Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa is a timely volume, since academic interest in masculinities is carving a greater space for itself day by day in area studies, which have been spending greater energy in women’s studies to discuss gender. Masculinities have been invisible to the academics for a long time, but now critical masculinity studies is trending. Edited by Mohja Kaf and Nadine Sinno, this valuable collection of sixteen articles illuminates how masculinities, their anxieties, crises, and so-called toxicity, are relevant issues in the discussion of European imperialism and the backlash it caused, authoritarian state institutions, mentality of reaction and revolt, and also diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and malpractices. The collection has a queer-inclusive view that aims to shed light on the processes during which masculinities are constructed and deconstructed, and it also historicizes masculinities by making the colonial and the postcolonial mentalities face each other.Masculinities are discussed in depth from various points of view in this volume. Sexual double standards in the culture are negotiated; forces of religion and new forms of masculinity that are formed around new trajectories of politization are examined. By underlining neopatriarchies in the region, Kaf actually explains why such a gendered look at the current realities of the region is timely and necessary: with a critical lens focused on masculinities, it becomes possible to see power dynamics in a reflexive manner and to look at archetypal normative models with a new consciousness, with an aim to see which parts of them are becoming old-school, at least to some extent. This, apparently, is a challenge to the centralization of stereotypes for Middle Eastern masculinities in the Western academy, as it suggests a new cultural awareness.Regional realities are always connected with dynamics outside the region. In the introduction Kaf rightfully reminds us that changes in discourses about masculinities cannot be understood only by looking at the internal dynamics of cultures, countries, and regions: in the Orientalist grand scheme, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) masculinities “seem always to be on the wrong side of civilization,” because “when Imperialist Orientalism was anti-gay, MENA men were condemned as shockingly gay and sexually permissive, but after the sexual revolutions of the twentieth century in the US and Europe, MENA men were reduced to being shockingly macho and sexually repressive” (12). This is a powerful reminder to keep power relations of the specific periods in mind, while dealing with masculinity in a historicist manner.This collection is predominantly occupied with literary and cinematic texts, and it ultimately reinstates certain facts, such as the fluidity of gender and the importance of overall (social, cultural, and political) power dynamics in the analysis of gender. The book opens with a chapter on visibility and hypervisibility of Arab queer, in which Jedidiah C. Anderson links the complexities about Arab queer to the great project of European imperialism. Amal Amireh turns in her chapter to Palestinian literature to negotiate the sustainability of the motif of the freedom fighter. Nadine Sinno adds a discussion on the very fragile construction of heterosexual masculinity in the Lebanese novelist Rashid Al-Daif’s works, and Kifah Hanna, again with Lebanese masculinities as her focus, elaborates on the civil war as the founding layer of power/control freakiness of masculinities. Robert James Farley discusses politicization of masculinities along nationalistic agendas, focusing on the differences between generations of men in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1956–57).Three more chapters revolve around literary texts before the focus of the collection shifts to cinema. Nicole Fares carries questions about Arab men to the diaspora and focuses on the tensions of not belonging, which put a powerful shadow on the often-quoted discourses on diversity, cosmopolitanism, and integration. Alessandro Columbu takes Zakariya Tamir’s works as his focus and elaborates on the representations of authoritarian atmosphere in Syria in literary texts, which produces politically castrated masculinities. John Tofik Karam’s chapter flips the critical gaze to analyze how MENA masculinities are viewed from North and South America. There he finds a reproduction of macho Arab masculinities, which opens up new questions on neo-Orientalisms.Chapters on cinema take the discussion to a new ground. Kaveh Bassiri focuses on Iranian cinema and discusses the transformation of hegemonic masculinities during the 1979 Islamic revolution. Nouri Gana’s chapter on postcolonial Tunisian cinema explains how top-down modernization in the country empowered paternalistic and patriarchal mentalities. Sarah Hudson turns to Palestinian cinema, which, in a different mood of postcolonialism, operates in an atmosphere of human rights abuses and nationalistic endeavors.The remaining five chapters do not have literature or cinema as their explicit focus; rather, they conduct a sociocultural and anthropological reading of masculinities. Matthew B. Parnell focuses on nineteenth-century Egyptian cartoons and discusses how masculinities serve in that context as symbols for the loss of power. Kathryn Kalemkerian sheds light on the dynamics of the Ottoman bureaucracy in Beirut and discusses how military and civil masculinities coincided in that city. Oyman Başaran’s chapter maintains the trend of following military mentality as he examines gay men’s clash with mandatory military service in Turkey. Andrea Fischer-Tahir analyzes Iraqi peshmerga masculinities to spot the fragile dimensions of hegemonic masculinities. Finally, Ebtihal Mahadeen examines how Jordanian militarist masculinities reappear as the glue of the society when there is a threat to the nation in public discourse.Overall, this is a rich volume that covers a vast historical period in a wide geographic area. Commonalities and differences in different parts of the MENA region make for an interesting read, especially since theories of masculinities often refer to phenomena such as diversity of masculinities, the unattainability of an ideal masculinity, and transnational/transgenerational aspects of change, but few studies actually portray a cosmopolitan picture. I consider this book also a powerful and critical response to Eric Anderson’s (2009) controversial inclusive masculinity theory. Anderson’s observations on changing behaviors of heterosexual men in male peer-group cultures in the United States and the United Kingdom can be valid in terms of the decrease in homophobia, but chapters in this collection show that in a greater sampling it is clear that ethnic, sexual, and religious stigmas are still alive in the formation and reformation of masculinities, even at times in the millennial generation.