National Socks and the “Nylon Woman”

Materiality, Gender, and Nationalism in Textile Marketing in Semicolonial Egypt, 1930–56

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8965802
AutoresNancy Y Reynolds (0009-0003-7466-4125, autor correspondente)
Ano2011
Volume43
Fascículo1
Páginas49-74
Data de publicação2011-01-24
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743810001194
OpenAlexW2118298352
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas43

The specific ways that cloth—“foreign silks,” “durable Egyptian cottons,” and “artificial silks”—emerged as a potent and visible symbol through which to contest the relations of colonialism and establish national community in Egypt varied with the changing realities of Egypt's political economy. The country's early importation of textiles despite its cultivation of raw cotton, the growth of its state-protected local mechanized industry working long- and medium-staple cotton for a largely lower-class market, and that industry's diversification into artificial silk technologies all helped structure a shift from “foreign silks” to “the nylon woman” as tropes in popular and political discourse defining the limits of the national community and the behaviors suitable for it. Although artificial fibers considerably lowered the cost of hosiery and other goods, thereby expanding consumption, the use of synthetics like nylon rather than cotton subverted the goal of national economic unity between agriculture and industry

Economic nationalism · Economics · Economy · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Textile industry · African history and culture studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Law