Abstract
Muslim men have long been viewed in the Western public imagination as either threat (as terrorist), patriarchal oppressor, or as “at risk” (of radicalization and subsequent participation in terrorism). Men in Muslim-majority nations have been construed in similar terms and beyond this have remained largely invisible in scholarship. However, the past two decades have seen an exponential growth in studies of Muslim masculinities that reveal deep insights into the social and historical forces shaping Muslim men and their subordination in broader power structures. The study of Muslim masculinities has emancipatory potential, casting a light on both structural discrimination and the daily lives of Muslim men as loving husbands, fathers, and contributing members of the community. This chapter commences by examining the growth of the new subfield of Muslim masculinities and the key theoretical frames that have shaped it, before engaging with the very broad literature on Muslim masculinities that has emerged in relation to Muslim men in both majority and minority contexts. The chapter concludes by considering future directions for research.
References
Amar, P. (2011) Islamic masculinities (book review). Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 7(3), 124–128.
Archer, L. (2001). ‘Muslim brothers, black lads, traditional Asians’: British Muslim young men’s constructions of race, religion and masculinity. Feminism & Psychology, 11(1), 79–105.
Archer, L. (2009). Race, ‘face’ and masculinity: The identities and local geographies of Muslim boys. In P. Hopkins & R. Gale (Eds.), Muslims in Britain: Race, place and identities (pp. 74–91). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Aslam, M. (2012). Gender-based explosions: The nexus between Muslim masculinities, Jihadist Islamism and terrorism. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.
Aslam, M. (2014). Islamism and masculinity: Case study Pakistan. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 39(3), 135–149.
Balslev, S. (2019). Iranian masculinities: Gender and sexuality in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baobaid, M. (2006). Masculinity and gender violence in Yemen. In Ouzgane, L. (Ed.) Islamic masculinities (pp.161–183) London: Zed Books.
Bilge, S. (2010). Beyond subordination vs. resistance: An intersectional approach to the agency of veiled Muslim women. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31(1), 9–28.
Coleman, B. L. (2009). Post-conversion experiences of African American male Sunni Muslims: Community integration and masculinity in twenty-first century Philadelphia. Publicly accessible Penn Dissertations.
Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity.
Connell, R. (2015). Masculinities. Accessed 20 Jan 2020. Available at: http://www.raewynconnell.net/p/masculinities_20.html
Connell, R., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender and Society, 19(6), 829–859.
Connell, R. Hearn, R. Kimmel, M. (2005). Introduction. In M. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R. Connell (Eds.), Handbook of studies on men and masculinities (pp1–13) Thousand Oaks: Sage.
De Sondy, A. (2014). The crisis of Islamic masculinities. London: Bloomsbury.
Drollinger-Smith, N. S. (2014). Shadow masculinities: Nationalist Burmese monastics and the savage Muslim male (Masters thesis, University of Colorado, Boulder).
Dwyer, C., Shah, B., & Sanghera, G. (2008). ‘From cricket lover to terror suspect’–Challenging representations of young British Muslim men. Gender, Place and Culture, 15(2), 117–136.
Echavez, C. R., Mosawi, S. M., Wilfreda, L., & Pilongo, R. E. (2016). The other side of gender inequality: Men and masculinities in Afghanistan. Kabul: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.
Ewing, K. P. (2008). Stolen honor: Stigmatizing Muslim men in Berlin. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fallon, J. E. (2019). China’s crime against Uyghurs is a form of genocide. Fourth World Journal, 18(1), 76–88.
Ferizaj, A. (2019). Othering Albanian Muslim masculinities: A case study of Albanian football players. Occhiali-Rivista Sul Mediterranei Islamico, 5, 71–93.
Finnegan, C. (2020). The Uyghur minority in China: A case study of cultural genocide, minority rights and the insufficiency of the international legal framework in preventing state-imposed extinction. Laws, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/laws9010001.
Ford, M. & Lyons, L. (2012). Introduction. In M. Ford & L. Lyons (Eds.) Men and Masculinities in Southeast Asia (pp. 1–19). London: Routledge.
Gerami, S. (2005). Islamist masculinity and Muslim masculinities. In M. Kimmel, J. Hearn, & R. Connel (Eds.), Handbook of studies on men and masculinities (pp. 448–457). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Gest, J. (2016). The new minority: White working class politics in an age of immigration and inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ghannam, F. (2013). Live and die like a man: Gender dynamics in urban Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Goh, J. N., (2014). Fracturing interwoven heteronormativities in Malaysian Malay-Muslim masculinity: A research note. Sexualities, 17(5–6), pp. 600–617.
Gökarıksel, B., & Secor, A. J. (2017). Devout Muslim masculinities: The moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey. Gender, Place and Culture, 24(3), 381–402.
Grewal, K. (2007). The ‘young Muslim man’ in Australian public discourse. Transforming Cultures eJournal, 2(1), 116–134.
Hage, G. (2011). Multiculturalism and the ungovernable Muslim. In R. Gaita (Ed.), Essays on Muslims and multiculturalism (pp. 165–186). Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Hopkins, P. (2004). Young Muslim men in Scotland: Inclusions and exclusions. Children’s Geographies, 2(2), 257–272.
Hopkins, P. (2006). Youthful Muslim masculinities: Gender and generational relations. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(3), 337–352.
Hopkins, P. (2007). Young Muslim men’s experiences of local landscapes after 11 September 2001. In C. Aitchison, P. Hopkins, & M. Kwan (Eds.) Geographies of Muslim identities: Diaspora, gender and belonging (Re-materialising cultural geography, pp. 189–200). London: Routledge.
Hopkins, P. (2009). Responding to the ‘crisis of masculinity’: The perspectives of young Muslim men from Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland. Gender, Place and Culture, 16(3), 299–312.
Humphrey, M., & Islam, M. (2002). Injuries and identities: Authorising Arab diasporic difference in crisis. In G. Hage (Ed.), Arab-Australians today: Citizenship and belonging (pp. 206–224). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Idris, D. R., Forrest, S. & Brown, S. (2019) Health help‐seeking by men in Brunei Darussalam: masculinities and ‘doing’ male identities across the life course. Sociology of Health and Illness, 41(6), 1071–1087.
Inhorn, M. C. (2012). The new Arab man: Emergent masculinities, technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kasim, M. P. (2018). Mappila Muslim masculinities: A history of contemporary abjectification. Men and Masculinities, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1097184X18803658.
Khoja-Moolji, S. S., & Niccolini, A. D. (2015). Comics as public pedagogy: Reading Muslim masculinities through Muslim femininities in Ms. Marvel. Girlhood Studies, 8(3), 23–39.
Khosravi, S. (2009). Displaced masculinity: Gender and ethnicity among Iranian men in Sweden. Iranian Studies, 42(4), 591–609.
Kimmel, M. (2010). Misframing men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Kimmel, M. & Bridges, S. (2014). Masculinity, Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
King, D. (2018). The New Kurdish Man: Men as Refuge-Granters, Doting Family Members and Romantics. In M.C. Inhorn, & N. Naguib, N. (Eds.), Reconceiving Muslim Men: Love and Marriage, Family and Care in Precarious Times (Vol. 38). Berghahn Books. 144–155.
Lamont, M. (2000). The dignity of working men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lim, D. C. (2006). Cruising Mat Motor: Malay biker masculinity and queer desire in/through KL Menjerit. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7(1), 62–80.
Massad, J. A. (2008). Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McDowell, L. (2003). Redundant masculinities? In Employment change and white working class youth. Oxford: Blackwell.
McDowell, L., Rootham, E., & Hardgrove, A. (2014). Precarious work, protest masculinity and communal regulation: South Asian young men in Luton, UK. Work, Employment and Society, 28(6), 847–864.
Messerschmidt, J. W. (2016). Masculinities in the making: From the local to the global. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Messerschmidt, J. W. (2018). Hegemonic masculinity: Formulation, reformulation, and amplification. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Messerschmidt, J. W., & Rohde, A. (2018). Osama bin Laden and his jihadist global hegemonic masculinity. Gender & Society, 32(5), 663–685.
Mills, M., & Keddie, A. (2010). Cultural reductionism and the media: Polarising discourses around schools, violence and masculinity in an age of terror. Oxford Review of Education, 36(4), 427–444.
Moussawi, G. (2013). Queering Beirut, the ‘Paris of the Middle East’: Fractal orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues. Gender, Place and Culture, 20(7), 858–875.
Necef, M. Ü. (2016). “If men were men then women would be women”: ISIL’s construction of masculinity and femininity (pp. 1–7). Odense: Center for Mellemøststudier.
Nilan, P. (2009). Contemporary masculinities and young men in Indonesia. Indonesia and the Malay World, 37(109), pp.327–344.
Noble, G. (2007). Respect and Respectability amongst Second-Generation Arab and Muslim Australian Men, Journal of Intercultural Studies 28(3), 331–344.
Ouzgane, L. (1997). Masculinity as Virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Work. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 4(1), 1–13.
Ouzgane, L. (2006). Islamic masculinities: An introduction. In L. Ouzgane (Ed.), Islamic masculinities (pp. 2–8). London: Zed Books.
Pak-Shiraz, N. (2017). Shooting the isolation and marginality of masculinities in Iranian cinema. Iranian Studies, 50(6), 945–967.
Ramji, H. (2007). Dynamics of religion and gender amongst young British Muslims. Sociology, 41(6), 1171–1189.
Roose, J. M. (2016). Political Islam and masculinity: Muslim men in the west. New York: Palgrave.
Scheibelhofe, P. (2010). A question of honour? Masculinities and positionalities of boys of Turkish background in Vienna. In Jugend, Zugehörigkeit und Migration (pp. 275–290). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Schulz, D. E., & Diallo, S. (2016). Competing assertions of Muslim masculinity in contemporary Mali. Journal of Religion in Africa, 46(2–3), 219–250.
Siraj, A. (2014). “Men are hard… women are soft”: Muslim men and the construction of masculine identity. In J. Gelfer (Ed.), Masculinities in a Global Era (pp. 101–116). New York: Springer.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury.
Tabar, P. (2007). “Habiibs” in Australia: language, identity and masculinity. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 28(2),157–172.
Thangaraj, S. (2015). Desi hoop dreams: Pickup basketball and the making of Asian American masculinity. New York: New York University Press.
Turner, R. B. (2006). Constructing masculinity: Interactions between Islam and African-American youth since C. Eric Lincoln, the black Muslims in America. Souls, 8(4), 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999940601057333.
Vlaeminck, E. (2019). Islamic masculinities in action: The construction of masculinity in Russian visual culture about the Chechen wars. Religion, State & Society, 47(2), 248–264.
Wetherell, M. & Edley, N. (1998). Gender practices: Steps in the analysis of men and masculinities. In K. Henwood, C. Griffin, & A. Phoenix (Eds.), Gender and Psychology. Standpoints and differences: Essays in the practice of feminist psychology (p. 156–173). London: Sage.
Zang, X. (2012). Perceptions of masculinity and femininity among Uyghur Muslims in China. Asian Women, 28(4), 9–35.
Zarni, M., & Cowley, A. (2014). The slow-burning genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya. Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, 23(3), 681–752.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Roose, J.M. (2020). Masculinity and Muslims: Contemporary Debates. In: Lukens-Bull, R., Woodward, M. (eds) Handbook of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Lives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73653-2_46-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73653-2_46-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73653-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73653-2
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities