In Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt, Hanan Hammad provides insight into the lives of the working poor in urban areas outside cosmopolitan Cairo and Alexandria during a rapid period of modernization and urbanization in Egypt.

Industrial Sexuality is an important contribution to the fields of both Middle Eastern and gender studies. Hammad's effort to explore the history of Egypt's labor movement through the lens of gender analysis allows her to examine the changing gender roles of working-class women and men amidst the evolving realities of industrial workers in a rapidly changing urban environment (13). Hammad highlights the tension between resisting the state and reinforcing structures of power, including docility, state surveillance, hyper-masculinity, the othering of newcomers, subject formation, and the demonization of the poor. She adopts a Marxist-Feminist and Foucauldian framework and makes it readable for upper-division undergraduates in the humanities or social sciences. Hammad's work draws on archival material such as legal documents (including misdemeanor, criminal, civil, and shari‘a court records), oral histories, newspaper articles, and records from the Misr (Egyptian) Spinning and Weaving Company (MSWC), the largest enterprise attracting migrant workers to the large industrial city, al-Mahalla al-Kubra.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Hammad states her case for the emergence of competing masculinities in al-Mahalla and the challenges that develop among male Egyptian industrial workers. She outlines the bureaucratic structure of the MSWC, the different responsibilities attached to each role, and the general culture of the factory. She presents legal disputes between bosses and rank-and-file workers and the clashes among co-workers, roommates, and neighbors. Finally, she presents multiple cases of the overarching socio-cultural conflict between local hyper-masculine futuwwat or the “native or indigenous” male youth bands that protected neighborhoods (57) and the 2,000-27,000 migrant workers that flooded al-Mahalla between 1930 and 1945 (63). She introduces her next two chapters by suggesting that these conflicts reflect the anxieties men experienced from new challenges to their masculinities and to their ambiguous position within a new gender hierarchy.

In Chapters 3 and 4 Hammad explains that female industrial workers migrated to al-Mahalla to “support their kin and to stave off poverty. . . [They] remained dutiful mothers, wives, and daughters in the family, but in becoming economically independent, women liberated themselves from the repressive patriarchal standards of community and kin” (82). While men were the first to migrate to al-Mahalla, women joined them in subsequent decades and by the 1930s became the dominant workforce in the gauze industry (88). Women gained factory expertise, operated machinery, and earned wages. However, considered low skilled workers, migrant women working in al-Mahalla received the lowest pay, never served in management, and were judged as low social status figures with suspicious moral and sexual practices (82).

Local Mahallawiyya women took advantage of the influx of migrant workers, known as Shirkawiyya, and the industrialization boom to improve their own socio-economic standing and assume more powerful roles within their households. They wielded the legal system to gain access to rental property and to evict unpaying migrant tenants. They used their own capital as seed money for emergent businesses by selling their copper pots and pans and wedding dowries to care for their families and children. They challenged and redefined traditional notions of public and private space and gender roles. In response to increased housing shortages, they rented out rooms in their own homes to young workers. Many sold foodstuffs and tea as street vendors specifically tailored to workers on their breaks. Yet despite their new social status, they remained vulnerable to sexual assault, violence, and theft.

In Chapters 5 and 6, Hammad delves into sexual practices, state discourses on health and morality, and the increased sexual and physical violence women and children experienced in the city and factory contexts. She demonstrates that individuals often had to decide whether or not to expose non-normative sexual practices to the state, and did so usually for personal gain, or to resolve the conflict as a community. Hammad suggests that increased sexual violence against poor women and children emerged as a result of social and spatial reconfiguration. Lower class women and children were the most vulnerable to sexual assault, as they were often left alone in living quarters with male workers in theirs 20s and 30s who were sharing living quarters with women and children for the first time (166). Sharing living spaces made it easier for child molestation and rape to occur but also allowed neighbors and family members to discover and report the crimes. These spatial reconfigurations also created increased opportunities for surveillance and self-reporting to the state.

Finally, Hammad argues that the local middle class, the state, and the religious establishment coordinated their efforts to police the sexual activities of poor migrants as part of Egypt's modernization efforts. Hammad identifies the afandiyya’s war on sex work and ban on prostitution in 1943 as an important moment for the urbanization of Egypt, but fails to explain why the push for social conservativism and criminalization of prostitution were significant. The state banned sodomy among heterosexual married couples, and thus did exert influence over the private lives of its citizens (174). However, upper class men accused of sexually assaulting women and children were often acquitted by the courts, which Hammad argues exempted them from the sexual discourse and norms the state enforced on the working poor (173). Hammad could have explored the role of religious leaders and institutions, like al-Azhar, in the codification of laws regarding sex and their application. The lack of greater context left this reader curious about the relationship between the efforts to police sexual activity, specifically among migrant labor, and the larger political stakes of the 1940s.

Hammad's research sheds light on how local and newcomer women and men's lives in a strategically important urban and industrial sphere changed drastically as a result of socio-economic shifts in the 1930s and 1940s. Her most prominent contribution is in bringing the agency of working class men and women to the forefront, despite their dire conditions and regime of state surveillance. The book could have benefited from greater attention to the impact of the religious establishment on these changes, to the role of religio-nationalist discourses, and to the sexual practices in al-Mahalla before the 1920s. Despite this criticism, the meticulous nature of Hammad's work yields a worthy read.