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Rethinking Arab Masculinities: Intersections of Race, Religion, and National Origin in the Arab American Novel
Abstract
Recent discussions of gender and sexuality pertaining to representations of Arabs and Arab-Americans have obsessively focused on what Susan Muaddi Darraj has described as "the Faceless Veiled Women." Numerous feminist and postcolonial scholars have tackled the problematic simplification of complex political and religious identities that such stilted representations help produce. Yet in deconstructing the “saving brown women from brown men” narrative, the figure of the Arab, Muslim man remains under-theorized. My paper reads the figure of the Arab and Muslim man against the grain of dominant US narratives that deploy racial, sexual, and religious stereotypes (terrorists, fundamentalists, uncivilized, sexual pervert, etc.) to depict Arab and Muslim men as “unsettling figures to the American sensibility” (Elmaz Abinader). To do so, I map the development of a counter-hegemonic discourse in novels by Arab-American women writers that releases the Arab and/or Muslim man from the role of the threatening oppressor. To investigate such discourse and the intersections of race, sexuality, national origin, religion, and politics in constructions and re-constructions of Arab and Arab-American masculinities, I analyze Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2003), Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008), and Alicia Erian’s Towelhead (2005).
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
West Bank
Sub Area
None