Masculine performances communicate robust interrelations of power and inequality in contemporary Cairo, especially in the violent body politics of the post-2011 context. These performances, highly gendered, are rarely just everyday social behaviour but also political acts relevant to, inter alia, class dynamics, generational aspects, and varied interpretations. Drawing on ethnographic research in lower-income, popular quarters of Greater Cairo, namely Boulaq al-Dakroor and Imbaba, and informed by feminist traditions and theories of practice, this paper explores how men, young and old, navigate their own experiences within perceived social constraints. In particular, the paper will speak to three kinds of practices: the performative, the protective, and the normative. In other words, I examine not only speech acts (telling of stories) but also compare these to varied practices and survey how this figures into a sense of what a ‘man’ ought to be. How do men vary their stories to different company, and for what purpose? How do they reflect on the contrast of their performances in public versus in private? These categories are not mutually exclusive but instead inform each other in various ways. While many of the stories are embellished slightly depending on the audience, the stories are often told time and time again, each with varied masculine attributes. The production and reproduction of these moments should not escape the structural realities out of which they arise. The retreat of the state into a surveillance mode in these quarters (Ismail 2006) has left many issues of collective and neighbourhood security to the inhabitants of these quarters. While it is wholly relevant to look at the systems of social control, it is also of great concern to look at the resultant behaviours that arise as a consequence of state practice. The project builds on the work of Farha Ghannam and her examination of men and masculinities to contextualise a broader array of everyday politics and relationship to power, the state, the family and community. In particular, I interrogate the tension between emergent and hegemonic masculinities to examine resistance to traditional and generational stereotypes.

Why do our bodies learn new habits but resist others? How do we incorporate new ideas, discourses, and values in the constitution of our bodies? How does our gender and class positionalities shape how we inhabit our bodies? This paper looks at these questions in the context of urban Egypt and aims to look at how class and gender shape the way the body is inhabited, experienced, and presented. Drawing on research in a low-income neighborhood in northern Cairo and Marcel Mauss’s notion of “prestigious imitation,” this paper looks at how young men and women train their bodies and cultivate them to produce themselves as gendered and classed subjects. Focusing on the examples of weight and muscles, this paper explores how boys and young men are increasingly under pressure to produce strong muscular bodies while girls and young women are under more and more pressure to produce slender bodies. They struggle to forget certain ways and learn new ways (informed by global flows of discourses, images, and products) of inhabiting their bodies. Young men use the gym on regular basis and consume extra protein (be it in food or as powder) to produce muscular abs and chests that are visibly impressive and assertive. In contrast, young women focus on dieting (regulating food intake or taking medicine to control weight gain in some areas of the body and enhance other parts) and exercising (usually at home) to produce a body that is slim in some areas but plumb in others and is considered feminine and attractive. Through these examples, the paper explores how gender and class together shape the body, its gestures, shape, and size as well as its ability to forget and learn new ways of being in the world.

In September 2012, the Government of Morocco inaugurated the Atlantic Free Zone (AFZ), a 345-hectare industrial park focused on automobile and electronics production. The AFZ is located approximately twenty kilometers east of the Port of Kenitra in the rural Gharb plain, a predominantly agricultural region. Since 2012, corporate investments in the AFZ have created at least 20,000 factory jobs, emblematizing state economic discourses that stress the need for liberalization, export-oriented production, and technical training for industry. For most young rural men living near the AFZ, factory jobs are the best local livelihood option to accumulate the capital necessary to create an independent household and support a family. However, few male youth from the local area gain access to these jobs, which they argue is because of nepotistic hiring practices – a common perception throughout Morocco – as well as gendered biases towards hiring women. As global supply chains extended during second-wave globalization, labor-intensive manufacturing became highly feminized in many parts of the global economy. While mainstream development studies highlighted connections between formal employment and women’s empowerment, scholars drawing on feminist political economy emphasized the confluence of patriarchal structures and capitalist pressures in the superexploitation of rural women working in factories. However, most scholarship on rural women’s factory work in the Global South, including Morocco, has focused on urban sites. While some studies do address shifts in social norms as women return to their places of origin, there is a dearth of research on how feminized industrial work sited in rural areas plays a role in reshaping local understandings of gender norms. This paper – drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in seven villages in the Gharb region – investigates how rural men of different generations discursively address the recent phenomenon of young rural women working in local factories. While both older heads of household and young unmarried men normatively assert that men should be the primary household earner and decision-maker, there are significant inter-generational differences in how men discuss the causes and social implications of female industrial labor in rural Morocco. I argue that this discursive gap demonstrates a growing realization among young men of the economic costs of patriarchy, as gendered social norms contribute to women’s competitiveness in exploitative rural labor markets. In doing so, I highlight the complex interactions between economic precarity and gendered norms at the nexus of capitalism and patriarchy in the Moroccan countryside.

This paper is part of a greater project that conceptualizes English in the United Arab Emirates as a soft infrastructure (Larkin 2008), which creates professional and social networks that facilitate Emirati women's social, professional, and economic mobility. As an aspiring global entrepot, the UAE’s citizens (Emiratis) constitute only 15% of the country's near 10 million inhabitants, whereas the other 85% are foreign workers who hail from 196 countries to participate in the country's oil economy. Arabic is the official language of the UAE and its Islamic practices as well as the native vernacular of 30% of its inhabitants (FCSA 2018). Meanwhile, English, besides its role as a lingua franca or transactional language among speakers of different languages, has been imbricated in the UAE’s discourses of global capitalism (Pennycook 2012) and, hence, plays a prominent role in the country’s development of its education, commerce, and media sectors. As such, the majority of Emiratis under fifty years old undergo different types of English-language training, including mandatory English-medium higher education, to compete for positions alongside white collar expatriates in the UAE's multinational workforce and its bourgeoning knowledge economy. Focusing on social media as one specific infrastructure of English usage, this paper examines how a group of predominately female Emirati social media influencers in their mid-twenties to early-forties use English social media platforms to project state-feminist ideals of modern Emirati women while promoting self-development discourses and tackling social concerns that reflect women's struggles in the UAE's fast-changing modern terrain. The paper focuses in particular on how this group of influencers’ strategic choice of English, rather than Arabic, creates affordances for them to attract a wider international audience, pursue controversial topics, and provide a space of autonomous and anonymous engagement among female followers. The paper additionally examines how language ideologies (Silverstein 1976) related to English and Arabic usage in the UAE inform perceptions among the influencers and their predominately female follower base of social media as a semi-formal space of governance where self-expression and projections of self are negotiated. To that end, concepts of scale (Carr and Lempert 2016) are used to examine how self-development discourses are circulated and remediated (Peters 1999) through these English-medium social media channels to negotiate Emirati women's new professional subjectivities with the Islamic and patriarchal discourses which frame their roles as Arab, Emirati, and Muslim women, wives, and mothers.

The title of this paper, which translates to, ‘I want him [to be] a man,’ is taken from a climactic scene in the 1969 Egyptian film, Shay? min al-Khu?f (A Touch of Fear, dir. Hussein Kamal). The words are spoken in the film by the austere Jiddi ??tri?s: the ?umda, or chief, of a fictitious village in the rural Egyptian Sa?i?d. When Fu???da, a young girl, asks ??tri?s why he treats his only grandson harshly – preventing him from playing with Fu???da and the other children, amongst other restrictions – ??tri?s responds with the ominous words, ‘??yzuh r?jil’. ??tri?s’s words, I argue, are emblematic of a two-fold concern of Nasserite and post-Nasserite Egypt: a desire for ‘men’; and, a desire to make ‘men’. Taking ??tri?s’s wish as a starting point, this paper seeks to explore the treatment, and the subsequent stakes of representing, ‘masculinity’ as malleable on and off the silver screen in modern Egypt. Accordingly, I explore the representation of ‘masculinity’ as an unstable, moldable construct in three Egyptian films. Isha?at H?ub (A Rumour of Love), directed by F?ti?n ??bd al-Wah?b and released in 1961, is a comedy rife with early Nasserite-era optimism. In contrast, Shay? min al-Khu?f is a dark drama which precedes (and ominously foreshadows) the end of the Nasserite regime in 1970. Finally, I look at Ah?mad al-Gindi?’s Ti?r ?nta (As You Like It, 2009): a post-Nasserite film poised on the cusp of the Arab Spring. Ti?r ?nta, I argue, deliberately recycles and responds to the tropes of ‘idealized’ masculinity dominant in the latter decades of the preceding century: the ‘self-made man’ and the ‘Europeanized gentleman’ (in Isha?at H?ub); and the ‘man who feels no fear’ (in Shay? min al-Khu?f). I argue that each trope – in the original treatments as well as their 2009 resurrections – could be read to reveal a version of masculinity that is not stable or intrinsic but rather externally molded. Even the ‘self-made man’, I argue, is not ‘self’ made - but rather, he is a product of a series of externally orchestrated performances. I attempt to explore the political and social implications of representing ‘masculinity’ not as an intrinsic quality but rather a quiddity shapeable by external factors – and players. In so doing, I hope to question and understand the effects, relevance and reverberations of Nasserite-era socio-political dynamics on the films – and culture – of ‘molding masculinities’, in modern-day Egypt.