Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Anthropology
First Advisor
Harms, Erik
Abstract
This dissertation is an introduction to the culture of same-sex desire in Afghanistan and aims at understanding how (non-normative) gender and sexuality materialize in everyday social relations in Kabul. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul (and, for a much shorter period, in Bamyan and Mazar-i-Sharif) between 2016 and 2021. The main population with whom I worked were a group of male-born, non-masculine dancers and sex-workers who used murat for self-identification, a term they had borrowed from the argot of hijras/khwaja siras in Pakistan. By examining the formation of the queer subjectivity of murats, I suggest that the sex/gender world in Afghanistan cannot be comfortably divided into the two categories of male/man and female/woman but ideally includes two additional figures: the bachah, or the young beardless youth, and the īzak, who is defined as “neither man/male nor woman/female” among Afghans. I provide a social history of the figures of bachah and īzak in the Afghan world, revealing their shifting meanings and implications, as well as the discourses and practices they have given rise to in recent turbulent decades. More broadly, I suggest that what mainly demarcates a man from a non-man is that the former is imagined as the penetrator of other bodies while the latter is not. The constitution of the Afghan murat subjectivity, as a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon, has not been a consequence of any resistance against or assimilation into dominant Euro-American gender and sexual categories (such as “gay” or “transgender”). The specificity of the murat personhood, as encompassing multiple configurations of biological sex, gender expression and performativity, and sexual desire, is affirmed through its relationship with three analogous subjectivities in the Global South: the bachah, the īzak, and the khwaja sira and hijra, which span the Turko-Persianate region, Afghanistan, and South Asia, respectively. I conclude that studying the tradition of bachah-bāzī (having liaison with the beardless youth), the category of Afghan īzak, and the institution of “the third gender/sex” in India/Pakistan is integral to exploring the culture of same-sex desire in Afghanistan. The tradition of bachah-bāzī indeed lies at the core of this dissertation: I argue that the long-time socio-erotic tradition of bachah-bāzī hugely informs the terms, boundaries, and negotiations of murats’ (and others’) same-sex relationships. By offering a detailed ethnography of maḥfils (celebratory gatherings) where murats dance and exploring the socio-sexual relationships between murats and their clients/friends, to whom murats refer as shākh, I delineate how murats and shākhs draw on local values, beliefs, and practices associated with the tradition of bachah-bāzī to organize and make sense of their same-sex relationships. The dissertation reveals how murats and shākhs (re)produce and perform competing forms of gender and masculinities in various spaces and times and in relation to different people. Situated against the backdrop of war and militarism, state-building processes and policies, and humanitarian and development efforts of recent decades, the manuscript is an invitation to write Afghanistan’s modern history from the vantage point of its queer subjects.
Recommended Citation
Abdi, Ali, "Bachahs, Murats, and Shākhs: The Culture of Same-Sex Desire in Afghanistan" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 862.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/862
