Magdalena Suerbaum’s book presents an absorbing discussion rooted in masculinities and displacement and underlines the gender-specific challenges that displaced Syrian men face in Egypt. Through an intersectional lens, Suerbaum asks how men engage with the expectations surrounding masculinities and how their notions of masculinities (and femininity) shape the performance of their gender. Using detailed vignettes she paints an evocative picture of how displacement disrupts Syrian men’s aspiration for a middle-class heteropatriarchal family structure and how they cope with the impairments that displacement brings to their masculine sense of self. In successive chapters Suerbaum highlights how notions about class in the Syrian context accompany displacement, transmute in the Egyptian context, and are deployed to renegotiate masculinities as a displaced person.
Chapter 1 introduces a chief feature of everyday life in Syria: the military’s omnipresence shaping Syrian boys through childhood and culminating in the military service mandatory for all adult males. Even...
