This article is primarily a mid-20th century case-study of one particular woman from an upper-class clan of southern Iraq who is a poet and lives as a “mustergil”, that is, a woman living as a man. The informant reports that there are perhaps fifty women in her clan alone living as mustergils.
essentialism
The debate between understanding homosexuality as an inborn orientation versus a chosen or socially-conditioned behavior exists as far back as the records go. In general, the default is to view it as chosen (e.g., as “sin”) or as a context-specific social role (e.g., “romantic friendship”), therefore I have only tagged sources when they give evidence for understanding it as an “essential” inborn aspect of personality.
LHMP entry
This article provides a brief historic survey of evidence regarding love between women in Islamic societies. Classical treatises on sexual transgression discuss tribadism (sahq) from a male perspective. There are occasional comparisons to male homosexuality, but in general the two are considered distinct, except generally as vices. Popular imagination, (especially in western accounts) considered lesbianism common in harems.
Chapter 4: A close reading of Aĥmad Ibn Yusuf Tifashi’s Nuzhat al-Albab - Toward re-envisioning the Islamic Middle East
Part I: Introducing studies on female homosexuality and contemporary critical theory
Chapter 1: Introduction - Contemporary views of female homosexuality in the Middle East
Chapter 2 - Constructing and deconstructing sexuality: New paradigms for “gay” historiography
The expression of a self-realized romantic and erotic preference for women significantly predates modern language about “being out". Anne Lister in her ca. 1800 diaries expressed a clear and absolute preference for loving and being loved by women. As a literary motif, this recognition of same-sex preference and the effects it has on a character begins appearing in the later 19th century. But the context of this realization can take the story in many directions.
Chapter 3 - Egyptian Love Spells
One of the premises of astrology is that it predetermines various personality traits, as well as aspects of the course of one’s life. As applied to sexual preference, astrology provides at least a vague analog to the notion of an inborn orientation toward certain types of sexual activities and partners, although the ways these activities and partners are categorized don’t necessarily align with modern categories.
Pages
