While in Syria from June 2009- July 2010, I became interested in two seemingly distinct phenomena. First, everywhere I turned, I was confronted by the so-called “marriage” crisis. Syrian youth, suffering from underemployment and economic stagnation, are by all accounts unable to marry. Urgency and frustration, often of a sexual nature, colored the daily talk of the young people. Schemes for marriage, for promotion, for love affairs were the subject, hashed and rehashed and rehashed again. Among my acquaintance, only one solution seemed consistently viable: emigration. Indeed, the overwhelming response to my questions about what people planned to do next in their lives was “In Syria, nothing.” Alongside marriage talk, schemes for emigration played a constant refrain. You can’t it would seem, stay Syrian and move into economic, social, and sexual seniority. Second, in the political imagery that “clutters” the Damascene public (Wedeen 1999) President Bashar al-Asad continues to be depicted as son (to Hafiz al-Asad) and brother (to Basil al-Asad). Months into my stay, an offhand comment by a Syrian friend of mine suggested the possibility of a third ‘phenomenon’ bridging the first two. Joking about the former president’s dominance of the symbolic landscape and his son’s relatively weak showing, my friend became suddenly grave. “Poor guy,” he said. Surprised, I later realized that his comment resonated with a general trend. With few exceptions, my friends’ tended to speak of the president in sympathetic, emotionally-laden tones. “I feel so sorry for him,” they’d say. Or: “He has such a burden.” Meanwhile the image of the father – usually articulated as “before” or “then” or in the “other regime” – worked contrapuntally. Here – at the intersection of the discourse of a sympathetic Bashar al-Asad, burdened by the faults and fames of the father, and the stymied Syrian “shab” – underemployed, unmarried, publically virginal – I make my intervention. Based on field notes, Arabic-language newspapers, and television serials, I contend that masculinity and manhood provide one critical lens through which to understand the interaction between the official political discourse and a certain kind of meaning-making on the part the Syrian shab. I argue that Bashar al-Asad, as a son, is portrayed as both ‘less than’ and ‘burdened by’ the image of the father. Asking why a hindered or “lessened” masculinity speak to a Syrian public I explore how generational burden, as a discursive trope, translates into both an emotionally-wrought political inertia.

Notions of responsibility are intimately tied, if not always explicitly, to conceptions of masculinities and femininities in both collective and individual practices. Projects for gender justice and women’s empowerment often imply masculine responsibility in formulating the problem and suggestions for reform but men, while deemed responsible, are often not directly targeted by women’s rights organizations in their awareness and conscious raising campaigns and projects to promote gender equality. The implications of not directly addressing the role of men and masculinities in projects for gender justice are a gap in knowledge that will affect the successful implementation of internationalized gender mainstreaming, particularly in the area of gender based violence. The example found below comes from over three years of research following a campaign to end one form of gender based violence, sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo. In late 2005, the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights (ECWR) was compelled to launch a multi-faceted, anti-harassment campaign in Cairo, Egypt after hearing a multitude of stories from women experiencing harassment on the streets. Their aim was to not only document the extent of sexual harassment through surveys and focus groups but to use this research to advocate for legal and policy changes as well as forming the basis for awareness raising events and influencing public opinion through events and the media. Based on the results from their surveys and focus groups, ECWR concluded that men's awareness of the problem and a change in their behavior must play a key role in the campaign's focus; convincing men of the responsibility of self, with a consequence of stigmatization that was formally being placed on the victims. Thus the framing of this campaign not only relied on an increased knowledge of the need for an acceptance of social obligation but simultaneously, and discretely, evoked the importance of community responsibility and each individual playing a role in combating this severe, social issue to a make Cairo’s streets safer. Based on over three years of field work, we found that ECWR has since attempted different strategies including workshops and awareness days that, through the employment of responsibility and challenging current notions of masculinity in Egypt, have shown the significant need for, and effective implementation of, gender mainstreaming on the local level. Founded on this local and communal level, promoting an internationalized gender mainstreaming discourse may be more effective than implementation coming from above.