This presentation closely analyzes scenes about police brutality and the Mizrahi male body in Mizrahi documentaries, in particular David Benchetrit’s documentary, Eastern Wind: A Moroccan Chronicle (2002). David Benchetrit was born in Morocco in 1954 and died in October 2017 in Israel. In a eulogy published on the day of his passing, Benchetrit’s partner, filmmaker Sini Bar-David linked his death to his prolonged physical and mental devastation after undergoing an experience of crushing police brutality 13 years earlier. Yet already prior to that experience, Benchetrit’s groundbreaking documentaries about Mizrahim in Israel featured various accounts on police and military brutality in Israel. Eastern Wind excavated Moroccan Jewish life in Israel through oppression and violence. Benchetrit focused on the lives of 6 prominent Moroccan political leaders, amongst them Reuven Abergil of the Mizrahi Black Panthers, who narrated and demonstrated his severe experiences of police brutality. Benchetrit juxtaposed archival footage of the police suppressing protests of Mizrahim as shown on the state-owned Israeli television with the activists’ accounts and reenactments of the harsh battering inflicted on them upon the lingering repercussions archived under their skins. The scenes tackling police brutality in contemporary Mizrahi documentaries such as Eastern Wind expose the gaps between the hegemonic representation of Mizrahim on national television as innately violent versus their generally invisibilized shattering experiences of the violence that was applied on them. Eastern Wind thus excavates the un/making of the Mizrahi male body through violent practices that are otherwise mis/unrepresented, and Mizrahim’s survival of and resistance to it through their filmed performances. I read these scenes against the backdrop of the Zionist scripts that have imagined Mizrahi masculinity as primitive and exploitable on one hand, and menacingly aggressive on the other. The documentary performances of the Mizrahi political leaders mediated by the sensitive eye of Benchetrit in Eastern Wind complicate our understanding of the workings of both police brutality and, more broadly, the Zionist racialization and gendering of Mizrahim. The performances both foreground and refute Israeli television’s portrayals of the protests as bursts of primitive aggression. Unwilling to accept their fate as disposable matter, the Mizrahi leaders show up in protests, and in front of filming cameras, to resist the violent representational and actualized objectification and recrafting of Mizrahim by television, the police, and Zionism and Israel as a whole.

This project builds on the theoretical and methodological approaches of Marcia Inhorn and Farha Ghannam’s in their recent work examining men and masculinities in the Middle East. Their ethnographies humanize, contextualize, and historicize men and masculinities to particular times and places in the region and demonstrate the importance of studying men as gendered subjects whether as husbands, fathers, brothers, community members or workers. This paper is part of a larger project examining how and if various groups working to end gender based violence (GBV) in Egypt, particularly public space sexual harassment, deal with masculinities and engage men based on field work (30 in depth interviews with staff and volunteers, content analysis of reports and other written materials and observations) with independent initiatives, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), national and international organizations based in Cairo. Given that activism on GBV in Egypt has attracted men as volunteers and/or staff members of these groups, this paper argues there are multiple masculinities at play in this activism in terms of the male activists themselves and how the groups engage masculinities. In addition to using R. W. Connell’s typology of masculinities in my analysis (hegemonic, complicitous, marginalized, and subordinated), I will also incorporate Marcia Inhorn’s emergent masculinities, which she used in her work on infertile couples in Egypt, Lebanon, UAE and the US. In particular, the concept of emergent masculinities recognizes that masculinity is not static but in a state of flux, new masculinities are constantly emerging and Middle Eastern men themselves are questioning traditional stereotypes and how their lives are different from their fathers. This is particularly relevant to my study given that most of the activists I interviewed in my fieldwork are under the age of 40. The findings suggest that some of the youth activists joined these groups because they are survivors of sexual violence or familial abuse or because of being bullied at school or on the street for appearing “weak” or “not manly”. In other words, not meeting some norm of dominant or hegemonic masculinity. These men were also more open to developing a feminist consciousness. This project hopes to bring new insights into the changing masculinities of young male activists through incorporating their experiences of violence and abuse as well as how the newer, post 2011 uprising anti gender based violence groups are trying to reconceptualize masculinities in their activism.

This presentation will explore the new trend in Hollywood cinema to cast African American actors to play, and thus embody, the agents of the Security State fighting against so-called terrorism on the screens of American popular cinema since the late nineties, and more extensively after 9/11. I will look at films such as The Siege (1998), Rules of Engagement (2000), Unthinkable (2010), Olympus Has Fallen (2013), and London Has Fallen (2016). While the vilification and racist representation of people from the MENA region is nothing new in the US media, a new genre of Terrorist Films has been actively casting African Americans and women as their protagonists who enact violence on Central and South Asians, Arabs, Persians, and Others. The US government readily invites, incorporates, and enlists marginalized subjects into its imperial and security state apparatus to act as agents of violence against other marginalized people in and outside the US. With promises of honor and respect as well as education and employment, Uncle Sam predicates certain types of rights and privileges of citizenship, long denied to people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants, on those who become a part of the security state. In tandem with the Military Industrial Complex, Hollywood casts African Americans in the service of the security state against other brown and black bodies. I will characterize the new subgenre in the overall terrorist film genre as staging encounters between various men of color from within and outside the US imperial project while highlighting the imperial agenda setting embedded in them. Particularly, I will analyze the cinematized interactions between Central and South Asian, Arab, and Persian men crafted as “terrorists” and the African American agents of the Security State as they are foregrounded in the films.

A key transformation in the aims of governmentality that neoliberalism introduces is a shift from normalisation and discipline, replaced by a government seeking to control and inform conduct through ‘environmental technologies’ and the establishment of the ‘rules of the game’ (Foucault, 2008). Checkpoints, as well as various encounters with the security apparatus, can be viewed along other strategies of the state to develop such a framework, characterised by everyday practices, representational discourses, and multiple modalities of power (cf. Sharma and Gupta, 2006). For example, other such technologies demonstrate how mundane governmental practices related to spatial and national frontiers such as border patrols, passport checks, and immigration laws help make abstract entities such as the state a very real presence in people's lives (Mitchell 2006). Along those lines, Khalili and Schwedler (2010) point out that in regards to more contemporary investigations of policing, ‘with very few exceptions, most scholarly works are technical discussions of police organisation, rather than a contextualisation of the police and policing within broader political or sociological discussions.’ These forms of scholarly focus give disproportionate weight to the bureaucratic and extreme ends of disciplinary measures undertaken by state authorities. By contrast this paper investigates the varied and gendered performances, utterances and everyday activity that arise out of encounters with the police and security officials to shed light on particular modes of subject formation. With extensive ethnographic fieldwork with over 80 respondents across three popular quarters in Greater Cairo, I explore the constitutive role of security checkpoints which encircle these areas in a shaping the lived experiences amongst male youth (18-35 years), in particular how they find and develop amongst themselves alternate forms of networking and strategies to avoid a repressive state. I demonstrate how such strategies are not merely shirking authority and emphasise the importance of situating these encounters with an approach that underscores their embeddedness ‘in differently configured regimes of power’ (Ong, 1999). As such checkpoints are placed within the global context of security states and the fluid reconstitution of power relationships that they exhibit. Within this perspective, the state is an object of analysis that appears to exist simultaneously as material force and as ideological construct; it seems both real and illusory (Ibid).