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Struggling for masculinity in the modern world: The case of urban middle class Palestinians in Amman
Abstract
In my presentation I shall discuss the changing forms of masculinity among Palestinian men situated in the urban lower middle class of the Jabal al-Akhdar district of Amman (Jordan). The Iraq-Kuwait war (1990) led to a mass migration of Palestinians from Kuwait to Jordan bringing about fundamental changes within the social fabric – particularly concerning gender roles - of the Jordanian-Palestinian community. These changes are most noticeable among the refugee’s children’s generation which today are in their twenties or thirties and to whom - girls and boys alike - the parents have given the opportunity to pursue higher school and university education. This led to a more or less educational equity among the younger women and men. Moreover, even in the domain of religious education, such as Sharia Studies, women meanwhile have achieved a high level of authority. These changes in the educational domain have a profound impact on the way in which gender relations and hierarchies are nowadays conceptualized and debated among family members. I shall analyze how these developments have led to a decline of the “classical” Palestinian images of masculinity - the men constituting the core authority of the family and acting as the bearers of the public and religious knowledge. Due to this loss of “traditional” concepts of masculinity, young Palestinian men in the Jabal Akhdar district of Amman are in search of new forms of male identity. To this end, I shall present various cases recorded during ethnographic field work in Amman in order to exemplify that young Jordanian-Palestinian men nowadays are drawing on a variety of values and discourses – often a blend of new and old concepts - to delineate their identity and status within the context of modern Jordanian-Palestinian society. These redefinitions of male identity in turn are impacting on the core set of consanguinal and affinal relations, ranging particularly from father-daughter-, mother-son-, brother-sister, to husband-wife-relations, as will become evident from the cases. Finally, I will address the question to what extend the spirit of Jordanian-Palestinian resistance and political agency has been affected by these modification of male identity constructions.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
Urban Studies