A climate of Islamophobia allows anxieties about Muslim men living in and migrating to Britain to endure. British Muslims men are often profiled in highly negative terms or regarded with suspicion owing to their perceived religious and cultural heritage. But novels and films by British migrant and diaspora writers and filmmakers powerfully contest these stereotypes, and explore the rich diversity of Muslim masculinities in Britain. This book is the first critical study to engage with British Muslim masculinities in this literary and cinematic output from the perspective of masculinity studies. Through close analysis of work by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Guy Gunaratne, Sally El Hosaini, Hanif Kureishi, Suhayl Saadi, Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, Zia Haider Rahman and Salman Rushdie, Peter Cherry examines how migrant and diaspora protagonists negotiate their masculinity in a climate of Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric. Cherry proposes a transcultural reading of these novels and films that exposes how conceptions of 'Britishness', 'Muslimness' and those of masculinity are unstable and contingent constructs shaped by migration, interaction with other cultures, and global and local politics.

The complex nexus between masculinity and national identity has long troubled, but also fascinated the German cultural imagination. This has become apparent again since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the turn of the millennium when transnational developments have noticeably shaped Germany’s self-perception as a nation. This book examines the social and political impact of transnationalism with reference to current discourses of masculinity in novels by five contemporary male German-language authors. Specifically, it analyses how conceptions of the masculine interact with those of nationality, ethnicity, and otherness in the selected texts and assesses the new masculinities that result from those interactions. Exploring how local discourses of masculinity become part of transnational contexts in contemporary writing, the book moves a consideration of masculinities from a "native" into a transnational sphere.

This book explores the representation of queer migrant Muslims in international literature and film from the 1980s to the present day. Bringing together a variety of contemporary writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage engaged in vindicating same-sex desire, the book approaches queer Muslims in the diaspora as figures forced to negotiate their identities according to the expectations of the West and of their migrant Muslim communities. The book examines 3 main themes: the depiction of queer desire across racial and national borders, the negotiation of Islamic femininities and masculinities, and the positioning of the queer Muslim self in time and place. This study will be of interest to scholars, as well as to advanced general readers and postgraduate students, interested in Muslims, queerness, diaspora and postcolonialism. It brings nuance and complexity to an often simplified and controversial topic.

The essays in this volume provide a space for rethinking current theory on gender and masculinity, linking local issues--including representations of desire and male sexuality in Islam, current political conditions in the Middle East, and the suicide bomber phenomenon--to broader issues germane to gender studies.

Rigid notions of masculinity are causing crisis in the global Islamic community. These are articulated from the Qur'an, its commentary, historical precedents and societal, religious and familial obligations. Some Muslims who don't agree with narrow constructs of manliness feel forced to consider themselves secular and therefore outside the religious community. In order to evaluate whether there really is only one valid, ideal Islamic masculinity, The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities explores key figures of the Qur'an and Indian-Pakistani Islamic history, and exposes the precariousness of tight constraints on Islamic manhood. By examining Qur'anic arguments and the strict social responsibilities advocated along with narrow Islamic masculinities, Amanullah De Sondy shows that God and women (to whom Muslim men relate but are different from) often act as foils for the construction of masculinity. He argues the constrainers of masculinity have used God and women to think with and to dominate through and that rigid gender roles are the product of a misguided enterprise: the highly personal relationship between humans and God does not lend itself to the organization of society, because that relationship cannot be typified and replicated. Discussions and debates surrounding Islamic masculinities are quickly finding their place in the study of Islam and Muslims, and The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities makes a vital contribution to this emerging field.

This book offers the first substantial critical examination of men and masculinities in relation to political crises in South Asian literatures and cultures. It employs political crisis as a frame to analyze how South Asian men and masculinities have been shaped by critical historical events, events which have redrawn maps and remapped or unmapped bodies with different effects. These include colonialism, anti-colonialism, state formations, civil wars, religious conflicts, and migration. Political crisis functions as a framing device to offer nuances and clarifications to the assumed visibility of male bodies and male activities during political crisis. The focus on masculinities in historical moments of crisis divests masculinity of its naturalization and calls for a heterogeneous conceptualization of the everyday practices and experiences of ‘being a man.’ Written by scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, and drawing on a range of written and visual texts, this book contributes to this recent rethinking of South Asian literary and cultural history by engaging masculinity as a historicized category of analysis that accommodates an understanding of history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.