Sex in the Middle East and North Africa , livre ebook

Sex in the Middle East and North Africa
Sex in the Middle East and North Africa
Edited by
L. L. WYNN AND ANGEL M. FOSTER
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2022 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wynn, L. L., 1971– editor. | Foster, A. M. (Angelina Marguerite), editor.
Title: Sex in the Middle East and North Africa / edited by L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Wide-ranging essays on sex and sexuality in the modern Middle East and North Africa”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022002096 (print) | LCCN 2022002097 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826504326 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826504333 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826504340 (epub) | ISBN 9780826504357 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex customs—Middle East. | Sex customs—Africa, North. | Sex—Social aspects—Middle East. | Sex—Social aspects—Africa, North.
Classification: LCC HQ18.M628 S49 2022 (print) | LCC HQ18.M628 (ebook) | DDC 306.70956—dc23/eng/20220217
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002096
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002097
To a world where laws and policies are grounded in human rights, social justice, and science
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Sex in the Middle East and North Africa: Complicated Legacies and the Politics of Representation
Angel M. Foster and L. L. Wynn
PART I. SINGLE AND DATING
1. Anywhere but Home: Dating, Hooking Up, and Casual Sex in Jordan
I. M. El-Mowafi and Angel M. Foster
2. Gay Sex Apps and Normative Masculinity among Queer Men in Beirut, Lebanon
Mathew Gagné
3. Better Out than In: The Importance of Withdrawal in Sex and Family Planning in Turkey
Katrina MacFarlane
4. Queer Sociality in the Gulf in the Early 2000s: A Continuum of Outness and Silence Mediated by Class Privilege
Saffaa Hassanein and L. L. Wynn
5. Hexes and Exes: Post-Breakup Curses in Fez, Morocco
Shannon Hayes
PART II. ENGAGED AND MARRIED
6. God under the Bedsheets: Pleasure, Porn, and Piety among Iranian Revolutionary Women
Younes Saramifar
7. The Gendered Relationship between Sex and Marriage in Egypt: Interrogating Secret Marriages among Urban Youth in Cairo and Minya
Rania Salem
8. For Us, There Is No Love: Becoming “American” and the Politics of Intimacy
Morgen A. Chalmiers
9. The Wives of the Heroes, Smuggled Sperm, and Reproductive Technologies: Palestinian Women Building Families on Their Own
Laura Ferrero
PART III. IT’S COMPLICATED
10. Blurred Lines between Transactional Sex and Paramarital Relationships in Egypt
L. L. Wynn
11. Legal and Illegal Sex Work in Tunisia: Before and After the 2010–2011 Revolution
Laurence Michalak
12. Love, Sex, and Sexuality in Morocco: Navigating Barriers, Expanding Boundaries
Ginger Feather
13. (Un)hiding the Samaritan’s Sexuality in Egypt: Insights from a Coptic Woman’s Journal
Mina Ibrahim
Conclusion. Sexual Emergence in the Middle East and North Africa: Ten Insights from the Ethnography
Marcia C. Inhorn
Glossary
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
The success of an edited volume hinges on the contributors. We are grateful to all of the chapter authors for their efforts—we have enjoyed working with this dynamic group. We also appreciate the reflections and insights generated by participants in a series of Thematic Conversations at the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association. Those discussions helped shape our thinking and the structure of the volume. We also want to acknowledge the organizations and funders that supported the editors during different phases of this project: American Center of Research (ACOR), the Australian Research Council, Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants, the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health, the Centre for Academic Leadership (and Françoise Moreau-Johnson and Jean Quirion) at the University of Ottawa (uOttawa), Macquarie University, the Society of Family Planning Research Fund, and uOttawa.
We are also grateful to the friends, colleagues, and mentors who have supported the editors throughout this project and the journey that brought us here. Joel Beinin, Danielle Bessett, Kelly Cleland, Raywat Deonandan, Greg Downey, Majd Hammad, Saffaa Hassanein, Matteo Legrenzi, Annika Malmberg, Steve McCarroll, Chris Patil, Gordon Peake, Payel Ray, Eugene Rogan, and Tracy Weitz—thank you! We also want to thank our wonderful research assistant Mira Persaud and the team at Vanderbilt University Press, and Zack Gresham in particular, for sticking with us.
Lisa wants to thank Jeff, Louise, Jared, Valerie, Cory, DonRaphael, Saiph, Rigel, Alex, and Elijah, and especially David. Angel wants to thank Nancy and Emad Mancy, Linda Lemmens, and Gary Simms for their unwavering support, and Eddy Niesten for everything.
INTRODUCTION
Sex in the Middle East and North Africa
Complicated Legacies and the Politics of Representation
ANGEL M. FOSTER L. L. WYNN
Setting the Context
In 1798, Abd al-Rahman Al-Jabarti, Egypt’s “unrivaled chronicler of the eighteenth century” (Tignor 1993, 5), wrote a history of the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt. In it, Al-Jabarti described the “manners and customs” of the French invaders, including their sexual and grooming practices:
Their women do not veil themselves and have no modesty; they do not care whether they uncover their private parts. Whenever a Frenchman has to perform an act of nature he does so wherever he happens to be, even in full view of people. . . . They have intercourse with any woman who pleases them and vice versa. Sometimes one of their women goes into a barber’s shop, and invites him to shave her pubic hair. If he wishes he can take his fee in kind. (Al-Jabarti 1993, 28–29)
In 1849, the French author Gustave Flaubert (who later became famous for his novel Madame Bovary ) traveled through Egypt, chronicling his sexual exploits with dancers, sex workers, and courtesans in personal notes and letters to friends and family back in England. He describes one of the first courtesans he encountered, “Firm flesh, bronze arse, shaven cunt, dry though fatty; the whole thing gave the effect of a plague victim or a leperhouse” (Flaubert 1996, 40).
Al-Jabarti died in 1825 or 1826 (Tignor 1993), during the period of Muhammad Ali’s rule of Egypt that followed the French occupation and more than two decades before Flaubert’s own Grand Tour. But the juxtaposition of these two writers’ observations, with their shared fascination with the pudenda, depilatory practices, and promiscuousness of foreign women, occupiers, and occupied, speaks to a long history of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Descriptions of the bodies and sexual practices of exotic others are far more than a set of neutral observations about cultural difference. Accounts of otherness construct one’s own civilizational identity (Said 1978; Kabbani 1986).
But these two observers are not equivalent. Al-Jabarti wrote from the perspective of an Egyptian scholar observing the military occupiers, and his speculative portrayal of French women’s sexual transactions with barbers carries no hint of personal familiarity. 1 This is in striking contrast with Flaubert’s travel diary and letters, which are replete with accounts of his sexual encounters with Egyptian, Ottoman, and Nubian women and boys. As a member of the wealthy European elite, Flaubert’s access to sex workers was enabled and structured by the European political and economic presence in the region, which eventually culminated in Egypt’s occupation by the British in 1882. European power went hand in hand with the availability of Egyptian courtesans and sex workers to the European gaze (and penises); indeed, in the same letter to his mother sent from Alexandria in November 1849, Flaubert described the local women’s visual availability to Europeans—“all the women are veiled. . . . On the other hand, if you don’t see their faces, you see their entire bosoms”—and, two sentences later, noted that, “One curious thing here is the respect, or rather the terror, that everyone displays in the presence of ‘Franks,’ as they call Europeans” (1996, 29).
The history of European writing about the Middle East and North Africa as a space of exotic barbarism, sensuousness, and sexuality is much older than Flaubert’s Grand Tour or even Napoleon’s occupation. As Hsu-Ming Teo (2012) has documented, European-authored romances set in the Islamic world date all the way back to the twelfth century and the Crusades. They flourished in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries when European romances set in the Middle East evidenced a fascination with the despotic harem master and the lives of women of the harem. And they continued throughout the twentieth century with erotic historical romance novels of lusty Arab sheiks’ sexual encounters with, and eventual taming by, White women (Teo 2012).
Why bring up these historical descriptions and romantic imaginations of sexual otherness at the start of a contemporary edited collection of mostly anthropological accounts of sex in the Middle East and North Africa? Because every author writing about the topic in European languages—and every person reading about it—is heir to this long history of Western fascination with sex in the region.
“Othering” Sex and Sexuality in Western Academia
In 1978, Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said published his groundbreaking book Orientalism , in which he argued that European (and American) accounts of the Eastern other were a mirror for the Western self, a “flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand” (Said 1978, 7). Syrian-British historian Rana Kabbani took Said’s insights and appl