Arab Masculinities provides a groundbreaking analysis of Arab men’s lives in the precarious aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings. It challenges received wisdoms and entrenched stereotypes about Arab men, offering new understandings of rujula, or masculinity, across the Middle East and North Africa.
The 10 individual chapters of the book foreground the voices and stories of Arab men as they face economic precarity, forced displacement, and new challenges to marriage and family life. Rich in ethnographic details, they illuminate how men develop alternative strategies of affective labor, how they attempt to care for themselves and their families within their local moral worlds, and what it means to be a good son, husband, father, and community member.
Arab Masculinities sheds light on the most private spaces of Arab men’s lives—offering stories that rarely enter the public realm. It is a pioneering volume that reflects the urgent need for new anthropological scholarship on men and masculinities in a changing Middle East.
Spis treści
Introduction: Middle East Anthropology and the Gender Divide: Reconceiving Arab Masculinity in Precarious Times, by Marcia C. Inhorn and Konstantina Isidoros
Part I. Masculinity and Precarity: Class Conflict and Economic Indignity
1. Egyptian Middle-Class Masculinity and its Working-Class Others, by Bård Helge Kårtveit
2. Al-Ustura (’The Legend’): Folk Hero or Thug? Class and Contested Masculinity in Egypt, by Jamie Furniss
3. Al-Hogra—A State of Injustice: Portraits of Moroccan Men in Search of Dignity and Piety in the Informal Economy, by Hsain Ilahiane
Part II. Masculinity and Displacement: Moving, Settling, and Questions of Belonging
4. Repeating Manhood: Migration and the Unmaking of Men in Morocco, by Alice Elliot
5. 'I Am a Good Man—I’m a Gardener!’: Arab Migrant Fathers’ Reactions to Mistrusted Masculinity in Denmark, by Anne Hovgaard Jørgensen
6. Doing Gender in Shatila Refugee Camp: Palestinian Lads, Their Pigeons, and an Ethnographer, by Gustavo Barbosa
7. Welcoming Ban Ki-Moon: From Warrior-Nomads to Sahrawi Refugee-Statesmen in North Africa, by Konstantina Isidoros
Part III. Masculinity and Familial Futures: Sex, Marriage, and Fatherhood under Threat
8. Desiring the Nation: Masculinity, Marriage, and Futurity in Lebanon, by Sabiha Allouche
9. Masculinity under Siege: The Use of Narcotic Pain Relievers to Restore Virility in Egypt, by L. L. Wynn
10. Palestinian Sperm-Smuggling: Fatherhood, Political Struggle, and Israeli Prisons, by Laura Ferrero
Index
O autorze
Konstantina Isidoros is Lecturer in Anthropology at St Catherine’s College and Research Affiliate of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She is author of Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara: Gender, Politics and the Sahrawi.
Marcia C. Inhorn is William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs and Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University. She is the author of six books, including America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins; Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai; and The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East.