Subverting the Archetype Heterogeneous Masculinities in Contemporary Arab American Women’s Fiction

Abstract

This article examines the heterogeneous Arab masculinities which contemporary Arab American women’s novels offer. This diversity, as this article contends, dismantles the universalizing discourses on Arab men as identical and the conventional fathering model inspired by patriarchy and social conventions as the only option. The Western hegemonic conceptualization of Arab masculinity is that of dominance, patriarchy, oppression, and the like, hence rendering Arabs identically isomorphic and denying them the possibility of change and progress. However, contemporary Arab American literature subverts this ideologically driven representation through presenting miscellaneous Arab masculinities. The dissimilarity of Arab migrant fathers in The Other Americans (2019), The Inheritance of Exile (2007), and Swimming toward the Light (2007) suggests the plurality of Arabs, the malleability of Arab masculinities, the heterogeneity of Arab fathers and their fathering models, and the invalidity of the monolithic and essentialist Western discourse.