This paper will lay my initial findings on the production of emergent forms of working-class hypermasculinity around the police stations of urban Cairo. In light of the role of thugs and violent informants in the recent Egyptian Uprising of 2011, this world merits serious research. Recent studies of forms of "hypermasculinity" in the ashawiyaat (informal and slum settlements) of Cairo have focused on the mobilization of Islamist discourse or morality politics, or examined the economic marginalization of young men in the context of neoliberalism. And of course there has been the occasional human rights report on the spectacular brutality of police against individual youths. But there has no systematic examination of the micro-practices of police coercively shaping and scripting working-class masculinities through the process of producing informants who comprise a vast laboring class of information-gatherers, business extorters, drug runners, and political rapporteurs. Findings from ethnographic work in two hyper-criminalized neighborhoods in Cairo, Batniyya and Basateen, among former police informants, legal aid lawyers and former police officers, will allow me to analyze the institutional practices of gendered humiliation, reembodiment, surveillance and moralization that lie at the center of the informant sector. My hypothesis is that the hypermoralized masculinity often identified with "slum Islamism" is not a religious phenomenon at all, but an effect of the systematic production of certain forms of police-violated subjectivities that dare not speak their name.

Since September 11th, 2001, Middle Eastern Muslim men have been particularly vilified as terrorists, religious zealots, and brutal oppressors of women. Against this backdrop of neo-Orientalist representation, this paper presents a humanizing portrayal of ordinary Middle Eastern men as they struggle to overcome their infertility and childlessness. Based on ethnographic research with more than 300 Middle Eastern men from multiple nations, this paper examines Middle Eastern men’s changing manhood through the lens of male infertility and assisted reproduction. Through an “emergent masculinities” approach that challenges the concept of “hegemonic masculinity, Middle Eastern-style,” the paper highlights emerging masculine subjectivities, marital commitments, and family formations. “New Arab men” are quite different from their forefathers, self-consciously rethinking the four notorious P’s—patriarchy, patrilineality, patrilocality, and polygyny—which are said to characterize family life across the Middle Eastern region. Instead, Middle Eastern men from a variety of social classes and religious backgrounds are unseating received wisdoms. This is especially true in childless marriages where, contrary to popular expectation, male infertility is more common than female infertility, and many men and women are devoted to their infertile spouses. Through in-depth ethnography undertaken in assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinics in four countries, the paper captures the marital, moral, and material commitments of infertile Middle Eastern couples undergoing assisted reproduction. Emerging technologies—particularly intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) to overcome male infertility and egg donation to overcome age-related female infertility—are changing Middle Eastern couples’ lives and religious moralities. Although Islamic authorities have condoned assisted reproduction as a solution to human suffering, third-party reproductive assistance (sperm donation, egg donation, embryo donation, surrogacy) is still widely banned across the Sunni Muslim world from Morocco to Malaysia. However, recent Shia Muslim fatwas have challenged this ban, leading to a thriving donor technology industry in both Iran and Lebanon, the only two Muslim countries to allow this practice. In today’s Middle East, men are rethinking their “Islamic masculinities” as they undertake transnational “egg quests” out of devotion to the infertile wives they love. Their quests for conception—set against the backdrop of war and economic uncertainty—suggest that we must question many taken-for-granted assumptions about Middle Eastern men as men in an era of emerging science and technology.

My paper explores the sway that discourses and performances of masculinity hold in the virtual disappearance of so-called honor (al-?ar?) crimes in the Palestinian refugee camps of Tyre (South Lebanon) where I lived and conducted fieldwork for two years. While there is a large consensus in the refugee community to reprove such forms of violence as inhuman and antiquated, my male interlocutors in the camp would often make a point of conceding to me that the public abuse or deviance of female relatives still carries an affective dynamics that can obliterate abstract moral judgments. In the paper, I will provide a thick description of two cases that developed when I was living in the camp, and analyze the networks of actors (especially male) and the range of rhetorical registers they mobilized to definitively avert the potential for violence. I will draw in particular on in-depth interviews with two fathers who, by their own accounts and as a matter of semi-public knowledge, had recently found themselves in the position and with the impulse to put to death a purportedly deviant daughter. My argument is that in both cases the eventual renunciation of violence hinged not on the threat of the law nor on the negation of ideals of masculinity, but rather on a compassionate acknowledgement of these ideals and, at once, an ethical call to rise above one’s anger and vulnerability to kal?m al-n?s so as to turn a potentially unmanning position into an occasion for a sublime display of self-government.

This paper investigates the extent to which acting as a ‘male-provider’ is still an avenue open for coming-of-age and display of gender-belonging for the shebab (‘lads’) of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. The literature on Palestinians prior to 1948 suggests that a man would come-of-age by marrying at the appropriate age and having a son. When it comes to the saga of the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon, acting as a fiday (‘fighter’) worked, throughout the 1970s, as an alternative mechanism for coming-of-age and display of gender-belonging. The central question of this paper is how the shebab today come-of-age and display their gender-belonging, when the Lebanese legislation, through what I name ‘institutional violence’, bars their free access to the labour market, forcing them to postpone marriage plans, and participation in the Palestinian Resistance Movement, in its military version, is not an option anymore. Through a plethora of investigative techniques – participant observation; questionnaires; focus groups and open-ended interviews – I have registered the differences between the fidayiin and their offspring as far as their coming-of-age and gender-display are concerned. While the fidayiin were pure agency – understood as ‘resistance to domination’ – and display their coming-of-age and gender-belonging through what they identify as the fight to return to their homeland, their offspring have a far more nuanced relation to Palestine and articulate their coming-of-age and gender-belonging through different mechanisms: by building a house and marrying. Effectively, by observing how the shebab do their gender, it is not only the full historicity and changeability in time and space of ‘masculinity’ that come to the fore, but also the scholar concepts of agency and gender that can be, respectively, transformed and undone. As a matter of fact, the tendency in studies of the Middle East to define gender strictly in terms of power and relations of domination fails to grasp the experiences of those, like the Shatila shebab, with very limited access to elements of power. It is not that the shebab are emasculated, but rather that defining agency only in terms of ‘resistance to domination’ and gender in terms of ‘relations of power’ alone is rather restrictive.

Almost a decade after the attacks of September 11th, the current vitriolic debate about the construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero, the rise of the birther movement, and the erroneous belief held by some Americans that President Obama is a “closeted Muslim” highlights the rise of Islamophobia in the United States—a sentiment that puts in peril millions of Muslim Americans. In my proposed paper, I explore how queer Arab Americans are signified in the pornographic digital imaginary particularly after September 11th. I will argue that no where and at no other time has the collapse of the category “Terrorist” and “Arab” been palpably discernable than in the United States post September 11 and the ensuing War on Terror. In fact, Jasbir Puar contends that at this historical juncture, the invocation of the terrorist as queer, non-national and acutely racialized becomes ubiquitous.[i] This conflation between terrorist, Arab, and queer has had a dehumanizing effect on the Queer Arab American community. I will show how such representations are not entirely the fabrication of a heteronormative Islamophobic power bloc but that this stigmatization of the male Arab is highly palpable within the American queer community too. Consequently, I contend that the analysis of how gay Arab Americans are represented in pornographic websites exhibits a collusion between two types of normative power vectors that Arab Americans, both straight and gay, have to contend with: heteronormativity and a new emerging homonormativity in the US post September 11.