From Boys to Men: The Ethics of Masculinity among Working-Class Iranians in Dubai

This paper is concerned with the pursuit of masculinity among working-class Iranians living in Dubai. To this end, it elaborates upon the everyday lives of groups of Iranian men and youth – variously hailing from the provinces of Hormuzgan and Fars – who operate small retail operations and live together in the urban core of this Persian Gulf city. Based upon 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, and drawing from the burgeoning conceptual vocabulary of anthropology’s recent “ethical turn,” this paper examines how these men engage in self-fashioning practices (Mahmood 2005) and narrative performances (Prasad 2007) that together constitute a distinct ideal of respectable masculinity. As such, it is intended to compliment recent scholarship of masculinity in the area of Iranian studies (Gerami 2003, Khosravi 2009).
On the one hand, I examine how a particular constellation of virtues is cultivated through a variety of embodied practices in ordinary settings – practices pertaining to their homo-social residences, and interactions with customers in their shops. On the other, I examine the oral narratives that these men and youth routinely exchanged in these shared settings. These narratives often work to articulate Iran and Dubai as types of place that respectively require and enable the striving necessary to support their dependents. More specifically, these explicitly stated imaginings render Iran as a site of “moral breakdown” and Dubai as one providing the opportunities to offset the implications of this breakdown for these dependents. Thus these narratives performances do the illocutionary work of establishing their presence in Dubai and their everyday lives therein as a struggle to successfully inhabit and maintain the character of respectable men.