Farha Ghannam

The strength of this ethnographic discussion of the process involved in constructing a masculine role/identity is the years of fieldwork on which it relies. The start of chapters is padded with obligatory theoretical review, but in the end these are easily passed over, and add little to the description.

I was surprised by an almost conspicuous absence of two topics that one might have expected to be at least mentioned in a discussion of masculinity in Egypt: Terrorism and homosexuality. On homosexuality, she says that in twenty years of fieldwork she never met one. Given that Cairo was the site, and not a rural community, that seems especially dubious. It probably speaks to the unrepresentativeness of her sample; it is unclear in what other ways this has impacted her conclusions. As for terrorism, for this not even to be mentioned is again curious. Given the quite high incidence of terrorist attacks within Egypt, it is incredible that no one had any opinion, or ever talked about it, especially in the context of how men were expected to behave.

So the work is not without flaws, but it also offers the occasional interesting insight.… (meer)