Defiance and compliance : negotiating gender in low-income Cairo

Defiance and Compliance is a thought-provoking look into the lives of low-income women living and working in Cairo. Often confronted with economic and political discrimination, these women not only manage to survive, but to thrive. Although there's a prevailing attitude that Middle Eastern women are oppressed and devoid of agency, this study demonstrates the opposite by showing the complex and diverse ways in which they improve their situations by circumventing existing gender arrangements. Largely derived from in-depth interviews and observations, Defiance and Compliance is the result of fifteen months of research in several low-income communities in Cairo. The book aims to create debate, in both the anthropological and the broader feminist literature, regarding the ways in which women's gender interests are formed, and how their strategies for expressing discontent and negotiating gender-based power relations, are modified and inflected by their specific socio-economic locations. An insightful read, Defiance and Compliance challenges prevailing, unexamined assumptions about male and female relations, contributing significantly to current debates about poverty, gender, power and resistance.