Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of “Men in Crisis,” Industries of Gender in Revolution (original) (raw)

Toward a comprehensive approach to understanding the construction of Islamic masculinities in the Middle East and North Africa

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society, 2021

The Arab Spring, a wave of pro-democracy protests, began in Tunisia, where 28 days of demonstrations ended 24 years of a dictator’s rule. The protests spread throughout the region to countries including Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Morocco, Libya, and Yemen. These events took many analysts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by surprise (Bayat 2011; Johansson-Nogués 2013). As I show in this chapter, some scholars and analysts of the MENA rely on problematic MENA masculinity theories, which deploy a dangerous racialized narrative of toxic Arab Muslim masculinity to understand the causes of the uprisings and their aftermath. The traditional use of MENA masculinity theories sometimes conflates Arab (the ethnicity) with Muslim (the religion) and simplifies the complexity of gender performance in the region shaped by each country’s history and geopolitical context. This chapter offers a critique of the narratives. However, it also highlights progress being made in improving MENA masculi...

The challenge of 'protest' masculinities: how Arab riots have changed the representation of North-African masculinities in the public space

In the last decades, the rare analysis on Maghreb masculinities have usually linked them with violence, social exclusion and terrorism, preventing the full understanding of changing processes ongoing in the area, reflected also by changings in masculinities' models. This article reports some preliminary reflections of a study in progress on masculinities in the contemporary Maghreb, focusing on the emergence of 'protest' masculinities in the public space after the so-called Arab Spring, through the analysis of the representation of masculinities in the Tunisian post-revolutionary street-painting. The aim of the paper is to theoretically discuss the challenges that 'protest' masculinities pose to the concept of masculinity in North Africa and to analyse the way in which 'emerging' protest masculinities represent themselves in the public space, through artistic narratives. Fluid protest masculinities, represented through arts, are, indeed, a clear sign of the extreme variability of gender subjectivities and the impermanence of models of masculinity, characterizing contemporary North Africa, in opposition to the dominant national and international narratives about its inherent immobility.

Social, Cultural and National Masculinities in the Occupied Territories

Masculinity and manhood are not natural or innate characteristics like that of maleness, which relies solely on biology and physiology. Rather, masculinity is a culturally produced norm determined by a man’s interaction and participation within a societal context. Like all other culturally produced rationalities the definition of masculinity varies across time, space and cross-cultural values. Masculinity operates on a number of different societal levels (1) as a form of identity, in that it asses attitudes and behaviors and (2) a form of ideology, as it is conceived as a set of cultural ideals that define appropriate roles, values, and expectations for and of men. Masculinity reproduces and reinforces structures of social inequality. An unequal division of labor between the sexes, overall naturalization of unequal distributions of power; all function towards the sustainment of sexual oppression. Masculinity maintains and renders patterns of misogyny, repression of emotion, homophobia and aggressive personality types that exercises power in domestic and sexual forms of violence. Utilizing the concept of masculinity involves a critique of sexual politics with heterosexual men seated at the top; a questioning how particular groups of men inhabit positions of power, wealth and legitimacy in order to reproduce social relationships and regenerate male dominance.

Book Review, "The Persistence of Global Masculinism: Discourse, Gender and Neo-Colonial Re-Articulations of Violence"

Analize - Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies, 2019

The contemporary rise of antifeminist and anti-PC movements through a masculinist backlash has been accompanied by diverse reinvigorations of conservatism. The transition from the post-Cold War era to a current age of man-dominated global politics is rendering increasingly palpable the manifestations of masculinist understandings and practices of security and violence, in which patriarchal and misogynistic beliefs occur in diversified instances and constitute ideologies and movements that necessitate a dependence on uncritical internalizations of gendered hierarchies and binaries.

Deconstructing Arab Diasporic Masculinity: The Return of the Unheimlich

Arab Studies Quarterly. , 2017

This study focuses on the deconstruction of dominant perceptions of Arab masculinity, particularly with respect to Hans, the exiled Iraqi protagonist of Diana Abu-Jaber’s 2003 novel Crescent. Employing the concept of the unheimlich as it intersects with the Iraqi Al-Futuwwa movement, this article explores the ways in which the condition of being exiled strips the protagonist of his masculine ideals that are often associated with nationalism and chivalry, and exposes his internalized vulnerabilities to “unhomeliness,” since he has been disconnected from country and family. In effect, the study subverts hegemonic conceptualizations of Arab masculinity by examining the unsettling repercussions of forced migration.

Masculinity and Affectedness: An Intersectional Perspective on Gender, Power, and Activism in the Global South

The Future of Men: Men, masculinities and gender equality, 2019

Based on the concept of ‘affectedness’ (or ‘Betroffenheit’, Mies 1978), this article attempts to demonstrate how all participants in research, education, and social activism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are impacted by the lack of a stable social environment, which is seen as the bedrock of scholarship by mainstream Northern theories and scientific methodologies. Researchers, academics and activists – as part of civil society – must deal with this intentional lack of security, social justice and freedom. In it we can recognize a form of elite-produced, and potentially indefinite, postcolonial, systemic liminality. Whether women or men, from the Global South or North, we should consider how the topics we are studying and the conditions under which we work impact us individually and collectively. Inversely, we should determine how our endeavors directly impact the lives and environment of the subjects we are interacting with. Reflection on the impact of affectedness-based research methods in the Middle East, and their application to work with men and masculinities in the region, is the main contribution of this article.

Post-9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women's Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas

Post-9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women’s Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas, 2018

The gender question in the Middle East now serves ends beyond the local. It may be registered within a cluster of international patriarchal war-promoting discourses that find tremendous benefit in the historical bulk of literature that demonizes the Middle Eastern male and victimizes the female. This article attempts to defend two related arguments, both of which are well served by Foucault's Biopolitics (Foucault,