Model Bodies: Health, Beauty, and Belonging in Imperial Sudan

This paper examines the competing claims of imported biomedical science and traditional cultural practices on Sudanese women’s bodies. It takes as its premise the idea that shared body rituals were central components in defining Sudanese womanhood. And when imperial statues, medicine, and morality condemned particular practices, these pillars of womanhood and identity were overturned. Previous scholarship has demonstrated how Hollywood films, foreign magazines, and novels heavily influenced body images and conceptions of beauty in colonial and post-colonial contexts. This paper treats science and medicine as another type of cultural import: one that just as significantly changed the way Sudanese men and women judged which types of bodies were fit, fertile, and sexually appealing. In the first half of the twentieth century, school curricula on hygiene and a large-scale campaign to end female genital cutting introduced biomedical definitions of health and normalcy. Intended to “civilize,” these lessons challenged many of the measures by which Sudanese women defined themselves as mature, sexual beings. Thus the teachers, nurses, and activists who adopted (and modelled) imperial standards of health had to, in turn, reconfigure their understandings of what beauty and belonging looked like. By independence in 1956, cheeks were no longer scarred; cotton clothing laundered with greater frequency; and genitalia cut in more moderate ways. Drawing on evidence from letters of British civil servants, memoirs of Sudanese women, photographs, and political cartoons this paper traces the cultural effects of biomedical discipline in shaping modern bodies.