ABSTRACT
Anthropological descriptions have often emphasized idealized, hegemonic versions of gendered identities and ignored the shifting reality of people’s experience as gendered beings. Such an emphasis is particularly evident in the literature on honour and shame. An ideal of female virginity and versions of hegemonic masculinity have been much discussed: the radical differentiation of men and women has been taken for granted and there has been a focus on local idioms that naturalize the privileges of socially dominant men. I suggest that it is now time to move on: that it is more instructive, and less circular, to treat gender as a contested discourse. When gender is problematized, it becomes possible to ask how people make gender known to themselves and how gendered identities may be reified to express apparently absolute differences between men and women while simultaneously defining inequalities within these categories. The ethnographic literature of the Mediterranean and Middle East is rich
and contains some fine descriptions of hegemonic masculinities (see, for example, Herzfeld 1985). This literature offers the possibility of reanalysis: how are different versions of masculinity related to each other in any particular setting? And how are attributions of masculinity themselves constructed? Fiction can be an even richer source of ideas about the ways difference and inequality are defined and enacted through sexual images. In this chapter, the ethnography I present is a deliberate collage. My aim is to raise new questions concerning, first, the extent to which abstract notions of female virginity and chastity construct idealized, hegemonic versions of masculinity and femininity; and second, the plurality of gendered identities which emerge in practice (cf. Tapper and Tapper 1987). In the anthropological literature, ‘honour and shame’ has been treated as a loose
category around which comparative descriptions can be organized. As Davis has written,
Among systems of prestige and control…honour systems are distinct [in that] they generally have as one of their components the control by men of women’s sexuality, and the resulting combination of sex and self importance makes a unique contribution to the human comedy in life.
