MofA Week 11.

Music, dance, gender & sexuality

Gender and sexuality as a social construction

• Physiologically: gender binarism (though binarism oversimplifies even at the level of physiology)
• Socially: gender categories are numerous, and not always classified as "male" and "female".
• Constructions of gender and sexuality in Arabic-speaking societies is a broad topic, and a very interesting one--requiring a close look at Islamicate social histories (usually forgone in favor of political and economic histories)
• We limit ourselves here to an overview of performance-related gender categories.

Influence of Islam on gendered space and performance

• Catalyst for absorption and fusion of multiple expressive forms, and for accumulation of capital and development of modes of production enabling specialized performer-categories (often professional) to emerge
• Negative attitudes towards music and dance (hadith). But to condemn something does not eliminate so much as conceptually isolate.
  • Thus rejection of public female performers does not ban them, but rather leads to construction of special gendered categories of "female performer" which are allowed to exist, so long as they do not contaminate the "pure" woman.
  • Often these gendered categories, pariahs of mainstream culture, develop various forms of "symbolic inversion"
  • The forbidden also attains an erotic potency it might not otherwise have had
• Gender segregation
  • Principle based on eligibility for marriage
  • Defines private female domestic spaces
  • Impels use of veil as control
  • (These criteria apply primarily to upper-class urban society)
• Gendered-spaces *
  • Social space in traditional Islamic society
    • Domestic space
      • Haramlik, (domestic female space), including female only performance (male performers behind a curtain)
      • Salamlik, madyafa (domestic public space for males and their guests), including male only performance
    • Public space, urban
      • Female veiled space
      • Male open space
    • Public space, rural
      • less gender separation for work
      • gender separation maintained for entertainments (e.g. wedding)

Gendered performance types

• Gendered music/dance categories and professionalization
• Social construction of special gender-performance categories in the Arab world (and Islamicate cultures generally) include the following types:
• Male types
  • mukhannath (effeminate, especially as singer), e.g. Tuways. Important contributions to the development of Arab music; transitional phase (according to Owen Wright: from primacy of female singers, qiyan, to male singers). Arose following bans on alcohol restrictions on women, which constricted the qayna's position. Declined due to perception of corrupting influence.
  • eunuchs (sometimes mukhannath; not musicians per se but could participate in haramlik)
  • Alatiyya (19th century public musicians in Egypt)
  • Shaykh, munshid (public male singer, conservative, veiled; religious overtones; anti-erotic)
  • Mutrib (public male singer, emphasis on romantic and even erotic characteristics)
• Female
  • jariya\jawari (category of female slaves, under Islam), e.g. Dananir. Slave-singers were often captured (in war) from non-Arabic speaking areas. Education in poetry, singing, and performance on musical instruments could greatly increase a slave's value. Concubinage being legal, many slave-singers gave birth to caliphs. Slaves in aristocratic households tended to be better educated than aristocratic wives.
  • qayna (pre-Islamic, early Islam)
    • qayna as slave (jariya) who entertained her master and his guests (higher status).
    • qayna as public singer and entertainer, attached to a tavern (lower status), perhaps closer to prostitute
    • famous qiyan (e.g. Azza al-Mayla, Jamila) of 7th century Medina transmitted art of music to celebrated male singers, e.g. Ma`bad
  • raqqasa (general category of female dancer)
  • ghawazi
  • `alma\`awalim (19th century female performers in Egypt; "educated", tended to perform for private parties, mainly for women)
  • Chikhat (North African female singer; despite name, not respectable)
  • Shaykhat (Egyptian; respectable religious authority, but not a singer!)
  • munshida (some respectability, male in group)
  • mutriba (public female singer of the 20th century, unveiled; increased emphasis on eroticism. Little space for "respectability".)

Dance: raqs

• Western interpretations (next week)
  • Orientalism: the exotic east
  • Belly dance as originary female dance (fertility, goddess worship)
  • Art of "belly dance"
  • New contexts, new directions
• History of dance in the Arab world
  • Historical sources are sparse (due to religious attitudes, low esteem, continual "othering" of dance)
  • Strongly gendered (with males also imitating females)
    • Sufi "dance" (sama`)
    • Male dances: stick, sword, line, circle
    • Female dance
  • Court dances
    • • Iranian origins?
      • al-Farabi: dance classified with rhythmic arts, inferior to singing and playing instruments
      • al-Mas`udi (d. 956) describes dance linked to 8 rhythmic modes, and mentions dances: al-kurra, al-ibl
      • Dananeer (20th c representation)
  • Popular female dance
    • • Raqs baladi
      • Ghawazi: dancer as profession and tribe. Danced with cymbals, rabab, tar, darabukka, entertaining for life cycle rituals. Banished from Cairo in 1834 (M. Ali), increasing number of male professional dancers.
      • Raqs sharqi
        • Influence of colonialism (e.g. market for British soldiers in Egypt) greater exhibitionism, more risque
        • Influence of mass media (dance in film)
        • Contemporary dance: weddings, nightclubs
    • Dance as inversion of social order
      • Ghawazi (women in control, outside society)
      • Raqqasa (woman as object of public gaze, inversion of the veil, nudity)
      • cf. Zar, Gnawa