Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos: Nonnormative Masculinities in Militarized Iraq

Much has been written about gender-based violence against Iraqi women under the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and since the fall of the regime in 2003 (Brown and Romano 2006, 56, 60–62; Al-Jawaheri 2008, 108–17; al-Ali 2005, 742–43, 754–55; 2007, 198, 207, 226–29; 2008, 413–16; Smiles 2008, 272–76; al-Ali and Pratt 2009, 78, 80, 157–61; Campbell and Kelly 2009, 24–25; Fischer-Tahir 2010, 1391–92; Ranharter and Stansfield 2015). Although the mass recruitment of men as soldiers and fighters often temporarily expanded spaces for women’s participation in the Iraqi public sphere (Efrati 1999, 28, 30–32; Rohde 2010, 86–91), militarism and militarist discourse before and since 2003 have reinforced gender polarity and heroic forms of masculinity, marginalizing and degrading the noncombat social positionalities of the majority of men and women (Rohde 2010, 124–43; 2011, 100, 104, 109–10; Fischer-Tahir 2012, 93–94; Abdulameer 2014). Nevertheless, organized violence against queer positionalities, or men perceived to violate sexual and gender norms, occurred only after 2003. This essay explores ruptures and continuities in organized violence against sex or gender nonconformity in recent Iraqi history.

For the late Baʿthist period in Iraq, I analyze scholarly and journalistic sources, including items published in Iraqi newspapers and transcripts of a conversation between Saddam Hussein and tribal leaders in 1991 or 1992. For the years after 2003, I systematically analyzed four Iraqi (Arabic) daily newspapers (Al-Zaman, Al-Sabah, Al-Mada, and Al-Manara) and a weekly journal (Al-Esbuʿiyya) from late 2008, 2009, and spring 2012. I draw on other sources as well, including news videos, human rights reports, academic work, and other journalistic sources. Given the dangers and restrictions of research in Iraq, the available sources allow some preliminary analysis that can inform future systematic studies on gender and sexual diversity in Iraqi society.

Nonnormative Masculinities in Late Baʿthist Iraq

There is little research about the Iraqi Baʿthist regime’s handling of nonnormative sexualities and masculinities. Regime propaganda during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) propagated a crude heroic and heterosexual military masculinity (Saghieh 2006, 242; Rohde 2010, 124–43). Previously classified sources from the innermost circle of the Hussein regime became accessible after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which US military personnel captured and transferred to the National Defense University in Washington, DC (Woods, Palkki, and Scott 2011). Among the sources was a recorded conversation dated from 1991 or 1992 between Hussein and tribal elders from what was then called Saddam City (Sadr City today), a notoriously rebellious Baghdadi slum inhabited by some 2.5 million impoverished Shiʿi Iraqis, most of whom had migrated from rural areas in southern Iraq over the previous decades. Saddam City had been the scene of insurgent activities and demonstrations during the 1991 popular uprising. Many soldiers who had deserted the Iraqi army after being crushed by Western firepower in early 1991 reportedly blended into this densely populated area in various forms of dress and survived as burglars and beggars.

In a bid to reassert control, Hussein approached local tribal leaders in Saddam City to enlist them to police the neighborhood since state and party institutions had proven unsuccessful in this respect. During the conversation, Hussein called opponents of his regime “rabble-rousers” (ghughaʾiyyin), a term that started to appear in 1991 in the Baʿth Party’s internal records to refer to insurgents. Aaron M. Faust (2015, 133, 242n64) contends that this sign operates as a “euphemism for Shiʿites” because the majority of insurgents came from predominantly Shiʿi provinces. No sectarian connotation is apparent in this account. Rather, Hussein decries nonnormative masculinities as against Islam and the Iraqi nation:

The rabble-rousers do not know these notions [of tribal loyalty to the dictator]. Those who dye their hair in green and red do not know these meanings, and it is a shame for you to let them live. You should slaughter them with your own hands. Those people who dye their hair and wear...