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Marcia C. Inhorn , The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press , 2012). Pp. 404. $78.50 cloth, $37.50 paper.
Gender, Family, and Islam
In recent years, as activists in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere have utilized the internet to organize popular movements and demand social and political change, the importance of technology in Middle Eastern societies--long regarded by many as fundamentally resistant to "change" and far removed from all things "modern"--has received much attention. Marcia Inhorn's The New Arab Man richly documents another facet of a very modern Middle East that has received far less attention: the explosion of reproductive technologies to address high rates of male infertility, which was "[o]nce regarded as a source of male shame" but has been "reclassified as a biomedical disease category, with recognized causes, precise diagnostic techniques, and new technological fixes" (p. 26). In an accessible and engaging account of ethnographic research collected over a period of several years with more than 300 men in four countries (Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States), Inhorn argues that the increased availability of reproductive technologies in the Middle East and widespread changes in how infertility is understood have led to the emergence of a "new Arab man," who embodies a kind of masculinity that simultaneously challenges Orientalist stereotypes of Arab men as terrorists and "Middle Eastern" norms that associate masculinity with virility and the patriarchal domination of women. Working to counter the essentialism in both of these narratives of Arab masculinity, Inhorn draws attention to the "nuanced and constantly evolving responses" of ordinary men to "their changing social worlds and physical bodies" (p. 62). Ultimately, however, the book is a more effective exercise in storytelling than social-cultural analysis, and the new Arab man turns out to be little more than an equally one-dimensional inverse of his patriarch/terrorist counterpart.
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