Men and Masculinities

Male infertility is a major global reproductive health problem, contributing to more than half of all cases of infertility worldwide. Yet women typically bear the social burden of childlessness when their husbands are infertile. This article explores the four major patriarchal paradoxes surrounding male infertility in the Muslim Middle Eastern country of Egypt. There, women in childless marriages typically experience procreative blame, even when male infertility (glossed as “weak worms”) is socially acknowledged. In addition, Egyptian women married to infertile men experience diminished gender identity and threats of male-initiated divorce. Ironically, the introduction of new reproductive technologies to overcome male infertility has only served to increase this divorce potential. Although male infertility also presents a crisis of masculinity for Egyptian men, this crisis often redounds in multiple ways on the lives of women, who ultimately pay the price for male infertility under conditions of Middle Eastern patriarchy.

A core component of the Islamic Revolution’s ideology was reformulation of gender discourse wrapped around an Islamic hypermasculinity. Attention has been focused on women’s roles and rights in the Islamic Republic, and men are assumed to universally have benefited from the regime’s policies. This hypermasculinity of the Republic has revised prerevolutionary ideals promoting new ideals of manhood. Mullahs are the sage interpreters of the Qur’an and Shari‘at. The young men who bide the dictates of the mullahs and sacrifice themselves for the Republic are martyrs. Then there are the ordinary men. The Shari‘at favors them at the family and civil society, but such a blanket vision ignores the costs paid by all men depending on their social class. High unemployment, inflation, oppression, and rampant drug abuse assail all men. They all pay for gender discrimination against all women in general and women of their social group in particular.

This article explores the life and career of male singing star, instrumental talent, and Composer Farid al-Atrash, who created a prototype of the romantic male musical star from the 1930s until his death in 1974. An immigrant to Egypt and a member of a distinctive religious sect, the Druze, he arose from poverty and the invisibility of the previous generation of musicians thanks to his talent, ambition, and investment in his own film productions. A lifelong bachelor, he constructed a popular image with references to the authentic Arab Islamic poetic/historical past and an idealized version of modernity. Tales of his love affairs enhanced his popularity during his lifetime and were seemingly merged with the lyrics of his love songs. From Arabic sources, the author attempts to uncover the psychological rationale of a man whose life goals were shaped by his mother, who was overshadowed by his sister, and who consciously elevated music making to a professionalized art form.

This article, which broadly explores the impact of myth on literature and history, locates contemporary articulations of masculine identity with the founding myths, particularly that of Abraham. The story of Abraham, as it has been rendered in the Old Testament and in the Qur’an and as it has been read in modern times, brings together religious and nationalist formulations of identity. The article examines the limitations of nationalist and fundamentalist readings of this myth which have not only foreclosed the narrative possibilities of this story but have also led to the enactment of violence and exclusion in history through such readings. The latter part of the article looks to recent literature and poetry that respond to this delimited old myth and that interrogate the closure that it presumably has. Through the writing of Mahmoud Darwish and Assia Djebar, the article attempts to show a complex interrogation of the figure of Abraham, one that would reveal how readings of Abraham are open to contestation, that would allow for new outcomes of this story, and that would make possible new imaginings of identity

The seamless continuity between colonialism, racism, and patriarchy makes it imperative for postcolonial criticism to question the foundational category of gender. As Judith Butler argues, gender postulates a normative masculinity poised against a femininity construed as lack or deviation. This normative masculinity asserts itself in colonial discourse, which, as Edward Said observes, represents a masculine Europe dominating a feminized Orient. At the same time, racial discourse represents African men as hypermasculine, as Frantz Fanon and Cornel West, among others, have observed. Thus, the African man occupies at once masculine and feminine subject positions and, likewise, the European women figures ambivalently as both masculine and feminine. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North depicts such ambivalent spaces that enable a critique of colonial and patriarchal notions of gender.