Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967 (Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East)

This book offers an exploration of masculinity in the literature of the Arab East (Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq) in the context of a specific set of anxieties about gender roles and sexuality in Arab societies. While gender studies in the area have focused primarily on the situation of women, the treatment of Arab men as gendered subjects has fallen be­hind. Samira Aghacy's rich analysis presents gender relations not within a fixed biological mold, but rather as a complex phenomenon fraught with ambivalence, and operating within particular historical and geopolitical settings. Through a series of close readings of more than twenty-five contemporary Arabic novels Aghacy presents a mosaic of masculinities that challenge the generally held view of an essentialized archetypal Arab man and mirror a contested vision of manliness where men figure in diverse socio-cultural environments. This groundbreaking work reveals the volatile nature of masculinity and its inextricability from femininity.