“It is a very transient life here; even love affairs do not last in the Emirates”, tells a 28 year-old Egyptian banker who grew up between Alexandria and Abu Dhabi. Migration is not only a matter of better job and money, but also of love and bodies. For Egyptian male labour migrants working temporarily in the EAU, mobility indeed triggers specific “subjectivation” processes, in the sense of Michel Foucault. While confronting their own expectations with those of families left behind or brought along, of their home and host societies and states, individuals negotiate their manliness in the interstices of contradictory scales of power between Egypt and the Gulf. Coming of age by saving enough money to marry back home, in spite of increasingly tight control over foreign Arab workers in the Emirates; sublimating isolation and embodied experience of discrimination and domination while in “exile”; indulging into interlope leisure without breaking up with ideal manliness in Egypt, are not simple matters. Through a multi-sited ethnography in Cairo, Abu-Dhabi and Dubai among male emigrants, immigrants and returnees, this paper focuses on the highly ambivalent gendered subjectivities produced by mobility. Together with class, nationality, race and age identifications, gender models and practices are reproduced, negotiated or even contested between Egypt and the UAE.