Under the French mandate, Syria and Lebanon became a safe haven for the Kurdish national movement. After their attempts to liberate Kurdish territories from Turkish control failed, Kurdish elites exiled in Damascus and Beirut initiated a cultural movement. Central to that movement was the publication of magazines and newspapers namely Hawar, Ronahi, Rojanu and Ster in Kurdish and French by Celadet and Kamuran Ali Bedirkhan, brothers, in the 1930s and 1940s. Their goal was to create a standard alphabet for Kurdish, to put folk literature into writing and to educate ordinary Kurds. This presentation aims to address how the issue of masculinity was addressed and how women played a central role in presenting masculinity in the pages of the Kurdish publications at the time. Moreover, it will explain role of the French orientalist scholars in defining Kurdish women and masculinity. The Bedirkhan brothers called the Kurdish press a platform for Kurds. In fact, it was a platform for male nationalists emphasizing masculinity as the essential characteristic of the Kurdish nation and a precondition, along with science, for civilization and progress. Kurdish magazines and newspapers of the time presented two different but intertwined worlds. One is the world of documentary reality and the other one is the fictional or created world of short stories, plays, and folklore. First of all, the authors talk about social ills such as polygamy and bride-price, and necessity to educate Kurdish girls to be good mothers and wives. Kurdish female youth are given special duties. Moreover, journalistic coverage of European women during the Second World War challenges traditional gender roles. The images and stories of female workers and soldiers from the Allied countries constitute an important subject during the war years. As for the imaginary world of Kurdish folk and modern literature published on the same pages, Kurdish women seem to have already transcended traditional gender roles. We can see women in the stories and songs talking about their bodies, lovers and sexuality, fighting against the Turkish enemy, and teaching their husbands bravery and manhood. Based on an intensive and critical reading of the articles and books by the Kurdish nationalists and French orientalists, I will try to analyze the meaning of masculinity in the Kurdish national discourse in a regional and wider context of the 1930s and 1940s.

My research deals with the history of Iranian masculinities during the late 19th to middle 20th centuries, and with the way masculinities intersect with questions of modernity, nationalism and class. Despite the fact that the history of gender in Iran was researched extensively, there is still no full-fledged research that focuses on masculinities as its main interest. Western powers had great influence on processes that occurred in Iran through commerce, concession hunting etc. During the time frame of this paper, power relations between Iran and the West changed due to Reza Shah's rising to power, and his move towards ending Iran's dependency on foreign powers. Western models of masculinity, to which (mostly middle and upper class) Iranian men were exposed via overseas education or encounters with Westerners, posed a dilemma. On the one hand, Iranians were awed by Western power, progress and prosperity, and wished to import what they conceived as the causes to these into Iran. On the other hand, appropriating a new kind of masculinity contained the threat of becoming an empty vessel, a spineless imitator who adopted mostly the external characteristics of the West without the power related to them. These imitators were named in Persian "Fokoli", after the bowtie worn by them, and scorned by society. The term Fokoli appeared during the first decade of the 20th century, and was widely discussed during the early 1920s. The forced westernization of Iran during Reza Shah's reign, which included a dress reform enacted in 1928, ordering all Iranian men to wear western attire, caused the term to be pushed aside. The importance of a healthy and strong body took its place as a main concern of masculine identity. The Iranian man was now required to care for and nurture his body so that it would be of use to the nation. This approach was encouraged from above by compulsory physical education in schools as well as by the encouragement of the Boy Scouts organization. The case of Iran exemplifies an important aspect of masculinity – that of Power Relations. The weakness of Iran at the face of Western nations, and the wish to change this balance, whether by Iranian men who were exposed to Western power or by the Iranian regime, brought about changes in masculine identity as a tool of adjustment to a new national and international order.

In March 1919, Egypt erupted in revolution when the British arrested and exiled the Egyptian nationalist leader Sa’d Zaghlul. Thousands of Egyptians took to the streets spontaneously, protesting the exile of Zaghlul, demanding an end to British occupation, and calling for Egypt to assume its rightful place amongst modern nation-states in world affairs. In his account of the 1919 revolution, Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi’i described the urban demonstrations as led by students, later joined by groups of women and workers, and spreading to other parts of the country. Depictions of the revolution are found in Najib Mahfouz’s acclaimed novel, Palace Walk, which develops its climatic point around the young law student, Fahmi ‘Abd al-Jawad, being struck down by British bullets while leading a demonstration against British rule in 1919. Recently, scholarship on British colonization and the period of Egypt’s “liberal experiment” have emphasized the gendered endeavors of nationalists and colonists in their discourses on power and modernity. These studies have deepened our understanding of the development of the national subject, specifically the modern bourgeois man, woman, and family. Egyptian youth (al shabab) by the revolution of 1919 had developed into a dynamic force in the struggle against British colonization and a potent political and social symbol. Wilson Jacob’s recent study described the formation of an ambivalent, performative subjectivity in Egypt during this era known as “effendi masculinity” generated to guide young men towards a modern adulthood with national implications. This paper continues the study of gendered discourses of nationalism and modernity by focusing on the expression of youth masculinity within the Egyptian recording industry and the vaudeville music theater in 1919. Nationalistic songs sung in the streets during the revolution were taken directly from Egypt’s vaudevillian mass culture, from which writers and musicians were mining the streets for authentic material. Thus, I analyze the plays of Naguib al-Rhani and Ali al-Kassar from this period to evaluate how youth masculinity was infused with, strengthened by, and reflected in the growing sense of national identity and revolutionary spirit in these plays. My use of these sources is undergirded by Ziad Fahmy’s recent conclusions on the importance of colloquial Egyptian media in studying the development of Egyptian modern identity. This approach will provide a fuller understanding of the extent to which Egyptians across the socio-economic spectrum contributed to the discourses on and practices of colonial modernity and subject formation.