Desiring the nation: masculinity, marriage, and futurity in Lebanon

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Arab masculinities has sought to examine it beyond the lens of security, Islam, and negative representations in Western media by bringing forth novel conceptualizations focused on Arab men’s emotional investment in family life. Drawing on narratives collected during fieldwork in Lebanon, this chapter builds on this novel scholarship to show how the affect of the ideal husband in Lebanon is concurrent with the notions of care and empathy. Both men and women stressed the importance of viewing marriage as a partnership between husband and wife and to make decisions jointly. Such narratives offer the opportunity to explore Lebanese masculinity beyond the control/care paradigm that has--for too long--limited our view to that of breadwinner and household authority. At the same time, the author’s fieldwork offers new insights into how the ideal husband is constructed along highly nationalistic lines characterized by the slogan of “Lebanon is for the Lebanese” and by the revival of an authentic Lebanese masculinity. Such findings are paradoxical. Although emotional labor is highlighted, equally important was the importance to marry a “Lebanese” man. This reality is particularly troubling seeing the long history of kin alliances between Lebanese citizens on the one hand, and Palestinians and Syrians on the other. This research bridges the gap between anthropological writing and political analysis in order to show how discourses of ideal masculinities, far from being fixed, are constantly shifting, in addition to emerging at the intersection of the Nation’s Other with economic precarity.