Reducing gender inequities is seen as an increasingly important aspect to realizing development goals and promoting economic growth in Jordan. News coverage in the state-owned Jordan Times, recent statements by political leaders, and the policy language of official campaigns in Jordan, such as We Are All Jordan and Jordan First, suggest that Jordan must embrace "global values" in order to eliminate gender bias. Jordan and its international backers such as USAID and the World Bank depict education as the most important way by which to tackle issues of gender. Yet the "problem" of gender in Jordan is overwhelmingly depicted as an issue concerning women, and takes increasing women's visibility and participation in political life and the economy as its goals. Moreover, the state's emphasis on gender-as-women's empowerment neglects the ways in which males are gendered in schools at a time when Arab and Muslim masculinity is increasingly reified by policymakers and the media as an effect of a dangerous "Islamic" identity. In this paper, I propose to interrogate how schools serve as sites of gender struggle for boys and how these contests contribute to the production of their masculine identities. Drawing upon the scholarship of Connell (1987), Foucault (1977), Ferguson (2001), and Willis (1977), as well as ethnographic data from an eight-month study in two male secondary schools in Amman, I draw attention to the ways in which masculinity is contested and regulated in schools. Far from transforming heteronormative masculine identities, I argue that schools serve to uphold and enforce "hegemonic masculinities" (Connell, 1987) in myriad ways. First, teachers and administrators commonly discuss boys as "wild," "out of control," and "rougher" than girls. This cultural knowledge of young males in turn is productive of disciplinary techniques on the part of teachers and administrators that reinscribe gender differences and uphold hegemonic conceptions of masculinity. They also produce forms of surveillance that help define the boundaries of a gendered morality by delimiting what male students may share, view, or say in schools, despite the fact that practices and materials may be readily available elsewhere. I also highlight how students engage in various ways of testing the boundaries of intelligibility as a masculine subject. I argue these contests are significant for two reasons: first, they complicate binary accounts of masculine identity as traditional/modern; second, they show that boys are refashioning what it means to be male in Jordan amid calls to rethink gender.

This paper complicates normative and "common sense" narratives about gender, development, and political participation in the Middle East by problematizing the emancipatory promise embedded in dominant discourses and assumptions about schooling. Schools are the focus of much attention from the development arena, as sites for engendering political norms, particularly the norm of political participation as a form of "empowerment." Such approaches, underscored by security and development reports on the region's "youth bulge" and its implications for the demographic and leadership landscape of the future, alternatively frame boys as threats and girls as victims, in need of educational intervention as they transition into adulthood. These approaches also operate on the assumption that youth are passive recipients of ideology and content, rather than active agents in the process of becoming political participants on their own terms. In doing so, they also neglect how schools are significant sites of discursive production regarding gender norms and expectations. Drawing on 21 months of field research at ten religious and secular schools in Greater Beirut, this paper engages feminist poststructural theory to explore the complex and particular ecologies of school contexts and the ways in which they shape, monitor, and regulate gendered discourses of political participation, including who is allowed to participate and when and how. The paper focuses largely on the pedagogical practices at one Shi'i girls' school in Beirut's Southern Suburb after the 2006 summer war between Hizbullah and Israel to unpack the notion of "empowerment" at the intersection of gender and political participation. Drawing on rich illustrative classroom data, the paper explores how teachers and students, together, negotiate the discursive production of gender in relation to forms of political participation--such as resistance, militarism, democratic dialogue, and activism--through a critical, participatory, and anti-oppressive pedagogy that interrupts dominant heteronormative discourses. At the same time, gendered discourses at other levels of operation serve to regulate behavior and expectation. The paper thus demonstrates that schools in fact are neither emancipatory spaces, nor sites of hegemonic reproduction of gendered discourses. Rather, they are sites of contestation, in which the interrogation of gender norms and empowerment occurs in multiple spaces, including the classroom, and in which regulation occurs in the mundane rituals and daily interactions that constitute the school space.

The Lebanese civil war between 1975-1990 saw a significant number of children under 18 participate in battle. The context of the wars was far different, however, than combat zones such as Charles Taylor's Liberia, where Lebanon's landscape meant that its conflicts were highly urbanized. This translated into such practices as children fighting and simultaneously attending school, or returning home to their families after combat. These differences in the geographies and technologies of war ensure that the experiences and dilemmas of child soldiers are vastly different across warzones. This also opens a space from which to speak of the agency of the child in wartime, at a time when much of the literature on children in war tends to only consider the prevalent case of abducted children forced unwillingly into combat. This paper focuses on fieldwork conducted between 2007-2009 with former militia fighters - from a range of political parties, sects and echelons of society - who began armed combat as people under the age of 18, to specifically think about the conditions of and motivations for their participation in armed combat. The paper looks at context to tread between the universal category of the child and implications for policies in local conflicts. I take the battlefield, the militia, and the war as sites of knowledge production and spaces for learning where children are shaped into adults. My aim is to explore different constructions of childhood and how patriarchal traditions can have an impact on children's participation in war, often with the tacit approval of both parents. Here I will reflect on how the meaning of child and childhood are infused with political violence, making the child in Lebanon never outside of politics. I will focus on the implications this has for NGO interventions in times of crisis where I challenge key assumptions on childhood, and write against ideas that children can be simply depoliticized in times of conflict. In order to understand war, its aftermath, and the militia boys and girls that become men and women, I argue that we must be critically engaged in understanding the transformations by and on children in warzones.