Decolonizing Middle East Men and Masculinities Scholarship: An Axiomatic Approach

Gendered identities and practices are cultivated by institutions, selves, and others rather than given by nature. Like femininities, masculinities are plural in meaning and experience and malleable. They are achieved in context and often have to be proven through behavior, which reinforces the point that they are not natural at all. They operate through identification and disidentification at conscious and unconscious levels but structured by social institutions and cultural discourse. Jack Halberstam (1998) reminds us that they should not be reduced to cisgendered male bodies and their effects, pointing to masculine women, among other phenomena.[1]

 

This analytical review essay is informed by my research and teaching on gender and sexuality, as well as meta-analysis of recent masculinity scholarship focused on cases in the geographic area stretching from Morocco to Iran, often termed the Middle East and North Africa. Some of this scholarship challenges the assumption that the primary and most important contradiction has always and everywhere been men over women, often captured by the term “patriarchy,” and increasingly reflects what for lack of a better term can be called an intersectional analysis.[2] I have argued elsewhere, for example, that while sexual inequality that privileges men is embedded in multiple institutions and cultural formations, a different lens illuminates how states and non-governmental entities in the region–dominated by men but including substantial proportions of women–consider men and boys to be the main sources of social danger, sexual unruliness, and political resistance and largely target them for discipline, violence and control.[3] While sexism is alive and well and built into many institutions, it is not the driving or primary contradiction in the region, where many kinds of masculine and feminine sensibilities are at work.

 

Paul Amar notes that the field of masculinity studies begins from a perspective of sociological deviance, often focusing on male behaviors that disrupt the social order, inviting necessary policy interventions to mitigate them.[4] He warns that based on “psychological or biomedical generations [about masculinity], and, delinked from theories of specific social and historical power locations, critical approaches to masculinity can easily become incorporated into liberal, colonial, or disciplinary state projects.”[5] I would add that the dominant theories in contemporary masculinity studies were produced largely by white male scholars in the United States and Australia whose assumptions in relation to Western societies have been globalized as theory writ large relatively unselfconsciously. Most of the scholarship produced on the Middle East and North Africa, in turn, takes for granted the subjectivities and behaviors of boys and men, either by focusing solely on girls and women or by assuming that boys and men–for example in politics, economic institutions, security forces, and social movements–can be studied without analytical engagement with sex and gender.

 

As Eve Sedgwick argued for sexuality in Epistemology of the Closet,[6] masculinities and femininities are internally incoherent but often represented as coherent. Sedgwick offered seven axioms in relation to sexuality in Epistemology[7] that inspired me to propose a decolonial axiomatic framework for theorizing Middle East masculinities by considering some of the recent scholarship on the topic, including six sophisticated monographs published in English since 2011.[8] The authors of these texts rely on historical, ethnographic, and literary methodologies.[9]

 

The three axiomatic assumptions around which this review essay is structured (1) recognize masculine difference, plurality, and self-making; (2) understand masculinities as shaped by capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, but also “local” systems and ideas; and (3) pay close attention to masculine embodiments and emotions and not only the abstract workings of ideology, law, institutions, and systems.

 

Three related analytical points emerged from my engagement with a selection of recent scholarship on masculinities in the Middle East and North Africa. First, while the sexualized body usually serves as a convenient “base” for masculinity and femininity, an explanation seemingly given by nature–the scholarship seems to show a symbolic link between masculinity versus “emasculation” or “feminization” as related to one’s position in property and control relations. In this reading, to be masculine is to have ownership or ownership-like relations over others and to be emasculated is to be in relations of subordination. This property relations basis of masculinities and femininities offers clues to the masculinity anxieties explored in the scholarship examined, which is the second analytical thread I highlight. Cultivating masculinities seems to be about avoiding such relations of subordination or at least symbolically and materially compensating for them in other ways. In most cases, the sources of subordination are other boys and men or male-dominated systems such as authoritarian states, religious systems, or the military. Finally and related to the first and second points, the essay points to the centrality to the signs of masculinity and femininity of the body as capital over which one has degrees of agency/non-agency, extending Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that cultural capital and distinction are ultimately embodied.[10] The literature examined shows bodies to be central to masculine affects and struggles on quotidian, aesthetic, sovereign, disciplinary, and governmental scales.

 

Masculine identities were and are lived and experienced heterogeneously in response to situational and historical conditions, even within cultural categories such as “Arab” and “Muslim.” Yet Arab and Muslim masculinities are often ahistorically naturalized on the basis of biological, psychic, or racial/cultural differences. They are essentialized as if they are permanently rooted, homogeneous, and static in shaping masculine affects and embodiments. Such “culture knowledge” about masculinities, I have argued elsewhere, is reductive and ahistorical, although powerful in feeding racism and imperialism.[11]

 

Scholars increasingly take differences among men and plural masculinities into account. They show that men and boys are highly invested in self-making and embodied self-presentations that cultivate distinction and belonging through aesthetic practices. They demonstrate the plurality and situated dynamism–the sheer sociality–of masculinities. Jennifer de Groot, for example, illustrates the secular and religious sensibilities produced by cultural and political contexts as well as class and urban/rural differences in modern Iran’s history, which she found manifested in competing and overlapping forms of masculinity.[12] Moreover, she shows how quickly masculinity norms changed across generations, shaped by anti-colonial, nationalist, and state dynamics. Murat Yıldız[13] examines the content and circulation of body building photographic magazines in late Ottoman societies, arguing that men of different ethnic and religious backgrounds performed particular masculinities by cultivating and presenting their bodies. Men’s corporeal aesthetics changed and were shaped by the colonial, confessional, and civilizational logics of the period.[14] Studying unaccompanied migrant boys from contemporary Morocco in Spain’s Basque Country, Karmele Mendoza Pérez, and Marta Morgade Salgado found them to be “embodied agent[s]” who made great effort to distinguish themselves with the only capital they controlled in a foreign setting, their bodies.[15]

 

Sofian Merabet’s Queer Beirut (2014), while not explicitly about masculinities, tells us much about the flexibility and plurality of this concept given the book’s focus on men who identify as gay as well as male homosexual practices and spaces. The first ethnography of homosexuality in the region published in English, Merabet uses an interdisciplinary transnational approach that challenges “an often over-simplified political understanding of the very notion of identity.”[16] Performance and performativity by all men is central to the story of Queer Beirut, as is the co-existence of “homosexual disavowal” with a diversity of sexual practices.[17] “Queer space” proliferates, Merabet argues, even as capitalist enclosure and homophobia regularly threaten and exclude especially non-heteronormative poor men. [18] Gay men in Beirut perform conspicuous consumption to distance themselves from poverty, which is stigmatized and despised but the fate of the majority.[19] They actively appropriate spaces enclosed by privatization.[20] Merabet writes of “the homosexual sphere” rather than “the homosexual community” given the diverse and fluctuating nature of masculine and sexual practices and identities, as well as the incoherence of such categories, even as the men he studied and with whom he hung out often projected coherence and shared sexual and gender “convictions and aspirations”.[21]

 

Colonial and imperial forms of control and extraction worked and work through gender and sexual formations and discourse but do not exhaust the factors shaping them. It is difficult to avoid the degrees to which large culturally and nationally unbounded systems such as imperialism and capitalism shape gendered options and subordinate poor, racialized, or resistant boys and men. However, to decolonize how we live and study men and masculinities depends on a) not romanticizing indigenous, national or precolonial societies and practices, most of which worked and work through systems of subordination based on ownership, racialization, and sexualization, backed by provincial rationalizations; b) avoiding binaries of East versus West and traditional versus modern, since all cultures and societies are embedded in one historical time (if not immediate space) in relations that shape and reshape masculine sensibilities and ideals; and c) making legible the multiple masculinities made discursively illegible by systems of dominance, as Mark Anthony Neal argues in Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013) is necessary for understanding contemporary Black masculinities in the United States, and Merabet demonstrates in Queer Beirut (2014).

 

Because gendered and sexual idioms are so prominent, feminist scholars have systematically examined masculinity in anti-colonialist and nationalist contexts as well as postcolonial state discourses and practices. Recent articles and chapters in this genre include Sivan Balslev’s (2017) study of masculinity and nationalism during Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in the early twentieth century. Her findings reinforce a longstanding finding in feminist scholarship that nationalist men elites often imagined homelands as feminine entities to be protected from invaders of various sorts and understood their subordination as “emasculating.” Ahmet Serdar Aktürk’s article on Kurdish nationalist discourse in the 1920s and 1930s shows how a distinctly Kurdish masculinity consolidated in response to nationalist movements that used religious and ethnic differences to minoritize the Other. Kurdish male leaders increasingly idealized domesticity as a women’s space for social reproduction, he finds, even as they highlighted women’s central roles in modernization and national struggle.[22] Haytham Bahoora (2015) finds a class and urban bias in the anti-colonial middle-class masculine literary discourse of 1940s and 1950s Iraq. Moreover, he argues that this discourse, which reproduced sexual respectability as an ideal, instrumentalized the subaltern woman. Nationalist and statist projects, he and others have shown, frequently reify domesticity and draw on masculinist notions of modernity and civilization.

 

 

Pascal Menoret’s Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism and Road Revolt (2014), which despite the title is largely not about joyriding, examines the planning design of Riyadh’s people-hostile city, which serves the control interests of an undemocratic state. Rather than naturalizing what boys and men do, Menoret sought to understand their risk-taking practices and relations with each other and with cars. He shows how boys and men and not only girls and women are spatially and socially constrained in Saudi Arabia by corporate and state structural violence. He evocatively demonstrates the rage of subordinated boys and young men at their social expendability and its expression in rebellious behaviors,[26] as well as the seamless homosexuality of the male settings he studied.[27] Joyriding in Riyadh ultimately demonstrates significant differences among these men and boys, and illuminates their anxieties, competitions, and forms of resistance.

 

A textured and grounded examination is also offered in Çimen Günay-Erkol’s monograph (2015), Broken Masculinities: Solitude, Alienation, and Frustration in Turkish Literature after 1970. The book shares with the other monographs reviewed a non-singular approach to masculinity that recognizes “the unstable in-betweenness of men,”[28] as well as the relationality of gender. The literary methodology of Broken Masculinities assumes that the novels produced after the 12 March 1971 coup in Turkey, whose protagonists are “ordinary people” living “ordinary lives,” “refract rather than reflect” history.[29] Günay-Erkol’s historical and deconstructive close reading and analytical practices do not deny the materiality of the body.[30] The novels show characters struggling with the trauma associated with torture and rape, as well as with the problem of militarism, which is associated with the Turkish form of imposed “modernization.”[31] The monograph grapples with the cultural “admiration felt for power” and how this facilitates military coups and encourages overcompensation for being subordinated to colonial and imperial forces.[32] Gendered responses to the coup were widespread in the novels, validating “‘masculine’ bravado in combat and against the crimes of the state”[33] and showing how upper class men revolutionaries instrumentalized women.[34] Whether Marxist or anticommunist, the genre “celebrated traditional masculine concerns and phallic potency, creating similar ideals of masculine togetherness.”[35] The novels demonstrate at the same time how “masculinity does physical and psychological harm to men,” and the terror, fragility, and paranoia of men before “castrating state power.”[36] The novels oscillate, Günay-Erkol argues, “between masculinity as an essence and as a matter of becoming” that is collectively produced.[37]

 

Intriguing and productive (in the Foucauldian sense) in Broken Masculinities is how “feeling like property” and being treated like property are linked to masculinities and femininities in the novels.[38] Property relations may provide a material foundation for the symbolic meanings, affects and sensibilities often attached to the signs of masculinity and femininity–to be dominantly masculine is to own and control and to be feminine is to be owned and controlled. I propose that this allows us to remove the sexed body as causal ground for the meanings of masculinity and femininity. Indeed, some of the novels examined were centered on women figures who encouraged and reproduced hegemonic masculinities,[39] and others on “manly” women, showing that “masculinity does not exclusively belong to men.”[40] In this feeling like property reading, it becomes understandable that experiences like torture and prison make men feel less “manly”[41] or “emasculated.”[42] This leaves on the table why cis girls and women should be naturalized as positionally and relationally subordinate or deserving of such status by virtue of their embodied or sartorial “feminine” differences.

 

Men, no more or less than women, are irrational, emotional and fragile in their psychic structures and embodiments. While women and the sign of femininity are classically associated with emotionality, irrationality, insecurity, vulnerability, and sacrifice, men make at least as many decisions and non-decisions based on fear, love, shame, vanity, anxiety, anger, and desire. The body’s material positioning (racial, sexual, class, ability), mobility and access to different spaces, and symbolic coding in context or circulation is often central to definitions of masculinity and femininity. Bodies are ground zero for shaping, reading, and enacting masculine identity. They are presumed to be the real on which gender rests, although they are plastic, cultivated by institutions as well as self-styling practices. Indeed, male reproductive bodies appear to be more vulnerable than women’s to environmental degradation, chemicals, aging, dangerous labor conditions, and drug and alcohol abuse [43]. Readings of masculine embodiments, emotions, and behaviors are often selective, however, taking for granted and reproducing a gendered mind/body, rational/irrational framework.

 

Wilson Chacko Jacob’s Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 (2011) was the first in a spate of quality monographs on masculinities in the region that placed the body and masculine desires and anxieties front and center. Jacob reminds us that masculinities are malleable since the “subject is never prior to culture” or “discourse.”[44] Jacob emphasizes the performative aspect of “proper” Egyptian masculinities and the active “cultivation of feelings and bodies.”[45] He shows how nationalist campaigns of self-cultivation responded to British colonial discourse and policies, which were concerned to produce proper masculinities among themselves. “Caught in the colonizer’s gaze,” he writes, “the typical Egyptian male body was weaker, less disciplined, and insufficiently male,”[46]  illustrating how relations of subordination and power–in this case imperialism and colonialism–are central to masculinity. Nationalist projects, Jacob argues, were particularly concerned with ameliorating these colonial perceptions of “native inadequacies”[47] so that by the 1920s masculine “physical culture formed a critical element in the discourse of national progress.”[48]

 

Lisa L. Wynn’s scholarship on the impact of consumerism on masculine embodiment, sexual anxieties, and desire in contemporary Cairo shows the fantasies attached to erectile dysfunction drugs and other pharmaceuticals and foods deemed aphrodisiacs, whose use is seen to enhance sexuality rather than to index lack of virility.[49]  Also illustrating the always biological-cultural body, a recent book chapter by Salih Can Açıksöz (2015) examines campaigns for in vitro fertilization and other assisted conception technologies by working-class Turkish veterans who became quadriplegic in battles with Kurdish fighters. These men believed that the government violated its promise that military service would lead to full-fledged adult masculinity that includes marriage and reproduction. The state responded with a series of governmentalizing welfare and health policies that facilitated what it considered to be their “remasculinization.” Nevertheless, the masculinities of veterans whose wives had children were “always already under question,” even if the pregnancies were “technoscientifically unmediated.”[50]

 

Farha Ghannam’s Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt (2013) is a study of masculinity in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on Algeria, although without his social “determinism” since she pays more attention to “how situated individuals experience and reimagine class and gender divisions in daily life and how their experiences may change over time.”[51] Like Bourdieu, she pays attention to “bodily hexis” or the “ways our bodies reflect our socioeconomic positionalities” through grooming and presentation.[52] As in Jacob’s Working out Egypt, Ghannam takes seriously the active “doing” of manhood[53] and the social cultivation of masculine conduct in relation to other boys and men through work, play, food, clothing, hair styling, and bodily conduct choices[53]. Like Menoret’s Joyriding, Live and Die Like a Man is sensitive to the organization of and access to space, indexing gender- and class-based inequalities that shape identities and embodiments. Ghannam stresses the multiplicity of cultural and social factors and agents that shape masculinity and femininity in urban Egypt, illustrating heterogeneity and competition.[55]

 

 

The scholarship reviewed illustrates a decolonial approach to Middle East men and masculinities by analytically and non-defensively making legible masculinities that are erased by ahistorical generalizations. Such scholarship cuts across the scales of subjectivities, bodies, streets, states, and empires. Whether generalizations are made by “insiders” or “outsiders,” they have ideological, material and embodied consequences, including for girls and women. While systems of inequality are central to the shapes and experiences of masculinity and imprinted by multiple institutions, so is self-making that may or may not follow such paths.

 

Many areas are understudied and little understood. For example, how does militarism impact sexuality and gender relations? What do men who serve think and feel about police and military institutions? How do the logics of citizenship/non-citizenship, refugee status, religious difference, and racism make or remake masculinities? How do forms of disability factor? How useful are idioms of “emasculation” and “feminization” when boys and men largely fear being subordinated by co-religionist, co-ethnic or co-national boys and men? What if masculinities and femininities were not linked to property or property-like relations?

 

 

_______________ 

 

 

[1] An interview-based article with Halberstam: “Queer 2.0: Judith 'Jack' Halberstam complicates gender,” by Jeffrey J. Williams in The Chronicle of Higher Education (1 January 2012). https://www.chronicle.com/article/Queer-20/130156.

 

[2] I conditionally use the adjective intersectional because it does not capture the historical weight of colonial and imperial relations–let alone modern state laws and policies–in delimiting sexual and gender possibilities. Nor does "intersectional" capture the fluid and situated nature of relations of power between individuals. These cannot be understood solely through abstract positionally based analyses, even when more than one positionality is taken into account, as Jennifer Nash has argued in relation to African American women (2008). Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89 (2008): 1-15.

 

[3] Frances S. Hasso, Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 169.

 

[4] Paul Amar, “Middle East Masculinity Studies Discourses of ‘Men in Crisis’, Industries of Gender in Revolution,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 3 (2011), 45.

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 45.

 

[7] Sedgwick’s Axiom 1 sets out a seemingly obvious point often overlooked by categorical thinking: “People are different from each other.” Even people who “share all or most of our own positionings” can dramatically differ (22). Rather than looking for the essence of sexuality, Sedgwick asks how categories work, what they enact, and what relations they produce. Sedgwick’s Axiom 2 posits that the “study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender,” just as “antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry,” although we cannot “know in advance how they will be different” (27). Axiom 3 argues against “an a priori decision” for conceptualizing “lesbian and gay male identities together. Or separately” (36). Axiom 4 challenges a binary between social constructionism and essentialism to understanding sexuality: “The immemorial, seemingly ritualized debates on nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nurture and nature” (40). She argues for a “universalizing” rather than “minoritizing” frame. That is, rather than categorically setting aside the “homosexual” in contrast to the “heterosexual,” a universalizing frame recognizes the vast range of sexual practices, desires, and identities that challenge a neat divide (41-42). In Axiom 5 Sedgwick challenges scholarly arguments that pin to a particular historic moment some great transformation of sexuality because “The historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present condition of sexual identity” (44). Axiom 6 focuses on the relationship of “gay studies to debates on the literary canon,” the main focus of the book (48). Axiom 7 discusses the “strange and recalcitrant” paths of identifying “as,” “with,” and “as against” for sexual subjects, intellectual critics and activists (59, 61).

 

[8] While valuable in its ethnographic depth and focus on male reproductive technology used by infertile Arab and Arab American men, Marcia C. Inhorn’s The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (2012), whose stated aim to “disrupt stereotypes,” “humanize men” (xx), and challenge “the tropes of violent hypermasculinity that characterize ongoing Western Orientalist discourse” (256), leads to broad generalizations, methodologically reinforced by selection bias. In addition, the book suffers from a descriptive rather than analytical approach to the complex dimensionality of the men studied and the question at hand. Also troubling is the underlying assumption of a singular unloving patriarchal “old Arab man.”

 

[9] It should be noted that Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, edited by Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb and published by Saqi Books in 2000, was an early important contribution to the field. This well-conceptualized and edited collection set a high standard for interdisciplinary analysis of masculinities and sexualities, with chapters by thirteen authors who address militarization, quotidian life, embodied rites of passage, and masculine anxiety.

 

[10] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” translated by Richard Nice in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241-258.

 

[11] Frances S. Hasso, “’Culture Knowledge’ and the Violence of Imperialism: Revisiting The Arab Mind,” The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 7, Special Issue: Writing: A Tool for Change, `Abd al-Rahman Munif Remembered (2007), 24-40.

<https://dome.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.3/177979/MITEJMES_Vol_7_Spring2007.pdf?sequence=1>

 

[12] Joanna de Groot, “The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’: Domestic Narratives of Patriarchy, Masculinity and Modernity in Iran, 1880-1980,” in Raffaella Sarti (ed.), Men at Home, Special Issue of Gender & History 27, no. 3 (2015), 795.

 

[13] Murat C. Yıldız, “’What is a Beautiful Body?’ Late Ottoman ‘Sportsman’ Photographs and New Notions of Male Corporeal Beauty,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8 (2015), 192-214.

 

[14] Ibid.

 

[15] Karmele Mendoza Pérez and Marta Morgade Salgado, “Doing Masculinity: The ‘Look’ of Unaccompanied Male Migrant Teenagers from the Maghreb,” Men and Masculinities 21, no. 3 (2018), 15.

 

[16] Sofian Merabet, Queer Beirut, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 3.

 

[17] Ibid., 4, 213.

 

[18] Ibid., 25.

 

[19] Ibid., 64-65.

 

[20] Ibid., 44-45.

 

[21] Ibid., 112-113.

 

[22] Ahmet Serdar Aktürk, “Female Cousins and Wounded Masculinity: Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Ottoman Middle East.” Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 1 (2016), 46-59.

 

[23] Madawi al-Rasheed, A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 56.

 

[24] Ibid., 57.

 

[25] Ibid., 21-22.

 

[26] Pascal Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism and Road Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 59.

 

[27] Ibid., 163-173.

 

[28] Çimen Günay-Erkol, Broken Masculinities: Solitude, Alienation, and Frustration in Turkish Literature after 1970 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 10.

 

[29] Ibid., 14, 20.

 

[30] Ibid., 30.

 

[31] Ibid., 164.

 

[32] Ibid., 54.

 

[33] Ibid., 10.

 

[34] Ibid., 143.

 

[35] Ibid., 10.

 

[36] Ibid., 35, 37, 38, 73, 149.

 

[37] Ibid., 22, 46.

 

[38] Ibid., 48, 140.

 

[39] Ibid., 104.

 

[40] Ibid., 178.

 

[41] Ibid., 53.

 

[42] Ibid., 204.

 

[43] Cynthia R, Daniels, Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

 

[44] Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 20.

 

[45] Ibid., 13.

 

[46] Ibid., 65.

 

[47] Ibid., 66.

 

[48] Ibid., 72.

 

[49] Lisa L. Wynn, “’Viagra Soup’: Consumer Fantasies and Masculinity in Portrayals of Erectile Dysfunction Drugs in Cairo, Egypt,” in Abortion Pills, Test Tube Babies, and Sex Toys: Emerging Sexual and Reproductive Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), 59-171.

 

[50] Salih Can Açıksöz, “In Vitro Nationalism: Masculinity, Disability, and Assisted Reproduction in War-Torn Turkey,” in Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures, edited by Gul Ozyegin (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2015), 29.

 

[51] Farha Ghannam, Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 15.

 

[52] Ibid., 27.

 

[53] Ibid., 56.

 

[54] Ibid., 62, 78.

 

[55] Ibid., 63.