Egypt’s TV Sexologists and the Politics of Modern Femininity

Since Foucault’s History of Sexuality, sexology has been viewed by historians of science and medicine as a marker of sexual modernism, a category of biopower and an apparatus of discipline and social control. Postcolonial historians of medicine, including historians of the Middle East, have complicated our understanding of sexology as both an instrument of imperial control and a potential tool of social critique and resistance to colonial assumptions. More recently, feminist historians of medicine have highlighted the roles played by women sexologists as a way of countering the historical narrative that viewed women and their sexuality solely as objects of study and control by a male-dominated medical establishment. Modern interest in the scientific study of sexuality in the Middle East can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century. This interest manifested in various ways during the colonial period and over the course of the twentieth century. Most recently, new media allowed for the proliferation of sex education TV programs, websites, YouTube Channels and social media accounts. In this paper, I aim to contribute to the growing scholarship on sexology by examining the role played by contemporary women sexologists in Egypt and their role in cultivating ideals of modern, bourgeois feminine sexuality. Turning to two “popular” female sexologists and sex educators, Heba Kotb and Alyaa Gad, I aim to historically contextualize these popularized iterations of the scientific discourse on sexuality and how they approach questions of modern sexuality in relation to other discourses, such as religious and moral discourses.