Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East: Syrian Refugees in Egypt by Magdalena Suerbaum (review)

Abstract

Magdalena Suerbaum’s book presents an absorbing discussion rooted in masculinities and displacement and underlines the gender-specific challenges that displaced Syrian men face in Egypt. Through an intersectional lens, Suerbaum asks how men engage with the expectations surrounding masculinities and how their notions of masculinities (and femininity) shape the performance of their gender. Using detailed vignettes she paints an evocative picture of how displacement disrupts Syrian men’s aspiration for a middle-class heteropatriarchal family structure and how they cope with the impairments that displacement brings to their masculine sense of self. In successive chapters Suerbaum highlights how notions about class in the Syrian context accompany displacement, transmute in the Egyptian context, and are deployed to renegotiate masculinities as a displaced person. Chapter 1 introduces a chief feature of everyday life in Syria: the military’s omnipresence shaping Syrian boys through childhood and culminating in the military service mandatory for all adultmales. Even though themen come from an environmentwhere the militarization is normalized and deployed into mundane civil life, Suerbaum’s interlocutors shatter the widespread notion that connects masculinities to militarization, leading to her argument on the elasticity of masculinities. In the place of masculinity linked to patriotism, Syrian men approached the civil unrest and armed conflict by adopting alternative masculinities, expressing passivity, rejecting violence, and vehemently embracing fatherhood. In Suerbaum’s presentation, middle-class men are burdened by the interruption to their lives that military service causes, leading to masculinities that choose passivity and idealize fatherhood. In chapter 2 she homes in on the experiences of refugeehood, another interruption for middle-class men, who are prevented from attaining their ideals of masculinities in the lived reality of precarity. While the impetus to flee violent conflict is