Gender and Sexuality in the Marshes

March 16, 2008

A useful aspect of Wilfred Thesiger's Marsh Arabs (1964) is his eye for details about gender and sexuality. Keep in mind that the marsh Arabs are conservative Muslims and steeped in tribal values. Within this social system there was acceptance of gender ambiguity.

Several times Thesiger mentions being entertained in a group by dancing boys. The most remarkable of these dancing boys were known as dhakar binta.. or "male girl." These were male prostitutes hired to dance at public festivities:

Later in the evening, while the audience intoned a religious chant, they performed a blasphemous and indecent parody of Muslim prayer, with one boy making suggestive gestures behind the other's upthrust bottom. Used to more conventional behaviour among Moslems, I looked anxiously at a venerable Sayid who had brought his two grown-up sons for me to circumcise in the morning. All three were chanting with the best. [116]

We also get a fine description of this type of dancing boy:

The boy wore a scarlet gown with ropes of imitation pearls and heavy gold ear-rings. His hair, combed and scented, hung round his shoulders; his breasts were padded and his face was made up. He looked like an affected girl and behaved with the mincing mannerisms of a female prostitute... [125]

Thesiger goes on to discuss the way sexuality worked in this setting. With honor killing the sure result of any sexual dalliance on the part of a woman (thus making that kind of illicit pairing a bad option), the young men met some of their sexual needs with each other. This explanation for the practice of homosexuality among tribal Arabs is parallel to the speculations of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. There I believe Lawrence argues that the almost complete absence of women from male social settings leads to homosexual bonding. I am not really sure how to judge this line of thought.. but it is a common one among these classic English travel writers.

In another place Thesiger writes about the acceptance of gender switching. There is the mustarjil, the name for a woman who lives like a man. Such a woman usually wears her hair short like men and takes part in male social events. Thesiger asks an informant: "Do mustarjils ever marry?" and receives the answer: "No, they sleep with women as we [men] do." Absent is any use of our "lesbian" category of identity.. but clearly this amounts to the same thing.

Next Thesiger describes a rather bizarre incident:

...I was sitting in the diwaniya when a stout middle-aged woman shuffled in, enveloped in the usual black draperies, and asked for treatment. She had a striking, rather masculine face, and lifting her skirt exposed a perfectly normal full-sized male organ. 'Will you cut this off and turn me into a proper woman?' he pleaded. [165]

It turned out that this woman participated fully in female social life. Thesiger noticed her washing dishes at the river with the other women. Although the people of the tribe could not have explained this, they were allowing gender to be constructed rather than determined by sex organ.

It would be fair to say that gender and sexual ambiguities occur in all societies. Plenty of anthropologists relate similar anecdotes concerning Native Americans or other peoples. It is healthy for a society to allow for sexual and gender exceptions. Concerning the woman with a male sex organ Thesiger notes: "These people were kinder to him than we would have been in our society" (166). It strikes me that nations have had a hard time figuring out what to do with such exceptions.. at least a harder time than smaller scale tribal societies.