Gender in Iraq: A 'dangerous' concept with far-reaching potentials for social change
By Dominik Drabent | April 10, 2024
Early August of 2023 marked a major setback for women’s empowerment in Iraq and simultaneously further marginalized queer people in Iraq. A directive issued by the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission banned using the term "gender" in all public communications. It further recommended replacing the word "homosexuality" with "sexual deviance." The directive has had direct impacts on Iraqi society, with academics losing their jobs due to the ban and gender equality efforts being halted. Anti-domestic violence efforts have now become even more challenging to address. The pushback against gender equality by conservative forces is not unique to Iraq but is part of a larger "war" on gender and sexuality.
The “war” on the term “gender” is relatively new, as it started in June 2023 after an Islamic parliament member complained that women organizations in Iraq have been advocating for homosexuality and queerness under the umbrella of “gender.” However, since 2003, political campaigns have aimed at linking advocacy work around gender in the context of Iraq to different aspects such as promoting homosexuality, fostering moral decay, supporting transgender identities, and violating the national and religious values of the state. These efforts have happened in full awareness that Iraqi state officials have signed and committed to gender equality efforts facilitated by international and United Nations treaties and agreements that also align with the constitutional goals of equality in Iraq. Gender has become a demonized concept by the Iraqi state. Its ambivalence is rooted in the need to obtain international funds and reputation for projects that are necessary for the Iraqi state, while keeping the grip on its people intact.
Furthermore, the term “gender” is not easily translatable to Arabic with the same kind of meanings that the term has in English, which often leads to gender being portrayed as a Western concept in Iraqi discourses. The ambiguity of the term through its translations also jeopardizes projects that focus on achieving gender equality in Iraq. In a petition from fall of 2023 that was signed by more than 3,000 activists and academics in Iraq and then translated into English before it was sent to the United Nations it is written,
This concept [gender] has become global, adopted by the United Nations in its human rights agreements and documents, as well as successive Iraqi governments after 2003, within their national policies and working mechanisms. Gender analysis has been used as an important tool to identify the gap between men and women, diagnose activities, circumstances, and needs affecting their control over resources and decision-making.
This petition shows the far-reaching effects banning the term “gender” will have for the future and its deep entanglement with United Nations efforts for gender equality.
There is a longer history of anti-gender discourse
Iraq is a state shaped by sectarianism between various ethnic and religious groups. The tensions between groups such as Shi‘as, Sunnis, and Kurds have fragmented the state and created a fragility to stability and democracy. Constant struggles over power and for autonomous decision-making are defining for Iraq’s political landscape. Decisions made by the Shi‘a majority are often met with resistance from Sunnis, Kurds, and other minorities in the state of Iraq. This fragmentation can also be observed in the distribution of positions in power. While it is not written in the constitution, it is a commonly understood political praxis that the president be Kurdish, the speaker Sunni, and the prime minister Shi‘a. However, women are often not included in this political praxis.
The anti-gender discourse in Iraq has its roots in the absence of gender diversity in political decision-making. What becomes apparent when looking at political decisions is that gender as a category of analysis is often not considered and is missing in discourses in Iraq. This became obvious in the political processes in the aftermath of war and invasion post-2003. There cannot be peace without the inclusion of women, as women are amongst the groups most impacted by war. Nonetheless, women often only matter when they can be "used" by political forces to make an argument—be it for invasion or domination—but never to center their lived experiences as a valuable starting point to improve society's conditions. Throughout the years, women's rights in Iraq have been traded in for keeping power structures alive. This has created a vulnerability for Iraqi women, who are often never prioritized in the political discourse.
One study that interrogates how Iraqi women's security is jeopardized recenters the struggles of Iraqi women and focuses on their experiences with economic instability, terrorism, corruption, conflict, law, and the erosion of the Iraqi state’s institutions. This recentering of women's voices explains how gender is often diminished and forgotten in the political discourses in Iraq while being central to the omission of women from the public sphere.
This absence and ignorance of women's rights has influenced resistance efforts for gender equality. In Iraq, online spaces and online activism are central to women's resistance. One example of successful online activism in Iraq is around an anti-domestic violence bill. A social media campaign surrounding the hashtag [#tashry’ qanoon al-‘unf al-usary (passing the domestic violence law)] allowed many Iraqi women and activists to call for social and legal change by collectively questioning societal and patriarchal norms. The campaign was successful insofar as the legislation was forced to be introduced to the parliament in 2019 due to this feminist online activism. There, conservative Islamic forces halted it on the grounds that it would be against Islam and Iraqi culture. Thus, while gender diversity is often missing from the political discourse, gender-based feminist activism has forced Iraqi politics to deal with feminist issues such as domestic violence.
The framing of gender as a threat to the Iraqi state
Although women make up nearly one-third of the Iraqi parliament, neither these members of parliament nor the Parliamentary Committee on Women, Children, and Family have spoken up against the recent developments. This might also be due to (in)famous examples of attacks, such as the ones on Iraqi feminist activist Hanaa Edwar, who has received many misogynistic slurs. She was labeled as the "mother of homosexuality" and a "foreign agent." Hanaa Edwar is also Christian, which makes her even more vulnerable to such attacks while advocating for women's rights in Iraq, as belonging to a religious minority and identifying as a feminist goes against what state officials call national and religious values.
Such framing of gender as a Western concept can then be found again in labels such as “foreign agent” used for Edwar. The issues of translation surrounding language also allow for conflation and confusion. When it is not clear by the translation which concept one is referring to, terms like sex, gender, and sexuality all get thrown together. This provides space for Iraqi state officials to conflate sexuality with gender and—in conjunction with the framing of gender as a Western concept—to refer to queerness as an imported idea from the West, which threatens the national and religious values of Iraq. The description of gender by Iraqi state officials as promoting homosexuality, fostering moral decay, and supporting transgender identities directly feeds into the claim that gender as a Western concept violates the national and religious values of the state.
One way to channel national and religious values in Iraq is citizenship. A direct impact of the sanctions after the Gulf War was an increase in social conservatism, as the Iraqi state implemented a discourse where the honor of the nation was put on the shoulders of women. This new construction of the Iraqi woman as a pious citizen then also came with a change of dress code towards a more traditional, Islamic, and conservative dress code that portrayed this piety. Citizenship also relates to belonging. In Iraq, feminists and women’s rights activists are perceived as disturbing the state’s order. In one viral video, women activists were equated with terrorist groups. Such campaigns promote antifeminism as they misrepresent feminism and aim to eliminate activists from the public sphere. This equation of feminism with terrorism does not only exclude feminists and activists from participating in citizenship discourses, but it frames them as oppositional forces to the state. As those groups directly engage with discourses related to gender, it is not surprising that the anti-gender propaganda by the Iraqi government is directly tied to the framing of gender-based activism as “terrorism.”
However, citizenship in Iraq also becomes defined through the nuclear family. The true Iraqi citizen is male, independent, and has a family. Citizenship that goes beyond nationality is often gendered and leaves out not only cisgender women but any other human that is not a cisgender male.
Attacks on gender not only harm queer Iraqis but also restrain women’s empowerment
Even though one might think that the anti-gender discourse in Iraq is solely employed to harm queer Iraqis and that state officials do not understand the concept of gender at all, there is a more extensive rationale here. Indeed, the political campaigns targeting the concept of "gender" have direct negative consequences for queer people in Iraq also because they frame gender as proliferating homosexuality. Nonetheless, by framing gender as a Western concept that weakens the nation, feminist activism surrounding women’s rights is directly attacked. This jeopardizes women’s empowerment as much as it encourages violence towards women and queer people who do not comply with the state’s ideas of womanhood, manhood, and sexuality. This dynamic becomes evident when looking at the prioritization of banning "gender" over "homosexuality," which was only recommended to be replaced by “sexual deviance” by Iraqi state officials. This does not mean to indicate that the Iraqi state officials perceive homosexuality as less an issue than women’s empowerment. It rather signifies that there must be a greater fear of the potential “gender” has for mobilizing people to fight against values that constrain them, a potential that "homosexuality" is believed not to have or less so than “gender.”
Of course, queer Iraqis sadly have been marginalized and persecuted, and the attacks on mobilizing around gender directly affect queer Iraqis as gender and sexuality directly relate to each other. Violence, including the killing of queer people, is widespread and normalized. Discourses by the Iraqi state frame certain concepts as threats to the nation and are often based on placing queer people in opposition to the nation, the good citizen, and portraying them as the source of the negative, which undermine the state’s power and hinder having a productive and healthy society.
Historically, it was colonial empires that were concerned about homosexuality. In the early twentieth century, British officials sent back reports on the prevailing vice of homosexuality. According to their narrations, even schoolboys engaged in this vice to make easy money. This repetitive mentioning of the Iraqi vice that was even going on in Iraqi schoolboys was part of this logic based on sexology, evolutionary biology, and social anthropology. This discourse aimed to place the people of Europe—specifically the British—on top of the human hierarchy, while subjects in the Orient—the colonized—were placed as inferior, as their sexual activities did not equate to what was understood as a heterosexual character of civilization. Often, Westerners thought of homosociality as a direct result of gender segregation in Islamic civilizations and conflated homosociality with homosexuality. Not much research on the history of sexualities in Iraq has been conducted, but colonialism clearly had an immense impact in shaping how homosexuality in Iraq is understood nowadays. These hierarchical discourses based on sexuality are still widespread, and, thus, the Iraqi government's fears also stem from the notions that an association with homosexuality means inferiority.
As sex, gender, and sexuality are directly intertwined with each other, anti-gender rhetoric and campaigns undoubtedly affect all people in Iraq. Queer Iraqis are used as scapegoats for the issues in the country and stand in as a reason for targeting “gender,” while a substantial reason for these attacks is to keep patriarchal values in place and enforce power over women and queer people. This can be observed in the backlash activists experienced for the efforts in mobilizing the Iraqi society in favor of anti-domestic violence legislation, which would have empowered women and meant not only reducing gendered violence but also a diminishment of the patriarchal powers in the country. Banning the term “gender” will have far-reaching impacts for achieving gender equality and social change.
