2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel explores the dynamism of healthy and diseased bodies in colonial and post-colonial contexts across North Africa and the Middle East. The three papers analyze the legacies of imperial health initiatives in post-independence Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; a century’s long history of syphilis in Egyptian society; and biomedicine’s influence on beauty standards in Sudan. Each demonstrates that the rhetoric of health and wellness provided a highly intimate vocabulary for larger socio-political discussions of reproduction, sexuality, modernity, decolonization, and state-building. To speak of public health was to reflect on the fitness of society as a whole. But broad community-based health initiatives were more than social programing; they were physical and figurative sites of cross-cultural exchange: bodies came into contact, multiple forms of knowledge competed for primacy, and gender and sex roles were alternately confirmed or overturned. Thus, both states and individuals employed themes of health and disease as a means of exercising power. As much as their themes and questions overlap, this collection of papers is equally valuable for its differences: the contrast between French and British imperial administrations, the types of bodies that were the focus of medical interventions, and the variety of colonial responses to imperial health standards. The resulting panel is a wide-ranging, comparative look at the political and social effects of health and disease in colonial settings.