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This paper is concerned with the significance of ordeals as connected to constructions of female gender identity and morality among the popular classes of Muslim women of Cairo. The text is structured around pain and suffering as social experience, but also concerns pain as individual and embodied. The thrust of this paper is how the lived experiences of pain and suffering, as narrated by women in Cairo, are shaped and challenged by the social and political changes that impinge on these women’s lives. Thus, how the subject is constructed through the intricate interplay of the global hegemonic structures of power, where the most intimate sphere has been exposed in the international arena, and the lived experience of female circumcision, defloration and childbirth.

This paper is part of an extensive study32 on constructions of gender through the prism of female circumcision and the interplay with the wider social dynamics in Egypt today. Fieldwork in Cairo was carried out from August 2002 until July 2003. The actors are Muslim women of different generations from the lower class neighbourhoods of Cairo. The issue of female circumcision has become a global political minefield with ‘Western’33 interventions34 affecting Egyptian politics and social development, not least in the area of democracy and human rights. My analysis has revealed how intricately interwoven female circumcision is in women’s daily lives, where idioms of suffering are an imperative component. However, these idioms of suffering are today challenged by different Western interventions.