Masculinités Entrepreneuriales: refaire le commerce et le genre dans le context de la crise Syrienne

Abstract

Since 2011, new formations of masculinity and imaginaries of trade have emerged among Syrian traders escaping war and conscription through migrating to a market city in China. They reveal the co-production of gender, commerce and ideas about nationhood at a time of crisis. Rather than a status that is imperilled through migration and the loss of the breadwinner role, masculinities are approached here as cultural meanings bound up with entrepreneurial venturing, innovation, and imagined national futures. Entrepreneurial masculinities emerged as men both reckoned with a radically changed market, and sought to constitute a self that reached beyond the current moment of crisis. Ideals of entrepreneurialism were not imposed by modernising elites but emerged from the ground upwards as men navigated regimes of conscription and migration that threatened to subordinate them.