Masculinities

This article introduces and explores the subjectivity of a queer community in Afghanistan, the self-identified murats. Murat is a subject position that emerged in Afghanistan over the past 20 years to become a viable category of personhood and a practical term of reference among a community of non-masculine dancers and sex workers living and working in the capital (and other major cities). Based on the findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2021 in Kabul, the article shows that the transnational and transhistorical formation of Afghan murats’ gender and sexual subjectivities has been the result of the intersection of three other categories of personhood: the South Asian hijra, the Turko-Persianate bachah, and the Afghan īzak. By studying the Afghan murat subjectivity, the article further sketches out a template for imagining the sex/gender configuration in Afghanistan, suggesting that it is non-binary and cannot be comfortably divided into the two opposing poles of the male/masculine and the female/feminine.

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Queering Masculinities in the Middle East (SWANA) and South Asia

Thangaraj,

Inhorn

2024

Men and Masculinities

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One of the most important shifts in gender scholarship is the attention now being paid to discourses and practices of masculinity in the Global South. This issue of Men and Masculinities contributes to this growing field in three important ways. First, we foreground scholarship on masculinities in two interconnected, but understudied regions of the world, specifically the Middle East, which is also known as South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), and its neighbor to the east, South Asia. In particular, we demonstrate the ways in which queer identities and communities are being formed across these two regions, connected as they are by historic trade routes, migration pathways, and transregional cultural flows. Second, we point to the vibrant masculinities scholarship that is emerging from these regions. But we focus specifically on non-normative masculinities—or the queer, trans, and other genderqueer masculinities—which have been historically present in these two regions, but which have been much less represented in masculinities literature. Third, we look to identity formation, or the ways in which young cis-gender, trans, and queer men come out in their communities and seek authentic lives of desire, pleasure, and participation. At the same time, we highlight the ever-present precarity within queer communities in the Middle East/SWANA and South Asia, especially given postcolonial nationalist and ethno-nationalist agendas, which promote normative heteropatriarchal masculinities and concomitant homophobia and transphobia.

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Masculinities

Cited by 4 publications

References 42 publications

Introduction

Introduction

The Afghan Murat: A Queer Subject at Transnational Crossroads

Queering Masculinities in the Middle East (SWANA) and South Asia

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