4 - ‘It’s the Way I Empty What Is Inside of Me’: Occupied Masculinities, Emotional Expression, and Rap Music in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

Summary

Specifically analysing the experiences of Palestinian youth in a West Bank refugee camp, Chapter IV analyses the navigation of emotions inevitably precipitated by the grinding realities of colonisation and military occupation, in a setting in which normative conceptions of masculinity assert that ‘men don’t cry’. Using Palestinian rap music as a case study to explore young refugee men’s navigation and subversion of these dynamics, I argue that emotional expression in this particular musical culture both functions to reconfigure binary gendered norms in a context of invasive settler colonialism, while simultaneously masculinising emotionality through a dialogic performance of emotion, nationalism, resistance, and paternalism. I illustrate, therefore, that in some ways gendered binaries are challenged in and through the performance of Palestinian rap as a form of resistance and release, while in other ways, these are reconfigured so that men’s emotional expression can be subsumed within them.