Queering Masculinities in the Middle East (SWANA) and South Asia

Abstract

One of the most important shifts in gender scholarship is the attention now being paid to discourses and practices of masculinity in the Global South. This issue of Men and Masculinities contributes to this growing field in three important ways. First, we foreground scholarship on masculinities in two interconnected, but understudied regions of the world, specifically the Middle East, which is also known as South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), and its neighbor to the east, South Asia. In particular, we demonstrate the ways in which queer identities and communities are being formed across these two regions, connected as they are by historic trade routes, migration pathways, and transregional cultural flows. Second, we point to the vibrant masculinities scholarship that is emerging from these regions. But we focus specifically on non-normative masculinities—or the queer, trans, and other genderqueer masculinities—which have been historically present in these two regions, but which have been much less represented in masculinities literature. Third, we look to identity formation, or the ways in which young cis-gender, trans, and queer men come out in their communities and seek authentic lives of desire, pleasure, and participation. At the same time, we highlight the ever-present precarity within queer communities in the Middle East/SWANA and South Asia, especially given postcolonial nationalist and ethno-nationalist agendas, which promote normative heteropatriarchal masculinities and concomitant homophobia and transphobia.