My readings of three literary texts authored by Palestinian men recast ghurba (exile) and placelessness at a historical intersection between displacement and loss of the homeland and the gendered sense of self. De-linking violence and masculinity, I will attempt to read Edward Said ("Out of Place"), Ghassan Kanafani ("Men in the Sun") and Sayed Kashua ("Dancing Arabs") as articulating different subject positions that speak of alienation, place and the lack thereof as constitutive of the masculine self. Moreover, while previous scholarship of Palestinian masculinities perceived Palestinian-ess and manliness respectful of national and racial boundaries (Israel / Palestine and Arab / Jew) and have been tied to discrete locations, I suggest a transnational framework as an alternative for reading processes of masculinizing and self-fashioning. The three authors were / are Palestinians, yet the texts they produced reflect their distinct physical, social and cultural positionalities and experiences. More importantly, the experiences that these texts record (whether they are based on the authors' memories, imagination or both) narrate cross-border passages and processes of mobility and placelessness as unexpected opportunities for freedom from patriarchal dictates, nationalist masculine scripts and sexual anxieties. They were able to mobilize their sense of placelesness, victimhood and affect to find liberation in narration and to produce bodies that "expand" rather than "contract," in both the physical sense of actual movement between national borders and racial boundaries and in a more symbolic sense, of gaining prominent positions of "speaking for".