Becoming and “Unbecoming” Refugees: Making sense of Masculinity and Refugeness among Syrian refugee men in Egypt

Abstract

This article discusses how Syrian men in Egypt rearranged their lives around the newly imposed label “refugee” and negotiated notions of masculinity during their forced displacement. Drawing upon data collected during fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo from 2014 to 2015, this article shows that in Syrian men’s daily reality, their “refugeeness” was present through several encounters and experiences, such as worries about identity documents or contact with the state authorities. Having articulated men’s various experiences with the refugee category, this article goes on to describe how Syrian men in Cairo distanced themselves from the refugee label and tried to masculinize themselves by erecting boundaries between themselves and other Syrian men in their narratives and engaging in reverse stigmatization of the Egyptian host population.