The Pleasures of Domesticity: Household Appliance Advertisements, Gender and the Democratization of Well Being in Nasser's Egypt

This talk analyzes Egyptian print advertisements of gas stoves, refrigerators and washing machines as a way to consider how the techno-politics of Egyptian modernity intersected with gender politics---both at the level of state policy and in everyday life in the two decades following the 1952 revolution. I argue that the proliferation of advertisements for Egyptian made stoves, refrigerators and washing machines during this period envisioned domestic technology as a critical building block in a gendered social contract between the state and the Egyptian people. Aimed exclusively at women, such ads stressed values such as pleasure, abundance, affordability and leisure—a vision of society where every housewife could achieve her dreams and every family could have a modern kitchen. These idealized images of were not a new feature of household advertisements, however the language of pleasure, of beauty and happiness used to advertise household goods prior to the revolution became embedded in new gendered definitions of citizenship after it. Advertisements also depicted women as primary beneficiaries of Egyptian state socialism and (in doing so) papered over some of the tensions in the state’s plan to mobilize women as workers, housewives and consumers.