Short Abstract

The panel explores emergent performances of Mediterranean masculinity that reinvent ideologies of “honor” in the context of economic precarity, retrenched authoritarianism, religious revival and online misogyny. We welcome papers focusing on activism, entrepreneurialism, militarism and subcultures.

Long Abstract

The Mediterranean has long been a key site for anthropological inquiry into gender systems, from foundational studies on "honor" and "shame" by Bourdieu (1966), Herzfeld (1980), Peristiany (1966), and Pitt-Rivers (1977), to feminist critiques by Abu-Lughod (1986), Mernissi (1975), and Schneider (1971). More recently, scholars working across the region have made significant contributions to our understanding of gendered performances in contexts of economic precarity, retrenched authoritarianism, and religious revival (Deeb 2006; Fernando 2014; Mahmood 2004; Mahmud 2014). For this panel, we will focus on how men in the region confront and incorporate new scripts for manhood as they do gender in the first decades of the 21st century. While Amar (2013) and others have cautioned against assuming an overarching “crisis in masculinity,” we note that narratives about men in crisis and strategies to reclaim and reinstate masculinity circulate widely on social media in the so-called Manosphere (Gerrand et. al. 2025). The panel seeks to examine how these trends matter on the ground. Building on innovative ethnographies of Egyptian masculinities by Ghannam (2013), Inhorn (2012), and Naguib (2015), but also similarly compelling work done in Israel/Palestine (e.g. Atshan 2020, Kanaaneh 2008), Turkey (e.g Açiksöz 2019), France (e.g. Bromberger 1995), Morocco (e.g. Eliot 2022), and elsewhere, we are particularly interested in exploring how ideologies and practices of masculinity reinvent traditionally imagined sentiments of honor, diacritics of self-presentation, and norms of conduct and reconfigure them along neoliberal expectations of self-discipline and entrepreneurial self-making. How are emergent practices of male performance inflected by (Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, Orthodox) religious piety, militarist nationalism, economic necessity, subcultural trends, or oppositional activism? How do liminal spaces of masculine intimacy like the back office, staff lounge, gym, online chatroom, army unit, or football stadium defy hoary oppositions of private and public, the home and the street?

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