Abstract
This article explores how revolution stories become a claim to manhood in Egypt, which may be used as leverage when men struggle to live up to the ideal of male provider. The revolution is stylized in the stories that youth have about their participation in the 2011 Thawrat Shabaab (youth revolution). In analyzing the narration and performance of the revolution stories, Herzfeld’s concept of performative excellence becomes relevant. Based on fieldwork undertaken in Cairo, Egypt, in 2013, the author argues that revolution stories and being good at telling jokes impart masculine capital. Inspired by Inhorn’s call for ethnographies on Arab men, this article engages with how Egyptian manhood is produced in interaction with peer groups and underlines the importance of male friendship and humor. Focusing on men from the upper-middle class of Cairo highlights how deeply classed (male) gender is in contemporary Egypt.
Introducing Saleh, a Revolutionary Husband
Saleh is a young man in his early thirties. He moved to Egypt when he was fifteen. He grew up and spent most of his childhood living in Saudi Arabia with his mother, father, and older brother. He is born in Egypt and has Egyptian nationality, and he identifies as Egyptian. In 2013, Saleh worked in a software company and earned a respectable salary. He lived with his parents in Doqqi until he got married, and after getting married, he and his wife spent some time living with his mother, because their apartment took longer to get remodeled than they had planned. Saleh’s father unfortunately died after being sick for some time the year before his son married.
In 2013, I followed the lives of Saleh and his bride as they prepared to get married and then afterward as they moved into their new family home. Here, I will tell parts of their story to show how Saleh lays claim to a type of masculinity associated with his participation in the 2011 revolution, and how this gives him leverage when he struggles to live up to the Egyptian male provider ideal. In an Egypt marred by economic crisis, the road toward financial independence, not to mention being able to provide a middle-class lifestyle for a family, is not easily traveled. Even university graduates struggle to find jobs, and as one graduate of the prestigious and very expensive American University in Cairo wrote on Facebook in 2013: “Congratulations all graduates, I will see you in the breadlines soon enough.”
This article is inspired by a call for ethnographies on men and marriage, and particularly on Arab men’s “emergent masculinities,” or changing notions of manhood across the Arab world today (Inhorn 2012, 2014, 71). In a bid to contribute to the growing body of scholarship concerned with the everyday lives of Arab men, this article is concerned with the male provider role in Egypt and possible alternative paths to manhood and marriage as observed in Cairo during the spring of 2013. 1 This article does not directly address the Egyptian youth revolution of 2011 but shows instead how some young men employed the stories of their participation and of their bravery to carve alternative paths to manhood as they struggled to live up to a middle-class provider ideal. The stories and their performance, as well as performances of comedy and joking, are conceived of as a type of “masculine capital” (de Visser, Smith, and McDonnell 2009), which is accumulated and provides leverage when men lack masculine capital in other arenas of their lives.
Inspired by Farha Ghannam’s (2013) work on masculinity in Egypt, I view masculinity as closely linked to social class, capital, and labor. I adopt Veblen’s (1899) concept of “conspicuous leisure” to comment on the class-based access to certain types of skills and to show how Saleh’s ability to be brave is classed and linked to these skills. In addition, I employ Herzfeld’s (1985) concept of “performative excellence” to engage with how masculinity is interactional and contextual; it is not about what one does, but how well one does it.
A Small Romantic Wedding
Saleh and his bride chose to get married in a “ruined castle” location in Egypt’s Sinai desert, mostly because they loved the venue, but also to keep the wedding small. They explained that if they hosted it in Cairo, it would require inviting 400 or more guests, as social obligations would demand, and this would break their budget. The wedding eventually became a small, intimate affair of a mere sixty guests, and those who made it complimented the couple on creating a fun, different kind of wedding.
After dinner, everyone cleared out of the dining hall back onto the terrace overseeing the Red Sea and the shared Jordanian and Saudi Arabian coastline. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and as it was getting darker, Saleh’s friend Ahmed took the microphone to give a speech. The speech was stylistically addressed to the bride, but it was about the groom, a testimony of his bravery and manliness. He talked of Saleh’s part in the 2011 revolution. He told stories of how he and Saleh decided to camp in Tahrir Square and how Saleh (a seasoned camper) pitched his tent there. As the revolution carried on, many people did the same, and as the square filled up, Saleh and his friend let people stay in their tent. They also got hold of food supplies that they shared with others, and they provided regular updates from their camp on various social media outlets. Ahmed told this story of their experiences together in the square as a part of his speech about what a “great guy” Saleh was and continues to be. He held up values and virtues such as his humility and bravery, generosity, cleverness, and positivity. He laughingly told the audience that Saleh is so humble, “He doesn’t even have a Twitter account.” He also explained how he, Ahmed, had traveled the world to talk about the revolution and his experiences, but Saleh never wants his name mentioned. Ahmed went on to tell the guests about how brave Saleh is, as he proved when he went to Muhammed Mahmoud Street to fight the army and the police, later in November 2011. He told of how Saleh was shot in the face and ended up in the hospital. At this point, several of Saleh’s male friends protested loudly, because they wanted to spare his mother the horrible details and to “cover Saleh’s ass,” because his mother does not know the entire story. Ahmed explained how the tent in Tahrir was Saleh’s clever idea and how he shared the tent and food with others. He then told the audience that Saleh went home for a couple of days during the camping in Tahrir. “I know it’s not really related,” he said, “but I felt like when Saleh was away, the revolution slowed down and almost was stopped. But then when he came back it gathered momentum again. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I felt like, if Saleh was there with me it would be fine, and we would succeed.”
Ahmed strove to keep the speech positive and funny, and people laughed when he talked of Saleh getting shot, because everyone knew Saleh himself told the story with a lot of humor. It was doubly funny, because he lied to his parents and his employer that day in order to go to the square, and he got caught because Ahmed tweeted “Saleh got shot!” Saleh, of course, had to go home and confess his lie to his parents because he could not hide the birdshot he had taken in his face, torso, and arms. Ahmed’s speech ended with how Saleh was “The core of the revolution” and “Just looking to fulfill his purpose in the revolution.”
A Marriage
Saleh and his wife’s first couple of months as a married couple were somewhat rocky, as they faced many delays with their apartment remodeling and had to stay with Saleh’s mother for the first two months. Normally, the apartment is supposed to be ready before the wedding, but due to delays, mounting credit card bills, and waiting for materials to be delivered, finishing their apartment took much longer than planned. Saleh was not happy about having to spend the honeymoon days in his mother’s house, in a room fitted with separate beds, which he referred to, jokingly, as “the dorm.”
The last thing to happen on the day when they finally moved all their things into their new home was that they discovered bumps in their brand new wooden floors. They had to cut the floor open and leave it to dry, before they could have parts of the floor refitted. Finally, they had all of their friends over for a housewarming party. The apartment had three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a half bathroom, a big kitchen with a dining area, and a spacious salon/living room, as well as a small balcony. As the couple’s friends were waiting for food to get ready and for everyone to arrive, I sat with Saleh and a friend of his outside. I asked him what was different about married life. He quickly, with a sarcastic grin, said “my wallet,” and his friend laughed. “Before I could just take a weekend off and go diving if I felt like it, and spend money on myself without thinking,” he said. Saleh’s friend asked, “But doesn’t your wife work?” Saleh replied, “Yes, but anyways it’s different now.” And then he said, voice full of laughter, “Well, it’s nice that someone is always there and all of that.”
Saleh told me some weeks later, when I stayed with them for a couple of days, that he and his wife have a shared economy. He pays for all he can, such as bills, household expenses, and so on, but when he runs out of money, she pitches in. With the expenses of finishing the apartment and the wedding, on top of monthly expenses like phone bills, gas, electricity, dog food, and people food, they cannot afford as much as they would like, or are used to.
However, as they explained to me when I expressed concern for them, they do not have a mortgage. When they finish paying the credit card bills and the expenses related to the work on the house, they will not have any big expenses left. As another one of my interlocutors once commented, Egyptians “live life when they are young, not like Americans,” who have to pay back their mortgage until they are sixty before they can enjoy their riches. This, of course, applies only to those Egyptians who have the capital required to purchase their marital home or whose parents have been able to secure an apartment for their sons. For most people in Egypt, this is not so.
A Brave, Revolutionary Husband
The Egyptian male ideal of the family provider is central to young men who are establishing their lives (Ghannam 2013). A good man makes sure his family eats (Naguib 2015), has a roof over their head, and is happy. He protects them, and as we see with the revolution of 2011, this extends beyond protecting the family in the home, to protecting their future through attempting to change Egypt’s political realities.
The poem cited in the beginning of this article is by the beloved Egyptian poet, Ahmed Fouad Negm. The poem was written three decades prior to the revolution of 2011, but it was brought back to life as protesters in the square chanted this and other poems by the outspoken poet:
This poem underlines the point made during the Revolution: the brave men are brave and should prove it by coming to the square. In the square, they protected their families and their futures through demanding a better future for Egypt.
Saleh came to the square, and this is what his friend Ahmed explained in his speech. In the speech, Ahmed was attempting to convey to the bride that she could rest assured that she had married a good man, because a good man is a brave man, as Saleh had proved in Tahrir. By giving the speech at Saleh’s wedding, Ahmed was also bringing revolutionary masculine capital into Saleh’s marriage. As his peer group participated in the performance of the story, Saleh’s standing as a man among his friends was underlined and brought into his marriage.
Bravery as an Egyptian masculine ideal is not a new phenomenon (see discussion of gada’ in Ghannam 2013 and El Messiri 1978, cited in Ghannam 2012, 33–34). But what is interesting in the contemporary postrevolutionary context of Cairo is how the revolution is here used to narrate Saleh’s claim to manhood. Tahrir Square becomes the “ultimate test” of manhood. Through his participation in the January 2011 uprising, Saleh proved himself to be a man through the arena of revolutionary bravery. Thus, even when he failed to provide fully for his wedding and marital home, he had an alternative arena in which he could assert and maintain his masculinity, bringing those claims with him into other arenas of everyday life.
In the anthropological literature on masculinity in the Arab world (Gilsenan 1996; Herzfeld 1985; Peteet 1994), the constitutive force of violence is prevalent. Although I do not argue that it is merely enduring violence that makes Saleh brave, there are similarities to the work of Julie Peteet (1994) on the second intifada in Palestine. Peteet argues that young men who return from imprisonment in Israeli prisons overturn traditional patterns of generational masculinity. The imprisonment and torture the youth have been subjected to grant them a male authority normally only granted with age and fathering children. In effect, the endurance of violence and the display of bravery give the young men masculine currency formerly reserved to older men with sons. Similarly, in Saleh’s case, his bravery, participation, and endurance of violence have given him an alternative path to manhood, like the young Palestinian men in Peteet’s study. In Saleh’s case, his revolutionary bravery grants him leverage when he fails to fully live up to the prevalent ideal of being the sole provider for his new family.
What I observed with Saleh, and some of the other young Egyptian men who participated in my study, was their struggle to live up to the idea of what a man should be. It is considered a failure for men of middle-class backgrounds like Saleh to be unable to fulfill the ideal of provider for the family. 2 This leads some young men to migrate for better-paid jobs or to postpone marriage (Singerman 2007). This struggle to reach a status as a male provider manifests particularly when men are planning or thinking of getting married. They need to be able to provide, and providing normally takes on a very materialistic dimension in this part of their lives. The “symbols” of a middle-class providing man essentially manifest as a home, a car, and the shabka (the gifts given to the bride), as well as the brideprice or maḥr. In addition, the young man must be employed in a “proper” job and earn a salary to cover living expenses.
Saleh has struggled to do this: he is often broke before the end of the month and has to ask his wife to pay for some of the living expenses. However, he has acquired some leverage based on his revolutionary narrative. He has proven himself. He is a good man and husband, because he is brave and willing to sacrifice for his wife, his family, and his country. In Saleh’s case, he has proven his performative excellence (Herzfeld 1985) through the revolution.
Performative Excellence—Putting on a Show
The stories of Tahrir are, of course, stories. Naguib (2009, 141) refers to stories as “[M]emories of the past merging with current life.” Most young people I met in Cairo in 2011 and 2013 had some kind of “revolution story.” They were selective pieces, often told in a specific way, with a buildup, and usually outlining how the young person “learned” to be a protestor and fashioned himself or herself into a fighter. In most of these stories, young people started out as passive, naive, idealistic youth, but they became disillusioned, and often they spoke of their rage during the revolutionary fighting. The stories usually include a dramatic highlight—either being hurt or of having taken part in one of the “famous” televised scenes, such as praying Muslims being showered by water cannons, the storming of Qasr El Nil bridge, or “the battle of the Camels.” Sometimes the highlight was about helping to carry people with lethal injuries to the hospital. These stories most often ended well, with memories of acts of kindness or with the elation of February 11, 2011, when Mubarak stepped down.
One of the stories I heard was just a few weeks after the ouster of Mubarak, as my interlocutor was showing me and a visitor around Tahrir Square. Still bandaged from having been shot with birdshot, he told us about his participation in the “day of rage” (January 28, 2011) and pushing through police barricades on the Qasr El Nil Bridge as part of the group that took the square. As we walked around the square, he placed different events. In the end, we walked across the bridge to stand at the monument on the Gezira side of the bridge, while he told of the fighting in waves, pushing against the police, giving up, returning, breaking, and then going again. He told of the deep frustration and eventually a sense of defeat from the protestors who could not breach the police line.
As they were nearing the point of giving up, a march arrived with people coming in from the squares of Giza (on the opposite riverbed from Tahrir Square, accessing Tahrir via bridges across Gezira Island in the Nile). He told us that the people of Giza are stereotyped as “rough,” and for that reason, they were welcomed with cheers. The tired protestors who had been fighting all morning stepped aside, allowing the Giza protestors to pass in front. The new influx provided optimism and new momentum. As the now joined group of protestors stormed the bridge, the police barricade was breached and collapsed. In video footage, this moment is observed as the police officers turning to flee, opening the bridge for hundreds and hundreds of people to flood into the square and take control of Tahrir Square.
Listening to many stories of youthful bravery during the revolution brings to mind Michael Herzfeld’s (1985) work on manhood in Crete. In his monograph, Herzfeld develops the concept of performative excellence: […] there is less focus on “being a good man” than on “being good at being a man”
Performance, Class, and Conspicuous Leisure
Saleh knew how to set up camp in Tahrir, and the skills he employed are reminiscent of Veblen’s (1899) notion of conspicuous leisure. Certain types of performances are highly classed (Veblen 1899, 33), and as Bourdieu (1994, 175) has argued, the ultimate expenditure of capital is in time. Veblen showed how time spent on nonproductive activities was central to the ways in which the “leisure class” distinguished itself. What characterized the middle class, or “petit bourgeoisie,” was how time and capital were strategically spent on activities that would contribute to the total accumulation of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984).
As a young man, Saleh spent a considerable amount of time learning skills not directly related toward being able to earn a wage. In Egypt’s class-based society, what truly distinguishes the working class from the middle class is the deficit of time for leisure activities (Ghannam 2013). For men especially, they must often learn to hold two or more jobs to make ends meet. The deficit of time means many working-class men do not have the time for “leisure” activities, such as spending time with family or even sleeping. They definitely do not have time to practice sports, travel, or take costly classes to learn nonproductive skills such as camping.
In Saleh’s case, this was not an issue. He was a young professional, still living with his parents for many years prior to his marriage, so he could afford to use his leisure time for actual leisure. He could afford (and was in a position to be allowed by his boss) to take time off from work in order to pursue leisure activities. It was therefore possible for him to acquire the skills he used to become well regarded by his friends during the revolution. He was able to help others by setting up camp, and he himself spent time holding the square alongside the other protestors. He performed a skill, and through performing this skill, he embodied the important Egyptian masculine values of being helpful and being able to pass along his knowledge.
Fighting the police, however, was a completely different type of knowledge that Saleh, as well as my other interlocutors, did not possess. Instead, in the 2011 revolution, the football fan group, called the Ultras, played a particular role (see Rommel 2016), as they had acquired knowledge of how to deal with the Egyptian police’s “crowd control” tactics. Thus, they took part in the revolution by helping to keep the police at bay (Woltering 2013). One female interlocutor told me of how she learned how to run, where to hide, as well as dealing with exposure to tear gas. This knowledge, many told me, came from the Ultras at first. But as one young woman said, while sharing revolution stories with a casual group of friends: “We had to learn to become demonstrators.”
Joking Performances
In his group of friends, Saleh played an important role as jokester, and more often than not, his jokes were self-ironic. As shown above, Saleh was more than willing to joke about what could be seen as failure to fulfill his role as provider for his family. But due to his claim to bravery and selflessness as a revolutionary, his manhood was not endangered by this.
When I first introduced my research topic of masculinity and marriage to Saleh, he answered me, laughing, by saying that “marriage breaks masculinity.” In this sense, he was joking about how his wife now consumes his leisure time, making him lose his masculine independence. In effect then, marriage means a shift from, or even a break with, the strong ties between men and their male friends in informal social groups (Baron 2005). In this regard, men share an understanding that marriage interferes with and disrupts the established homosocial ties that guarantee young men like Saleh their masculine capital. Prior to marriage, men are the recipients of others’ stories and jokes, and as such, they are coperformers in men’s claims to manhood.
There are also changing financial and social demands that a wife, and society more generally, puts on a married man. He is tied down financially, can no longer “take off” to spend time with his friends, and when not the sole provider, must compromise with his wife. Joking about the ways in which marriage ties men down speaks truth to an underlying reality, or as Mary Douglas (1968, 364) states, “For a moment, the unconscious is allowed to bubble up without restraint, hence the sense of enjoyment and freedom.”
Joking lightens reality with humor, allowing Egyptian men to maintain the very important characteristic known dam khafeef—literally, “light blood,” or a person of positivity and light heartedness (Fernea 1970, 279; also see El Messiri 1978, 2–3, for a comment on the centrality of joking in Egyptian culture). In the idea of dam khafeef lies an Egyptian ideal of being able to laugh at oneself in the most difficult situations (Fernea 1970, 279). This character of having light blood is something people strive for.
For example, as I spent time with a group of friends, those gathered were laughing heartily as they urged a woman in the group to give her husband more water. He was not seen as funny, so she needed to dilute or lighten his blood. This was also a mild reprimand to the husband, telling him that he needed to “lighten up” and not take everything so seriously. In Saleh’s case, through joking, he releases the pressure attached to him for not being able to live up to the ideal of sole provider. Indeed, Saleh has mastered the art of dam khafeef as he is viewed as his group’s jokester. Alongside his acts of bravery in the revolution, he can make jokes that play with the idea of proper manhood. Self-deprecatingly, he displays himself as a failed man, but through this, he actually gains masculine capital. He is not only good at being brave, via his strong revolution story; he is also a skilled comedian. In effect, through owning up to his failures as a male provider, he negates the failure through his performative excellence (i.e., manliness) as a truly funny jokester.
Masculine Capital, Performative Excellence, and Peer Group
Being a jokester is central to Saleh’s role in his peer group, and through his skill in comedy, he upholds his performative excellence. His ability to joke about his failure to provide is based in part on the audiences’ prior knowledge of his participation and bravery during the revolution. His joking and comedy continue to provide him with the type of masculine capital that is not directly linked to his capabilities as sole provider. The cultural centrality and value put on dam khafeef or lightheartedness in Egypt makes Saleh’s ability to joke about his financial difficulties and his marital relationship a feature of his performative excellence. Saleh’s has light blood, dam khafeef, so he is good at being an Egyptian man. As a contributor to his peer group, his standing as a man is not damaged by his wallet, and precisely through making fun, he negates the lack of masculine and economic capital in one arena by being good at being a man in another.
As seen in Saleh’s example, a man’s masculine standing, or his masculine capital, is an aggregate of his multiple social positions. As argued by de Visser, Smith, and McDonnell (2009), the transference value of masculine capital from one arena to another is not necessarily given. As seen in Egyptian men’s stories, masculine capital may be accumulated but not necessarily directly transferred from one arena of a man’s life to another. Saleh, the main protagonist in this article, accumulated masculine capital through his participation in the revolution, his acknowledged bravery within his peer group, and his skill in comedy. Saleh’s performative excellence—of bravery, joking, and other masculine virtues—needed an audience in order to be recognized. In classic studies of performativity (Levi-Strauss 1963; Goffman [1959] 1990), the audience also plays an important role. As the performance is always interactive, it must not only be performed with skill, but it also must be received with acceptance.
In Saleh’s performance of jokes about his failure of being a male provider, there is risk—that is, risk to Saleh (what if no one laughs? what if the joke is off?)—but also to his audience. As his audience guarantees his claim to manhood, Saleh’s peer group has a stake in his claim to performative excellence and manhood. Because his audience as coperformers has invested in Saleh as part of their peer group, they retell his story and laugh and praise his jokes, thereby receiving a performative dividend by maintaining the validity of his performances. They provide a grateful audience, and are, in fact, Saleh’s biggest supporters. Joking is risky labor for Saleh, but in his appreciative peer group, the risk is safely spread.
Conclusion: Postrevolution, Posthope?
In Egypt, revolution stories became masculine stories and are the way in which young men 3 created and maintained alternative paths toward the male ideal. Tahrir Square became more than a physical arena. Their stories were a way for men to take this arena with them, even after the physical events within Tahrir Square came to an end. At the event of Saleh’s marriage, the revolution story became part of the constitutive moment in Saleh’s life cycle. As he then moved forward as a married man, the story was told as part of the move into a new life phase. As such, the “memories of the past merg[e] with current life” (Naguib 2009, 141) as they are made part of Saleh’s marriage, as well as Saleh’s new role as husband. Through the constitution of a new family unit, the stories also merged with his imagined future.
Like any type of capital, the masculine value of revolution stories like Saleh’s may differ depending on the context or market—that is, the currency may fluctuate or even be taken out of circulation. Over time, the transferal value, or the “going rate,” of revolution stories has changed in Egypt, as the political landscape has continued to change in the postrevolutionary period. The revolution of 2011 is today seen as by Saleh and his friends as “failed.” Most of the “revolutionary” youth with whom I have worked are disillusioned. Instead, these Egyptian youth such as Saleh have faced the postrevolutionary period by emigrating to other countries. Saleh is part of the privileged elite for whom emigration was an option. Until the emigration option became possible, however, Saleh, as well as other revolutionary Egyptian youth, was faced with the futility of their sacrifices, their injuries, and those friends who were imprisoned, “disappeared,” or died in the struggle.
It is becoming increasingly clear that today, some Egyptians are moving to countries in which new citizenship is possible, due to fears of what the future in Egypt brings. The safety of a new passport from countries such as Canada is coveted, guaranteeing safety over the “lifestyle” afforded by higher salaries in places such as Qatar. Migration for many Egyptians today is not only a path to a higher-class status but to security for their future families, which can no longer be assured in Egypt.
In the political climate of today’s Egypt, Saleh’s revolution story holds masculine capital only with certain groups. Right after the revolution, such stories were valid currency in many social settings. But as time wore on, those settings became more and more restricted. By the time I returned to Cairo in 2013, some people would no longer share their stories with me, unless I had been vouched for by their closest friends.
At the time of this writing, the revolution of 2011 and the military takeover of 2013 have strong political connotations. Thus, the stories of revolutionary participation may land one in prison. Therefore, the audience with which the stories are still valid currency has shrunk dramatically. In some ways, then, revolution stories are a type of masculine capital that has since become nontransferable. The revolution is over. As I sat at a café in Medinat Nasr in the summer of 2017, just a few blocks away from the square where protestors were massacred in 2013 at the Rabea sit-in, several former revolutionary youth—now fathers with babies and families—told me their priorities have shifted.
As for Saleh, he still has his scars from the revolution and carries with him the stories of a time filled with hope. It is no longer clear what type of leverage Saleh’s revolution story grants him today, either in Egypt or abroad. However, in his family and his social network, Saleh’s stories are remembered and are part of the quiet discussion of what comes next in postrevolutionary Egypt.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author recieved a scholarship from L. Meltzers høyskolefond to conduct fieldwork.