An article by Assistant Professor of Sociology Jaime Kucinskas was recently published in the journal Comparative Sociology. “Gender Ideals in Turbulent Times: An Examination of Insecurity, Islam, and Muslim Men’s Gender Attitudes during the Arab Spring” was co-authored with Tamara van der Does of Indiana University.
The authors used Arab Barometer data to examine gender attitudes of Muslim men in Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen during the 2011 Arab Spring, a time of heightened social, political and economic unrest. They looked at the relationship between living in economic, safety and political insecurity, which may be a threat to masculine ideals, and male overcompensation, evident in patriarchal gender ideology. They also considered whether the relationship is influenced by Islamic religiosity.
The results showed that political Islam is strongly related to the patriarchal gender attitudes of Muslim men in those countries and that the effects of living in insecurity and other facets of Islamic religiosity on men’s gender ideology vary by country.
The researchers concluded that the many effects of insecurity and Islam on men’s gender ideology challenge the stereotypical representations of the region as uniformly Islamic and patriarchal.
