Transforming Norms and Desires: Gendered Self-Fashioning Amongst Young, Educated Jordanians

This thesis captures young educated Jordanians' profound ability to express and enact alternative feminine and masculine subjectivities and gender relations. It does so by exploring young people's complex and continual processes of becoming relational selves negotiating often constricting gender norms. Their agentive force is driven by strongly-felt and creatively-realised inner desires and aspirations in the context of their unique social interactions and lived experiences. This thesis argues that young people's self-identity and possibilities of becoming are not constrained by the limits of hegemonic structures and ideologies operating upon them. On the contrary, young people actively engage with power structures and often find effective ways to enact desired realities. In doing so, this thesis expands the meanings, possibilities, and outcomes of agency, which is not limited to narratives of resistance or compliance with power, but belongs to everyone and renders each individual an agent of change. Indeed, the Middle East gender studies literature, while it has allowed for an alternative embodiment of agency to appear, by remaining careful in claiming ordinary people's ability to dismantle the gendered status quo in their everyday lives, has also prevented us from completely overcoming dichotomous narratives. Moreover, scholarly resistance to including masculinities within discourses on gender has also hindered the possibility to assess the parallel, often similar struggles of women and men and their mutual yearning for driving positive change. By triangulating qualitative data from semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and family observations, this research shows that young Jordanians have largely co-opted the significance of gendered expectations to normalise a new set of values by staying within the system. The research findings contribute to individualising young people's values change, whose significance lies in its potential to transform Jordan's gendered status quo from within, circumventing a range of west-centric and essentialising expectations in the process.