This article analyzes the way retired Palestinian fighters in Lebanon narrate their years of combat with the Palestinian Resistance Movement. I argue that these narratives exhibit a shunning of "feminine" spatial and symbolic spheres, which serves to bolster a discursive mutual dependency between nationalism and hegemonic masculinity. Drawing on the veterans' departure stories, in which they depict their transition from camp homes to military encampments and their removal from the civilian spheres of non-combat and domesticity, I frame this shunning within notions of transformation from boyhood to manhood. I understand this shunning as symptomatic of an official nationalist discourse characterized by a blind spot over women's histories and desires and of a reluctance to register women's challenges to prevailing gender constructs. Finally, I read these "anti-feminine" narratives as mechanisms of resistance to a refugee condition that bears emasculating connotations and to emergent non-soldierly notions of masculinity.
There is a great dearth of studies on masculinities in the Islamic and Arab world, and emerging literature on ‘subaltern’ masculinities (in this region at least) comes mostly in the form of collected essays as opposed to single-author, depth-of-field treatises. But even as it grows, this young field seems to avoid building up a canon, and this is by no means a criticism. Practitioners in this field, as in this particular collection of essays, have opted for multiplicity in form as well as content rather than any unitary voice.
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