Conflicting Masculinities

Yesterday, after I finished reading the Jacob’s study of Effendi Masculinity – a new species of masculinity that evolved out of an emerging bourgeois class in an attempt to create an indigenous modernity in Egypt – I get up to walk a bit and take a break. Naturally, under self-imposed quarantine, my options for where I can walk are somewhat limited, so I take to pacing the living room.

In any case, I find my father there and sit with him. For whatever reason, the conversation between us comes to my father’s brief time in the military, as part of the mandatory 2.5-year service required of all males in Syria. When he’s finished sharing, I ask why his parents hadn’t paid badal, a payment issued to the government to relieve males of their 2.5-year military duties. The option seemed like an obvious choice to me for anyone if funds were available. His response was that badal hadn’t existed at the time, and complained that even if there had been, his parents probably would have sent him anyway, so he could “become a man.”

To become a man. To undergo a process of turning into something else, something not necessarily who or what you are fundamentally.

I kind of like it when our language betrays the nature of how we might actually understand things. To “become” a man means that “man” is something created, fashioned by circumstance, certain features, signifiers, etc. This interpellated understanding of gender is a basis of gender theory, of course, so I am not gonna beat it over the head, but it was interesting to see how we always seem to implicitly recognize this. Even people who chose to rely on a bioessentialist view of gender will recognize it in the language they use since people “become” or are “made into” men. The moment reminded me of a song from one of my favorite movies as a child, Mulan (of course it would be a movie featuring a gender-bending heroine). Give it a listen. Sing along if you’d like, even. But it’s the title that’s what’s interesting here. The man training the troops tells his audience, “I’ll make a man out of you”. Turn these troops into men! In the army! Quite manly indeed, what with the physical bravado, honor and discipline it all entails.

The military as an agent in “creating the man” is somewhat similar to the formation of a modern-masculinity that we saw in Jacobs’ “Scouting, Freedom and Violence”, in which he discusses the first Egyptian boy’s scout as a “technology” used to create a modern masculinity. The other piece we read by Jacob, “Effending Masculinity” also examines the production of another modern masculinity, through the birth of a petit bourgeois Effendi class. This breed of “modern” man is rather different. Jacob explicitly notes how it seemed to diverge from the “warrior-hero” ideal of masculinity, which was even deified to an extent by the genealogical connection it was given to the prophet. This warrior masculinity did not disappear, as is evident in my father recounting his parent’s belief in the creation of a man through military service, or the song’s similar tilt. However, this category of “man” was different enough from the Effendi masculinity to warrant the creation of a new genealogy that connected the Effendi archetype to the prophet in order to legitimize its construction. And yet Effendi masculinity and warrior masculinity still coexist. The former did not replace the later, despite the former’s deviance from an existing narrative. And despite this deviance, both archetypes are still recognized as masculine.

What are the necessary-and-sufficient elements needed to create a masculinity in a “modern” country? Is it in the overlap of the warrior-hero and effendi, both of whom are providers and protectors with a disciplined demeanor? What ties a more archaic form of masculinity with the “modern” one, birthed in response to a very different set of conditions? I also wonder what “feminine” responses of postcolonial nations to exploitative world systems look like/could look like, seeing as how resistance is framed as a masculine enterprise. How do we move beyond the restrictions that this binary "masculine-feminin" axis present to begin with? 

P.S. Since I already brought up Mulan, it's interesting to read it in this longer tradition of female heroines earning respect and securing victory by perform masculinity. The movie then reverses this narrative and allows Mulan to be an "authentic" heroine, not a heroine in disguise. I think that by the end, the film does a pretty good job for a kid's movie at presenting a non-binaried resistance that isn't "fighting through masculinity" nor "through femininity" but I can't continue talking about the queerness of Mulan in this blog post as well. 

Maybe another one.