Transition and Trans*lation beyond Binary History in Mid-century Upper Egypt; or, Portraits of Transfemininity in Asyut

Abstract:In 1958, the popular Egyptian magazine Ākhir Sā`ah ran a story about four people designated “men donning dresses and living as women” in the Upper Egyptian town of Asyut. Ākhir Sā`ah presented brief profiles explaining these people’s gender expression alongside staged photographs and opinions from an Egyptian psychiatrist, the local minister of education, a lawyer, and a social scientist. This article departs from that one. By annotating my trans*lation of the Arabic text, I interrupt its binary logics. Trans*lation is an idiomatic meaning-making process that is in intimate dialogue with the process of transition itself. In the source text, Egyptians living in tension with the gender binary were made legible through the relay of pseudoscientific evidence and details about their early childhood experiences, or in one instance, through a story about a deal between the subject and a spirit, a jinn. My analysis denaturalizes the publication’s ethnographic documentation and teleological narration of these people’s lives. Working through the Arabic text and departing from the Orientalist fixation with philology, I consider the possibilities of rendering gender alterity across languages and employ trans*lation as a method to engage narratological and historiographical processes. In my treatment of these biographies, I clarify how “nonbinary” challenges the emplotment of gender transition and the work of translation as linear processes, and I motion towards its potential to evacuate the overlapping transitions to modernity and the emergence of the postcolonial nation-state, which the aforementioned transfeminine individuals also lived, from similarly teleological narrations and binary logics. Ultimately, I situate these four subjects beyond the interlocking binaries of man/woman, human/spirit, cis/trans, modern/traditional, and East/West. In so doing, I collapse these structures and offer alternative portraits of transfemininity in Asyut.