group. It's twice a week after school hours and we have the lesson in the house of one of our classmates. I hate it and I want to leave. MF: Why do you hate it? Don’t you need help with your Maths?

Hadia: I do need help with Maths, but I think I can help myself if I get more encouragement. The problem is that Mr. Ashraf doesn’t have faith in us. He keeps telling us during the class and also during the private lesson that we are useless and hopeless. I don’t need private tutoring in Maths with a teacher who keeps telling me that I am useless.

MF: So what are you going to do?

Hadia: I don’t know yet. I don't get any benefit from the private lessons and I pay a lot. I will stop, but I am afraid that Mr. Ashraf will give me a hard time after I leave. Should I tell him face to face or should I send the final week's lesson payment with one of my classmates and ask her to inform him that 'm stopping? I don’t know what to do.

A few weeks later I saw Hadia in the school and she had a big smile on her face. She stopped to talk to me briefly:

Hadia: Finally, I have just told Mr. Ashraf face to face that I don’t need the private Maths lesson and that I can study it myself. I told him that I am leaving the lessons. But I didn’t tell my parents that I've left Mr. Ashraf’s lessons. He may talk to them, meaning that I may face trouble at home. But I will insist I'm not going back.

Thinking of the prominence of what the school should mean for Hadia, her narrative does not suggest that a significant role is in fact being played by the school. Although she escaped from home by going to school, she repeated the same notion of being “useless” when describing her position within the school. She submitted provisionally to restrictions placed on her movement and relationships by her family

and to the norm of the private lessons. At first I thought that it was a contestation on Hadia's side to the teacher’s authority by telling him face to face that she was leaving his private Maths lessons. If, however, it was not an act of contestation and subversion, then what was it? Hadia neither subverted nor escaped the teacher's and family's pressures to join the lessons. It might be suggested that Hadia had submitted to norms in a way that changed the norm itself (Butler 2006: 532). Butler asks: “Is it possible to inhibit the norm in order to mobilize the rules differently?” (Butler 2006:532). Hadia strategically avoided subversive actions and joined the private lessons. Through submission to the norm, she allowed herself the time “to make room for an alternative agency, a creative deployment of power” (Butler 2006:533). Butler argues that “there are, after all, other things to do with rules than simply conforming to them. .. They can be recrafted. Conformity itself may permit for hyperbolic instantiation of the norm that exposes its fantastic character” (Butler 2006:533). That is exactly what Hadia did by joining the teacher’s private lessons for a short period which allowed her the opportunity to realise the uselessness of the private lesson for her which eventually granted her the courage to face him with the fact that she did not need his help. It was an example of the ambivalence of mastery and submission which paradoxically occur simultaneously towards the constitution of the subject (Davies 2006:426). Hadia as a subject had cultivated a novel tactic of desubjection through abiding by the rules. It is a tactic that perhaps she might start deploying with her family and in the school.