Masculinities and Racial Terms of Belonging in Post-colonial Tunis

Area studies paradigms awkwardly position the states of northern Africa as African and largely disconnected from much of the continent, belonging to the Middle East and yet marginal there as well. We see these positionalities as well as colonial legacies, geostrategic concerns, experiences of Afro-Asian solidarity, Islam and Islamic movements, and the revolutionary mobilizations starting in 2010, as informing official and popular notions of identity and their racialization. Considering scholarship on women, gender, and patriarchy, we offer examples of ways in which masculinity was imagined and embodied at different moments in postcolonial Tunisia, and the racial terms of belonging that intersect with socio-economic status. How are notions of masculinity constructed in relation to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East? How do they shape what it means to be Arab to the exclusion of other identities and in relation to Islam? How are experiences of masculinity informed by hegemonic constructions of state secularism and women’s rights as aspects of national belonging?