America's Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins by Marcia C. Inhorn (review)

What is the intimate aftermath for individuals and communities riven by war and conflict? In her new book America's Arab Refugees, Marcia Inhorn offers readers insights into the personal and social consequences of war for Arab refugees trying to rebuild their lives—and to establish their own nuclear families—in Dearborn, Michigan. While much of the literature on refugees focuses on experiences of persecution, this new work is situated firmly within critical refugee studies,¹ in which refugees are not defined or neatly circumscribed by encounters with violence, although those moments play a role in shaping life trajectories.

The intense value placed on reproducing the family in Arab societies and cultures is a key theme in this book.² As one of Inhorn's interlocutors notes "the second question…" in the Arab community "is, 'How are your kids?'" (p. 121). But the ability to have children has unfortunately been impeded for Inhorn's participants due to war, inherited conditions, medical malfeasance, and poverty. In order to better understand the deep, tragic, and long-term consequences of a Middle East that has been at war for decades, Inhorn undertakes a study of Arab men seeking fertility treatment at a Dearborn clinic. She recruits patients to discuss their private and painful struggles to have their own children. The project is highly sensitive, but Inhorn is a master of the craft and easily up to the task. With her decades of experience conducting research in the Middle East, the author is able to coax out personal medical histories from her interlocutors relating to their struggles to have a child. In the Arab social world, such troubles are often highly stigmatized, calling into question the full adult personhood and gender identity of married-yet-childless men and women.

Under Inhorn's skillful and compassionate direction, the individuals in the book seem eager to share their experiences with their community and the broader public. The men in the book (and sometimes their wives as well) are generous collaborators, opening up long-muted discussions of infertility in the Arab community. At times, they seem to call for a more vigorous social discourse on the effects that decades of conflict have incurred on Arab bodies and a wider acknowledgment that young Arab couples may now face starkly different impediments to childbirth than their elders. Although the interviews in the book took place in private, participants' calls resonate loudly for social acceptance, to pull away the curtain of shame, and of the need for social change in response to infertility, in the context of long-term geopolitical conflicts that continue to irrevocably change the Middle East and the lives of its inhabitants. The study's participants are often inexorably caught in the lag between deeply held and meaningful sociocultural values and the rapid social, economic, ecological, and political changes brought about by war.

Inhorn provides a concise overview of the conflicts that have ravaged the Middle East in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with particular foci on Lebanon and Iraq. While these conflicts may seem distant and peripheral from the Western hemisphere, Inhorn convincingly argues that they are, in fact, fundamentally linked to the United States, and that the US government has an obligation to reconcile the damage it has caused in the region through its foreign policy. She also reminds readers of the intimate, devastating effects that these wars have on the civilians who are most directly affected, in the (in) ability to produce children, to experience sexual pleasure, to sexually satisfy their partners, to be able to work and make a living, and to feel like a complete man or woman.

America's Arab Refugees also makes a significant contribution to dismantling orientalist stereotypes about Arabs, and particularly Arab men. In these essentializing representations, Arab men are often portrayed as violent, misogynist, lascivious, and ignorant.³ In contrast, Inhorn's account offers a humanizing picture of actual...