Academic Staff - Lisa Wynn
Academic Profile
Ph.D., Anthropology, Princeton University, 2003.
In the field: Cairo, Egypt, 2008. At the Opera House cafe, talking to Sameer Fareed about popular culture representations of reproductive health technologies. Photo by Dr Ziad Mouna.
I first became interested in the topic of tourism in Egypt while living in Saudi Arabia and hearing accounts of my Saudi friends' summer vacations. Every summer, my Saudi girlfriends would plan to meet up in Cairo; some even got engaged to Saudi men that they met on vacation in Egypt. Young Saudi men and women hanging out in Egyptian hotels would socialize in a way that they couldn't back in Saudi Arabia, where strict sex segregation is enforced by the state, and this provided one way for the younger generation to avoid arranged marriages. I decided to study the Saudi summer vacation as a window onto generational changes in Saudi culture and investigate the extent to which Saudi tourists upheld or deviated from Saudi cultural norms while they were on vacation in a more liberal Arab country.
But when I arrived in Egypt, I found that Egyptians had completely different ideas about what the Saudis were up to. The Egyptian stereotype held that Gulf Arab tourists came to Egypt to visit prostitutes, drink alcohol, gamble, and generally engage in all the illicit activities that were prohibited in their home countries. This eventually expanded into a research project that compared Western and Arab imaginations of Egypt and vice versa, tracing travelers' fantasies of the exotic to histories of colonialism, the migrant labor economy, and the Hollywoodisation of belly dance, among other things. My first book, "Pyramids and Nightclubs: A Travel-Ethnography of Western and Arab Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and Colonies of Atlantis to Sex Orgies, Rumors about a Marauding Prince, and Blond Belly Dancers," was published in December 2007 by University of Texas Press.
During my postdoc at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, my research project shifted dramatically, as I started to investigate sexual archetypes circulating at the intersection of family planning, medical science, and government regulation of pharmaceuticals. What constitutes "safe sex"? Another area I have started to investigate is the language women and men use to describe sexual experiences and reproductive health to medical professionals. A third project is concerned with the portrayal of unseen biological states in the reproductive cycle in both religious and scientific texts - particularly that period of time in between when the egg is fertilized by the sperm and the embryo implants into the uterus and pregnancy begins.
Since coming to Macquarie, I have started two new projects. One is a teaching project that will develop concrete ways for Macquarie staff to incorporate hands-on student ethnographic research projects into their teaching. The second is a research project that examines Egyptian interpretations of reproductive health technologies through 3 prisms: medical education, religious jurisprudence, and popular culture. In coming years I hope to expand this to a broader ethnographic exploration of the social, cultural, and religious interpretation and adoption of reproductive health technologies in Egypt.
Other future projects include an edited volume on emerging reproductive technologies in the Middle East (with co-editor Angel M. Foster), another edited volume on emergency contraception worldwide (again with Angel Foster), and a sequel to my first ethnography that explores how men and women negotiate gender and moral identities in cross-cultural contexts.
For more information, see my research profile for more details about ongoing research projects, my online CV for a complete list of publications, or check out Culture Matters, Macquarie's Anthropology Department group blog, where I regularly post research updates and informal commentary on anthropology in current affairs, and Khaldoun, another Macquarie group blog where I comment on matters related to Middle East culture and politics.