This thesis draws on 34 months of participant observation in a working-class neighborhood of Amman, Jordan to ask whether and how gender, specifically femininity, can serve as a framework for ethical self-cultivation. It describes the relationships between morality, progress, and gender in contemporary Jordan, where progress is viewed as important and inevitable but also amoral, and morality is associated with the past, which is the opposite of progress. Women are uniquely affected by these oppositions because they are expected to both preserve the morality of the past and embody progress, defined as maximizing their own self-interest through consumption, education, employment, and participation in public life. In this confounding context, women must be deliberate about how they choose to define and inhabit proper femininity, and the work of defining and inhabiting demands creative and productive engagement on their part. They respond by participating in a bounded public that not everyone can enter, and by making and maintaining a distinct temporality inside their homes that is distinguished from the temporality of urban life outside the home. They observe and work on their bodies in a complex and highly elaborated way, differentiating intuitive knowledge (authentic) from social knowledge (instrumental) and biological (medicalized), and they approach friendship as an arena for establishing boundaries between oneself and others, and for dealing with the social ramifications of the individualized approach to self-cultivation that is available to them.

In the Middle East and in many majority Muslim nations, homosexuality, including homosexual acts, identities, desires, and discussions of those, is considered taboo. Utilizing a feminist theoretical orientation, this project examined the ways in which same-sex desiring women in Amman, Jordan view the concept of sexually desiring and its relationship to identities. It also examined the pressures placed on them to abide by and navigate familial and religious expectations that conflict with their sexuality. This project drew upon 15 interviews from Muslim and Christian women in Amman using semi-structured and unstructured interviews and participant observation. After analysis, it was concluded that the majority of informants believe in innate sexual desires and sexuality and that all people sexually desire in similar ways. It was also concluded that informants face more pressure from family than from religion, and therefore, find it easier to balance religious obligations than familial obligations with their sexuality.