Marcia C. Inhorn, PhD, MPH

Professor of Anthropology and International Relations, Yale University

The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East

Monday, March 30, 2015 at 4pm
121 Bay State Road, 1st Floor

Since September 11th, 2001, Arab men have been particularly vilified as terrorists, religious zealots, and brutal oppressors of women. Against this backdrop of neo-Orientalist representation, anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn presents a humanizing portrayal of ordinary Middle Eastern men as they struggle to overcome their infertility and childlessness. Contrary to popular expectations, male infertility is more common than female infertility in the Middle East, and many Middle Eastern men are engaged in high-tech forms of assisted reproduction. In today’s Middle East, men are rethinking their “Islamic masculinities” as they undertake transnational quests for conception out of devotion to the wives they love. In forwarding the trope of “emergent masculinities,” Inhorn questions taken-for-granted assumptions about Arab men as men in an era of emerging science and technology.

Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman Jr., Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs in the Department of Anthropology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. She is the current and founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) and has served as director of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale (2008-2011) and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan (2004-2006). She is one of six medical anthropologists in Yale’s Department of Anthropology. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 25 years.

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