Invisible Men

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of gendering the veil and argues that veiling must expand beyond the primary focus on clothing and must be viewed as a system that frames bodily styles, speech forms, and the language of gestures. Veiling has feminine and masculine forms but evokes different things for men and women and is experienced in dualgendered ways. The ethnography focuses on the lives of male domestic workers who are liminal and incomplete members of contemporary urban households to address the issue of the performance of maleness and male veiling practices by the partial members of social units such as households to argue that we must understand veiling as a way of undoing gender. The intersections of class, sexuality, and gender within interior spaces of domesticity reconfigure relations of gender. Work as a site within which masculinity, identity, and power are constituted enables us to view male veiling beyond the shame and honor discourse to address the bodies and dispositions of men who labor.