Food resonated with attitudes and emotions relating to men´s and women´s understandings about self and others and their underlying interactions. A meal is a gift that sates desire, gives pleasure, evokes memory, and creates attachments. This paper is about food in its social and material dimensions as seen through the narratives of Egyptian men. The accounts rest on men’s voices, on how men convey food’s extraordinary ability to historicize, encode, and regulate their close relationship to their spouse and children. It is an attempt to ask questions about the link between men´s struggles to feed their families well and often, their anticipations and everyday practices. Buying and sharing meals have a way of binding and tearing apart morals and economy, households and state, the personal and communal, and the body and psyche. Food moves between laden and empty tables, and the story of food in Egypt is as much about struggle as it is about human attachments. As the title of this paper suggests, this presentation is about the aspirations and fulfillments that food provides, not under established conditions, but rather as struggles to buy and feed. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo the paper explores the ways that food reveals culturally determined family and parenting relationships in Egyptian society. Men’s food struggles reverberate through everyday life in this paper, from economic and political battles to intimate life, to the defense of culture and tradition, religion and hope. The paper considers notions underlying values that are pervasive in men´s individual involvement and relationships with regard to buying food and sharing family meals. In this paper I return to the kind of anticipations that the promise of anthropology holds as an exploration into human social potentialities. It is a turn towards the notion of culture and food as an “art of living” and as a way for men to engage with everyday family living. The return encourages the creation of new vocabularies to analyze the development of new registers for addressing issues of “doing the right thing” and what it means to be a “good family man” in contemporary Egypt. This exploration into what food should and can do in men´s daily practices opens up interesting questions regarding gender and the anthropology of food in the Middle East.

What does it mean to be a family father in a geographically and ideologically dense space such as the Old City of Jerusalem? Here, political oppression co-exists alongside the often precarious economic and social situation of the Palestinian inhabitants; at the same time, commitment to religious, social, and national principles is demanded by local communities, complicating parenting roles considerably. In this paper, I explore the negotiation of these issues within intergenerational familial figurations, based upon participant observation and biographical-narrative interviews with men of various generations in one of the Muslim neighborhoods in the Old City. I show how family fathers experience their parenting role and how they talk about and present questions of what example of a “man” they want to set for their children. Practically, these men experience a strong urge to control their children’s movements tightly (for example, not to encounter settlers or drug addicts), and also their cultural range (not to be exposed to “the enemy’s” cultural products via mobile phones, the Internet, etc.). Family fathers must also negotiate whether to encourage or support their children’s political engagement, for example in acts of resistance, or if they should prevent them from the dangers that come with this. Furthermore, there is a constant and prominent self-reflective discussion within the neighborhood about the low educational aspirations of their offspring, the bad schools in the Old City and the search for alternatives. In my interviews, men frequently contrasted their children’s everyday reality with their own childhood and youth, entering into a self-reflexive process which led to reinterpretations of their past actions and experiences: in reading, for example, the First Intifada as “damaging the Palestinian education for generations”, men were divided between stressing their wish to prevent their children from taking part in overt resistance on the one hand and on the other accusing the current generation as being politically passive. These findings also suggest taking a generational perspective more seriously, e.g. by interviewing members of different generations within a family, or by assessing whether “historical generations” are identifiable in the Old City. However, such an approach needs to take the relevancies of the Old City inhabitants themselves as a starting point and not, as is often done, macro-political issues.

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.

The Arab father has often been approached through the figure of the patriarch, the man who enjoys unlimited power and who rules his children and wife with an iron fist. This view has endured over time and has been reproduced in media and scholarly work. Surprisingly, this reductionistic and simplistic perspective has not been countered by serious scholarly discussions that account for the multiple meanings and practices that the category “father” encompasses. Drawing on ethnographic field work and textual analysis of media representations, this paper aims to contribute to the study of fathering in the Middle East by looking at three modalities of fatherhood in Egypt. First, the paper explores the figure of “the father of the nation.” While Egypt, the country, often has been depicted as the mother who should be cherished, loved, and protected, successive Egyptian presidents have presented themselves through the figure of the father, the head of the family, who cares, provides, and protects, and who expects respect, obedience, and deference. This notion was challenged by the January 25th Revolution but it has been reincarnated by the current regime and its supporters, and it is circulated in popular media to legitimize the power and rule of the current president. This figure continues to be directly challenged by two other modalities of fatherhood. The first is the working father, who spends most of his time and energy struggling to offer his children good education, adequate housing, and enough food. This father is present/absent in the life of his family. He cares and provides but is rarely able to afford the time to be with his children. This modality of fatherhood articulates a critique of the ability of the “father of the nation” to care and provide. The second modality, the grieving father, presents a direct challenge to the claim of the national father to be able to protect, putting his legitimacy of the national father into question. While the media often show mothers and sisters mourning the loss of their loved ones, recently fathers have also more visibly expressed their mourning and advocated for the rights of their deceased children. By juxtaposing these three modalities of fatherhood, this paper seeks to counter any simplistic understanding of the figure of the father and to highlight the need for us to think of fatherhood as a concept that varies across time, space, class, and age.

Male infertility is one of the world’s best-kept secrets. More than half of the world’s cases of involuntary childlessness are caused by male infertility, and in the Middle East, the rates are much higher. Male infertility clusters in Middle Eastern families, is hereditary in nature, and likely linked to widespread practices of cousin marriage. Yet, the “secret” of male infertility generally unfolds only in in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics, where many Middle Eastern men are engaged in high-tech forms of assisted reproduction. Through in-depth ethnography undertaken in assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinics in four countries, this paper captures the marital, moral, and material commitments of infertile Middle Eastern men as they engage with ARTs. Emerging technologies—particularly intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to overcome male infertility—are changing Middle Eastern men’s lives and moral subjectivities. In particular, when men are asked to masturbate “on demand” as part of assisted reproduction regimes, some Muslim men bring their moral anxieties about masturbation with them, and are therefore unable to produce critically important semen samples. In these cases, painful sperm aspirations directly from the testicles are often required. Having said this, men’s masturbation is now accepted as a routine part of assisted reproduction in the Middle East, and is one of many practices signifying men’s “emergent masculinities,” or newly embodied ways of being men. Although masturbation may be viewed as zina in Islam, millions of Muslim men are masturbating out of medical necessity, and some are even embracing the idea of masturbation as a healthy, pleasurable, and guilt-free form of male sexuality. Indeed, in today’s Middle East, men are rethinking their emergent masculinities as they undertake masturbation and assisted conception out of devotion to the wives they love. With the “coming out” of men’s fertility and sexuality secrets in IVF clinics across the region, this paper questions taken-for-granted assumptions about Middle Eastern men as men in an era of emerging science and technology. ?????