Khawal, köçek, and femmephobia
Hello scholars,
This semester was a fruitful one for my research.
I did two research projects on male belly dancers: one on Bert Balladine, and a historiographical one about the khawal and köçek dancers. While I have more work to do on my Bert stuff before it’s ready to be released, I wanted to share with y’all some of my analysis on the khawal and köçek and femmephobia.
Men have been mischaracterized in the historical narrative of belly dance since the 1800s, described in European travelogs as “beastly transvestites,” “unnatural…being partly male, and partly female,” and their movements as “like a woman ready to be fucked” or “a confounded wanton posture” (Karayanni 2004, 77–87; Buonaventura 2010, 69). These European travelers, carrying preconceived notions about appropriate gendered behavior, depicted the male dancers they encountered as perverted facsimiles of women. Coming from countries where “generations of cultural dogma confined the hips, shoulders, and the lumbar region [of men] to a…state of embarrassed silence” (Karayanni 2004, 73), Europeans categorized these male dancers in ways that conformed to Western gender norms. Despite considerable evidence disproving these accounts, such femmephobic attitudes—or the “systematic devaluation of femininity…[that] operates by policing feminine transgressions” (Hoskin 2019, n.p.)—persist in scholarship, as seen in Kathleen W. Fraser’s Before They Were Belly Dancers, where male dancers are still described as “young male transvestites” who “impersonated public female dancers” (2015, 81). This shows the way male belly dancers have been perceived and written about is biased by femmephobic attitudes, proving that the archive of evidence about male belly dancers is not a neutral repository of facts, but rather a confluence of assumptions resulting in a literary echo chamber tainted by colonialist ideologies and Western patriarchal frameworks.
As briefly mentioned in this quote, I’m using femmephobia as a framework to describe the “ick” people feel when men behave femininely. As a male belly dancer, I’ve experienced this firsthand in a multitude of ways, including, but not limited to:
Male photographers and videographers refusing to photograph or film me during performances
Having people leave 🤮🤢 emojis on my videos
People mass reporting my videos until they’re taken down by the platform
Being told men shouldn’t belly dance because it’s a violation of a woman’s dance
Being barred from certain commercial opportunities, because producers only want female dancers
However, this is not a universal experience for all male belly dancers. While there is generally a stigma for male belly dancers regardless of how femininely they are perceived, this discrimination confers more often on men such as myself who don’t embody the ideal vision of Western masculinity. For this, I used the framework of “hegemonic masculinity,” as depicted by RW Connell:
Hegemonic masculinity, a theory posited by R.W. Connell in the early 1980s, argues that the masculine ideal is governed by the sociocultural context in which it exists (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 829–835). To put it differently, what was considered hegemonic masculinity in Western Europe in the 1800s looked very different from what it was in Egypt in the same period, because these two regions were constituted by very different epistemic models of masculinity. This passage by Joseph Boone in The Homoerotics of Orientalism illustrates this plainly: “In cultures where women wore trousers and men flowing robes, some Europeans simply misread sartorial norms, thereby envisioning violations of gender codes…that occurred outside a binaristic understanding of male and female” (2014, 104). Boone is showing how the hegemonic masculine ideal of Europeans was antithetical to what they witnessed in Egypt, causing them to mischaracterize khawalat and köçekler as female impersonators.
In my paper I discuss how dancers like the khawal and köçek experienced discrimination and revulsion in the travel writings of European colonizers due to their femmephobic attitude couched in hegemonic masculinity. In other words, travel writers thought the khawal and köçek were gross because they acted too femininely, which they perceived as a violation of appropriate gendered behavior for men.
“But wait!” you might be thinking: “Weren’t the khawal and köçek basically drag queens?”
In short, no. In long, it’s complicated.
Did they adopt feminine mannerisms and dress? Yes. Does this prove that they were female impersonators (argued by Edward W. Lane), transgender (argued by Tarik Sultan), or homosexual? No.
The “female impersonator” model of reconciling the existence of male dancers in the Middle East has been a pervasive myth for centuries, and has been used as a theoretical framework for explaining the phenomenon of male dancers such as the khawalat of Egypt and köçekler of Turkey. This model is couched in the misunderstanding that male belly dancers were all impersonating women, similar to how we might think of a drag queen. In my master’s thesis, I argued that scholars have perpetuated this model due to a lack of critical engagement with the integrity of the primary sources of this myth, compounded by ignorance of the scholarship that disproves it: “A misunderstanding is communicated as an assertion of truth, and then becomes an inlet into the subsequent belly dance scholarship” (von Trapp 2023, 75). I concluded that these assumptions were exclusively Western misunderstandings, as evidence shows that native audiences generally found the khawalat and köçekler to be desirable performers precisely because they were men, which “constituted one of their chief attractions for their eager clientele” (Shay 2000, 239). In other words, the dancers’ gender attracted native audiences, and often repelled European audiences due to their conservative moral sensibilities.
If any part of this research sounds interesting to you, then you’ll enjoy my paper: “Colonial Drag: How Femmephobia Narratives Transformed Male Belly Dancers into Female Impersonators.” You can read it right now for FREE on my Patreon! Follow the button below.
