Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices.
The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.
Introduction | Sex in the Middle East and North Africa: Complicated Legacies and the Politics of Representation | Angel M. Foster and L. L. Wynn
Part I: Single and Dating
Chapter 1: Anywhere but Home: Dating, Hooking Up, and Casual Sex in Jordan | I. M. El-Mowafi and Angel M. Foster
Chapter 2: Gay Sex Apps and Normative Masculinity among Queer Men in Beirut, Lebanon | Mathew Gagné
Chapter 3: Better Out than In: The Importance of Withdrawal in Sex and Family Planning in Turkey | Katrina MacFarlane
Chapter 4: Queer Sociality in the Gulf in the Early 2000s: A Continuum of Outness and Silence Mediated by Class Privilege | Saffaa Hassanein and L. L. Wynn
Chapter 5: Hexes and Exes: Post-Breakup Curses in Fez, Morocco | Shannon Hayes
Part II: Engaged and Married
Chapter 6: God under the Bedsheets: Pleasure, Porn, and Piety among Iranian Revolutionary Women | Younes Saramifar
Chapter 7: The Gendered Relationship between Sex and Marriage in Egypt: Interrogating Secret Marriages among Urban Youth in Cairo and Minya | Rania Salem
Chapter 8: For Us, There Is No Love: Becoming "American" and the Politics of Intimacy | Morgen A. Chalmiers
Chapter 9: The Wives of the Heroes, Smuggled Sperm, and Reproductive Technologies: Palestinian Women Building Families on Their Own | Laura Ferrero
Part III: It's Complicated
Chapter 10: Blurred Lines between Transactional Sex and Paramarital Relationships in Egypt | L. L. Wynn
Chapter 11: Legal and Illegal Sex Work in Tunisia: Before and After the 2010–2011 Revolution | Laurence Michalak
Chapter 12: Love, Sex, and Sexuality in Morocco: Navigating Barriers, Expanding Boundaries | Ginger Feather
Chapter 13: (Un)hiding the Samaritan's Sexuality in Egypt: Insights from a Coptic Woman's Journal | Mina Ibrahim
Conclusion | Sexual Emergence in the Middle East and North Africa: Ten Insights from the Ethnography | Marcia C. Inhorn
Glossary
Contributors
Index
