Afghanistan’s “Bacha Posh”: Gender-Crossing in Nadia Hashimi’s The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ According to Hashimi the bacha posh tradition is still practiced in Afghanistan, but no official record shows how much it is prevalent. On the origins of that tradition Hashimi explains that “[t]here are theories that [the bacha posh] came from a need for boys or men to fight in times of war but evolved to fill a different voidʼ” (Hashimi, “Q&A with Hashimi”).

² The term “transvestism” was coined in 1910 by German physician and sexologist Hirschfeld. However, for the purpose of this article, I opt to use the more general, less sexually laden term of cross-dressing, since transvestism is taken predominantly as a symptom of sexual deviation.

³ Attempting to alter the creation of God is altogether forbidden; in the following verse Satan swears to seduce human beings to disobey Allah: “I will order them to change the nature created by Allah” (Translation of the Meanings of The Noble Quran in the English Language 4.119).

⁴ For a thorough explanation of Ahadīth as an essential component of Islamic divine discourse see Asma Barlas, ‘Believing Women’ in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’a¯n, pp. 32–49.

⁵ This hadīth is the first of The Forty hadīth of Imam Annawawi. See: https://sunnah.com/nawawi40:1.

⁶ In Unzipping Gender, Charlotte Suthrell spotlights a peculiar yet perplexing tradition of cross-dressing in India, i.e., the hijras, in which men dress as women and grow their hair, while at the same time shave and act like men.

⁷ The discussion of the harem in relation to the lesbian theme is beyond the scope of this article. See Leila Ahmedʼs “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem.”