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hrj(I explain the LHMP here.)
This finishes the relevant articles in Murray & Roscoe. I feel a certain wariness with regard to this article. A great deal of it is an overly-general summary of gender roles and relations in southern Iraq that is utterly devoid of nuance. The entirety of the author’s familiarity with the “mustergil” role seems to come via this one informant who may not be typical, due to class and economic privilege. After describing a gender-segregated, mysogynistic society in which girls and women were said to have no power and no say in their own lives, we are given to believe that a girl could become a mustergil purely by her own decision and that the family would support (or at least tolerate) that choice. I’m not sure I buy it. I think there are some fascinating themes buried here, and I'd love to know more about how they manifested in earlier times, but I would advice serious further research before basing a character on the information in this article.
* * *
Westphal-Hellbusch, Sigrid (trans. Bradley Rose). 1997. “Institutionalized Gender-Crossing in Southern Iraq” in Islamic Homosexualities - Culture, History, and Literature, ed. by Stephen O. Murray & Will Roscoe. New York University Press, New York. ISBN 0-8147-7468-7
This article is primarily a mid-20th century case-study of one particular woman from an upper-class clan of southern Iraq who is a poet and lives as a “mustergil”, that is, a woman living as a man. The informant reports that there are perhaps fifty women in her clan alone living as mustergils. The description of this category with its characteristics and range of variation is similar to that of the “sworn virgins” described in Dickemann 1997, except that -- as presented -- the motivation for entering this life is personal choice rather than a structural void in the family created by a lack of sons. This specific woman reported that she had felt inclined to live as a man from an early age, but there is no indication in the article that personal inclination was the universal motivation, and no real discussion of the extent to which parental permission was involved. The woman has not taken on all attributes of a male role, retaining some female garments and sticking to female religious activities. (For that reason, and based on the language of the article, I have retained female pronouns.) It is noted, however, that some mustergils pass so completely that their original sex is not known until after death.
Keywords: cross-dressing cross-gender
This finishes the relevant articles in Murray & Roscoe. I feel a certain wariness with regard to this article. A great deal of it is an overly-general summary of gender roles and relations in southern Iraq that is utterly devoid of nuance. The entirety of the author’s familiarity with the “mustergil” role seems to come via this one informant who may not be typical, due to class and economic privilege. After describing a gender-segregated, mysogynistic society in which girls and women were said to have no power and no say in their own lives, we are given to believe that a girl could become a mustergil purely by her own decision and that the family would support (or at least tolerate) that choice. I’m not sure I buy it. I think there are some fascinating themes buried here, and I'd love to know more about how they manifested in earlier times, but I would advice serious further research before basing a character on the information in this article.
* * *
Westphal-Hellbusch, Sigrid (trans. Bradley Rose). 1997. “Institutionalized Gender-Crossing in Southern Iraq” in Islamic Homosexualities - Culture, History, and Literature, ed. by Stephen O. Murray & Will Roscoe. New York University Press, New York. ISBN 0-8147-7468-7
This article is primarily a mid-20th century case-study of one particular woman from an upper-class clan of southern Iraq who is a poet and lives as a “mustergil”, that is, a woman living as a man. The informant reports that there are perhaps fifty women in her clan alone living as mustergils. The description of this category with its characteristics and range of variation is similar to that of the “sworn virgins” described in Dickemann 1997, except that -- as presented -- the motivation for entering this life is personal choice rather than a structural void in the family created by a lack of sons. This specific woman reported that she had felt inclined to live as a man from an early age, but there is no indication in the article that personal inclination was the universal motivation, and no real discussion of the extent to which parental permission was involved. The woman has not taken on all attributes of a male role, retaining some female garments and sticking to female religious activities. (For that reason, and based on the language of the article, I have retained female pronouns.) It is noted, however, that some mustergils pass so completely that their original sex is not known until after death.
Keywords: cross-dressing cross-gender
