Abstract

This article addresses multiple paths of desire in Egypt. To date, research has mainly focused on the family as the realm of intimacy. To understand desire, it is important to take into account other contexts that contribute to shaping experience. Conversations about sex among men in coffee shops are contrasted with family discourses as a symbolic locus for alternative modes shaping intimacy in homosocial circles. The hierarchy of truth whereby confessions are supposed to give insight into subjects’ core feelings are reassessed, allowing the sketching of a geography of competing intimacies that outline the coordinates of masculine desire.