Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East

Description

Writings on gender in the Middle East have tended to focus on the status of women. Issues of male identity, in a region which has seen enormous social change over the past thirty years, have been somewhat neglected. Imagined Masculinities redresses this balance by examining masculinity as a social construct as diverse in its forms as femininity. Initiation rites, ritualised violence and impotence anxiety are explored, as well as images of virility and male sexuality in popular culture and politics. There are moving firsthand accounts here too – a son’s recollection of his relationship with his father; a meditation on what it means to have a moustache; and a vivid recollection of visiting women’s Turkish baths as a young boy. Mai Ghoussoub, artist, author and playwright, left Beirut for London in 1979, where she co-founded Saqi Books. Her art has been exhibited internationally, and her play Texterminators was performed in London, Liverpool and Beirut in 2006. Her publications include Artists and Vitrines, with Shaheen Merali. Her stories have appeared in Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women and Lebanon, Lebanon. She was a regular contributor to al-Hayat and openDemocracy. Emma Sinclair-Webb teaches in the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University. Her doctoral research is on sectarianism and urban conflict in Turkey. Contents Preface Part I: Making Men: Institutions and Social Practices 1. Festivities of Violence: Circumcision and the Making of Men 2. Circumcision, the First Haircut and the Torah: Ritual and Male Identity Among the Ultraorthodox Community of Israel 3. ‘Our Bülent Is Now a Commando’: Military Service and Manhood in Turkey 4. Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada 5. The Military as a Second Bar Mitzvah: Combat Service as Initiation to Zionist Masculinity Part II: Male Fictions: Narratives, Images and Icons 6. Reading ‘Wiles of Women' Stories as Fictions of Masculinity 7. Male Homosexuality in Modern Arabic Literature 8. Farid Shauqi: Tough Guy, Family Man, Cinema Star 9. Chewing Gum, Insatiable Women and Foreign Enemies: Male Fears and the Arab Media 10. ‘That’s How I Am, World!’: Saddam, Manhood and the Monolithic Image Part III: Memoir and Male Identity 11. Lentils in Paradise 12. Not the Man My Father Was 13. Those Two Heavy Wings of Manhood: On Moustaches Notes on Contributors Index