Syrian Men’s Disability and Their Masculine Trajectories in the Context of Displacement in Jordan and Turkey

This article analyzes the relationship between men’s physical disability and the trajectories of negotiating masculinities in the context of Syrian refugee displacement in Jordan and Turkey. The article draws its analysis from the personal narratives of five displaced Syrian refugee men who sustained injuries during the war in Syria. It explores how Syrian refugee men with disabilities remake their masculine bodies and selves to create a new version of masculinity that responds to the changes in their socioeconomic circumstances and bodies. The article argues that the disabled Syrian refugee men went through multiple and contradictory masculine trajectories that intersect with multiple identities and different types of disability. Disabled Syrian refugee men’s emergent masculine embodiments created a version of masculinity that, although it adhered to the patriarchal family values of connectivity and intimacy, does not in its practice legitimate domination within the family and in the Syrian refugee community.

A Delicate Balancing Act

Historically Arab regimes have played critical roles in securing women’s rights in their societies. Yet regimes remain concerned about domestic, especially Islamist and traditionalist, reactions to women’s rights. When regimes feel they can overcome this resistance they honor commitments to women’s rights. When they fear more domestic opposition they renege. This article argues that Arab regimes are less likely to resist domestic opposition to women’s rights when US military presence increases in the region. The authors test the argument using cross-national data including an original expert-coder scale of Islamist power, and estimate an instrumental variable model to allay concerns of endogeneity. A case study of Jordan explicates their causal argument. The results are robust to different measures of Islamist strength and to different estimation techniques. Understanding this unintended consequence of US military deployments to the Arab world is important for future analysis of female empowerment in the Arab world.

Ladies Aid as Labor History

In the Arabic-speaking mahjar (diaspora), the plight of the working poor was the focus of women’s philanthropy. Scholarship on welfare relief in the interwar Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian diaspora currently situates it within a gendered politics of benevolence. This article reconsiders that frame and argues for a class-centered reassessment of “ladies aid” politics exploring the intersections of women’s relief with proletarian mutual aid strategies. Founded in 1917, the Syrian Ladies Aid Society (SLAS) of Boston provided food, shelter, education, and employment to Syrian workers. SLAS volunteers understood their efforts as mitigating the precarities imposed on Syrian workers by the global capitalist labor system. Theirs was both a women’s organization and a proletarian movement led by Syrian women. Drawing from SLAS records and the Syrian American press, the article centers Syrian American women within processes of working-class formation and concludes that labor history of the interwar mahjar requires focus on spaces of social reproduction beyond the factory floor.

Facing the Past

Through a consideration of three film works—Ravished Armenia/Auction of Souls (1919), Testimony (2007), and Remembering (2019), which all represent the testimonies of Armenian women to form truths of the catastrophe—this article problematizes how such portrayals might, contrary to their best intentions, resonate with the logic of genocide. By discussing specific woman figures in the three works, published at three times in the postgenocidal era—one just after the events, the other two recently—this article aims not only to mark the evolution of the representational regime with which the Armenian woman is surrounded but also to show that this phenomenon is a key component in a transformation of the lexicon developed around the recognition politics, which ought to involve something other than feverishly chasing a representation of the events of 1915–17 and using women’s witness narratives to this end.

Muslim Fashionistas in Contemporary Turkey

Turkey’s Islamic fashion market transformed during the 2010s with the entry of young, bourgeois, fashion-conscious Muslim female entrepreneurs. As designers, manufacturers, and retailers, these “Muslim fashionistas” not only gained the attention of young Muslim women but also became lifestyle gurus, projecting images of the successful entrepreneur, the ideal mother, the benevolent philanthropist, and the leisure enthusiast. This combination of roles resonates with the notion of the “ideal Muslim woman” promoted by the government. But its performance entails moments of imperfection and moral dilemma, as the demands of capitalism and consumerism place Muslim fashionistas in opposition to the teachings of their faith and traditional gender regimes. Drawing on practice theory, and on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul, this article explores Muslim fashionistas’ everyday performances in the fields of family, charity, and leisure. The objective is to analyze how these agents negotiate and interpret quotidian inconsistencies between their religious and social ideals and those ideals’ manifestation.