Sex in the Middle East and North Africa
Panel VI-08, sponsored byOrganized under the auspices of the University of Ottawa and Macquarie University, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Wednesday, October 7 at 01:30 pm
Panel Description
This panel explores sex in the Middle East and North Africa. It examines the complexities surrounding normative, non-normative, and illicit sexual behaviors and relationships, including non-heterosexual women and men, individuals whose bodies and lives reject binary gender categories, people who have premarital and extramarital relationships, and those who engage in remunerative or transactional sex. With papers based on original ethnographic research conducted throughout the region, including Jordan, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia this panel highlights national differences and similarities.
Panelists will discuss social attitudes toward ideal and proscribed sexual behaviors, assumptions about and challenges to normative gender roles, beliefs about families, cosmologies about the relationship between sexuality and an individual's relationship with God, and expectations about the role of government, security forces, religious experts, and medical authorities in individuals' sexual lives. Studying sex in the Middle East and North Africa focuses our attention on social hierarchies and imaginations of bodies, physiological processes, and morality. The study of sex thus offers a unique vantage point for studying not only cultural attitudes towards religion, the state, and the body but also the structures through which religion, science, and the state compete for authority over individuals' intimate lives. Yet, with its focus on the pleasurable and affective dimensions of sex, this panel promises to move beyond the narrow lens in which sex primarily discussed in the context of religious norms and public health challenges.
The panel examines the complexities surrounding normative, non-normative, and illicit sexual behaviors and relationships, demonstrating that bright lines do not divide normative and non-normative behaviors.In doing so, panelists will challenge preconceived notions of sex in the region while still exploring the challenges that people experience when their behaviors, relationships, or identities conflict with social and religious norms, customs, and traditions.
This panel serves as a preview of our edited volume (to be published in late 2020) that emerge from thematic conversations held at MESA over the last few years.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Laurence O. Michalak
-- Presenter
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Dr. Angel M. Foster
-- Organizer, Discussant, Chair
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Mona El-Mowafi
-- Presenter
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Morgen Chalmiers
-- Presenter
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Laura Ferrero
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Morgen Chalmiers
Muslim refugee intimacies, whether conjugal, extramarital, normative, or non-conventional are often imagined as potential sites of gendered oppression and thus perpetually defined as a problem to be solved through public health intervention. Sensationalized accounts of Syrian refugees’ “backwards” sexualities and “oppressive” culture abound in clinical and humanitarian settings. These hyperbolic narratives echo wider, transnational discourses that construct Muslim women as victims of patriarchy who must be taught—often by Western feminists—to exercise their right to freedom, equality, and individual autonomy. Within the realm of sexuality, these Enlightenment values coalesce in what Giddens (1992) has termed the pure relationship, characterized by two autonomous individuals consenting to remain in intimate relation with one another for as long as it serves their respective self-interests (Giddens 1992:58). Liberal ideals of freedom and gendered equality define the pure relationship in explicit contrast to the imagined pre-modern society in which individual choice is constrained by tradition and social convention (Povinelli 2006). These binaries co-produce the Western Subject of Rights and Orientalized subject of culture— the civilized and the savage—and, in doing so, justify continued EuroAmerican imperialism in the Middle East. This chapter draws upon 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork to explore the ways in which these hegemonic norms continue to inform evaluations of Syrian refugees’ deservingness after resettlement in Southern California. This account illustrates how refugee encounters with disciplinary institutions, specifically the clinic, are frequently structured by the demand that they affirm their deservingness as properly-assimilated sexual subjects by performing love in ways that reflect liberal ideals of autonomy in intimate relationship.
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Mona El-Mowafi
In Jordan, the average age of first marriage has increased in recent years. Current trends suggest the number of women between the ages of who have never been married has also been increasing. Therefore, heterosexual women are spending longer and longer portions of their sexual and reproductive lives unmarried, leading to changes in women’s sexual behaviours. Jordanian women are increasingly having multiple sexual partners prior to marriage and are engaging in casual sexual relationships. These changing dynamics have significant social and health implications. Drawing from longstanding ethnographic fieldwork in Amman, this chapter explores contemporary dating practices in this setting. Women’s narratives suggest that they are balancing competing sexual and social desires and navigating a number of peer, familial, and societal pressures and logistical issues. From “hooking up” in cars in dark alleys, to renting out apartments by the hour, women continue to find creative ways to explore their sexual desires clandestinely; however, with little to no sexual education, practicing safe sex still remains an issue. Accounts from women in Jordan reveal the important role that technologies, such as WhatsApp, social media accounts, and dating applications, play in identifying casual partners in ways that are socially protective. I conclude with some reflections on how existing sexual and reproductive health services might better meet women’s evolving needs.
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Remunerated sex work—sex for money or for non-monetary gifts and favors—is a controversial yet little studied topic in Tunisia--especially illegal sex work, which is widespread but difficult to investigate. The first part of the article discusses Tunisian civil law, which allows licensed FSWs (female sex workers) to work in brothels with medical inspection, regulated by the Ministry of Interior. The law prohibits unlicensed FSWs and all MSWs (male sex workers). Sex work was legal under the French Protectorate and after independence in 1956, Tunisia has kept this practice to the present. In 2011, after the the Tunisian Revolution, the Islamist party Ennahdha won control of the Tunisian parliament but made no effort to bring the law into accordance with Islam’s prohibition on sex outside marriage. However, during 2011 rioters attacked the legal brothels throughout Tunisia and caused almost all to close. Only Tunis and Sfax were left with legal brothels, and in those two cities the authorities have not been renewing the permits of FSWs. Thus FSWs have been pushed from legal to illegal sex work, which is widespread. The main body of this article is a series of case studies and interviews—a legal FSW, an illegal FSW, a former brothel keeper, a public health doctor who inspects FSWs, an STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) researcher, and an Islamist member of the Tunisian parliament. We summarize a 2015 Ministry of Health study on sex work and HIV/AIDS in Tunisia. The last part of the article discusses the normatively “grey zone” of sex that is remunerated in ways other than with money. We discuss the larger social context of changing sexual mores in contemporary Tunisia. Our conclusion is that the current practice of not renewing the sex work permits of FSWs contributes to the growth of illegal sex work and presents a public health danger because it undermines the control of HIV/AIDS and other STDs.
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Laura Ferrero
In Palestine around 50 women in the last years became mother thanks to insemination carried out with sperma of their husbands smuggled out of the Israeli prisons. A small part of them not only got pregnant, but also married while the man was already in prison thanks to marriages by proxy. This small phenomenon is de facto allowing the creation and the enlargement of a family in absence of a man.
In this chapter the interviews I collected in Palestine with wives of prisoners are analyzed in the light of the recent findings of the anthropological literature on assisted reproduction.One of the consequences of assisted reproduction is the separation between sexual acts and reproduction itself, something that denaturalize reproduction. Women who marry an inmate are an extreme example of procreation without sexual intercourse, because conjugal visits are not allowed to those Israel classify as “political prisoners”.
Since marriages by proxy could potentially involve virgins, the sexuality of women and the integrity of their bodies is of central relevance, because of religious opinions that declare that a woman who undertake a fertility treatment should not be virgin. In this chapter I focus on reproduction in absence of sexual intercourse and I concentrate on how the cases I interviewed legittimate their position. I hereby analyze how those women choose to marry a prisoner, how they start to think in being impregnated with their husbands’ semen and why the procreation without sexual intercourse - that in the case of marriage by proxy also means that potentially that woman and that man never had sex - was allowed.
