Severed Masculinity

Abstract Research on Tunisia has increasingly focused on issues of youth unemployment since the 2011 revolution. One of the major causes of the revolution is attributed to the widespread disappointment and anger of educated unemployed Tunisians. Many young Tunisians had to postpone life plans such as marriage and home ownership or had to flee the country through legal or illegal migration. While unemployment stigmatizes both men and women, the socio-economic consequences differ significantly by gender; for men, it is a social death. In this article, I ask: What type of masculinities and subjectivities emerged from the perpetual state of socio-economic and political death experienced by young Tunisian men? What are the strategies created to articulate their relations with space, time, and to reestablish their severed masculinity? To answer this, I draw on ethnographic fieldnotes and a collection of life stories of young Tunisian men gathered during my fieldwork in Tunisia (2021–2022).