Crossdressing in Arabia- Diane Frank

One of the concepts that struck me most about Marjorie Gartners "Vested Interests" was that without crossdressing there would be no culture. Culture in her view is shaped by gender specificity, the differences between men and women. But if you can’t transgress boundaries, then boundaries don’t exist...and if boundaries don’t exist then our kinds of cultures would look radically different. Now doesn’t that make you feel special- all of us who transgress gender boundaries are really pillars of society, upholding our traditions by violating them. Post-modern logic can be wonderul. But I’m digressing and I haven’t even started.

Of course, it’s hard to get started. I’m about to quote some prose from the New Yorker magazine. Writing before and after anything written for that magazine can only be called an act of effrontery, or perhaps vandalism. A recent edition of the New Yorker featured a long article by a newspaperman who worked for an extended period of time about 6 months ago in Saudi Arabia, before and during the current war. His assignment was to help improve the press there, but he really spent more time being an observer of the intimacies of Saudi life. The wave of Wahabism in Saudi Arabia has produced a extraordinarily rigid segregation between sexes and gender roles. So seeing two mentions of crossdressing in one article really got my attention.

Here is the first excerpt:

"To see his girlfriend in public, Mamdouh, the Bedouin reporter, dressed up in an abaya. "I do it all the time he confessed".

An abaya is an women’s garment that covers a woman from head to toe. I’ve read that the origin of the biblical prohibition against crossdressing was exactly this kind of behavior....breaking boundaries set up between men and women...leading to illicit liaisons. Given the all-covering nature of the abaya, there has always been speculation about what one could get away with. You could hide anything under an abaya, from heavy weapons to a man.

The second quote is illustrative of two points- one the way people respond to sex roles, and the difference between crossdressing and being a crossdresser:

"One year, however he visited his cousin in Dubai, and his cousin’s wife, who is American, held a Halloween masquerade. "She wanted me to dress up like a woman," he confessed.

"And did you?"

He laughed, a little embarrassed. "I went to the party for about fifteen minutes, then said I had to leave. I went upstairs with my cousin’s wife. She owns a beauty salon. " The relative put Nair on his legs and shaved his arms and mustache and even his eybrows. "At the time, I wore my hair really long. So she curled it. She gave me some panty hose and a dress with socks in the bra. And then I went downstairs." The disguise was convincing, and he began to flirt—plopping himself on a good friends lap. Soon, of course, the guests figured out it who he really was. His buddy was mad but the women were intrigued by his role playing. "They were, like, kissing me. They even let me come into the women’s bathroom!" He had a great time he said. "But I hate myself in the morning. I woke up with no eyebrows."

This second story sounds like a many a fantasy. But in a crossdresser’s fantasy, or real life, the event is always the impetuous to dress again. Here, it was just a Halloween party. What also struck me, was that despite the sex-segregation enforced inside Saudi Arabia, people outside have rather different behaviors. The mixing of sexes described at this party would be unthinkable were these people at home.

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