Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos

2016; Indiana University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-3637642

1558-9579

Achim Rohde,

Turkey's Politics and Society

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.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 red lipstick like women, I say you must slaughter them and hold me responsible for it. . . . Whoever dyes his hair and wears makeup like women is effeminate. In my knowledge, the first fatwa of our master Ali [Ibn Abi Talib, the prophet's nephew and son-in-law, and the founder of Shiʿi Islam] was related to one case that happened to Muslims the first time someone deviated. When . . . they asked [Ali] about the solution, "What should we do with this man?" he replied, "We should climb to the highest point, throw him upside down and let him fall down head first." This was a big fatwa. . . . I am seeking your help with the issue of those who dye their hair and wear women's clothes. This is shameful for Iraqis and against Islam. If a Syrian, Egyptian or Moroccan saw those people, he would laugh and say "What is that? Is that a man or a woman?" Iraqis are not like that, Iraqis are real men. (quoted in Woods, Palkki, and Scott 2011, 207–10)The former dictator refers to men and boys who engage in nonnormative bodily practices such as dying their hair and wearing makeup, and the fatwa he refers to explicitly addresses homosexual acts. The commonly used term for effeminate men (mukhanathiyyin) is a synonym for male homosexuals in Iraq (Luongo 2010, 105). Although I cannot verify whether the antiregime activities that triggered this conversation included significant numbers of cross-dressing boys and men, Hussein's emphasis on this issue suggests that he thought so; moreover, the fatwa he refers to is often cited by Islamist ideologues in order to legitimate violence against gays (Zollner 2010). While it may seem odd for a secular dictator to quote this fatwa, it was likely an opportunistic appeal to mobilize a Shiʿi audience Hussein understood to be Islamist and conservative. The rebuff from one of the tribal elders to Hussein's appeal, which Hussein repeated three times, is equally remarkable: "Master, there is a more important issue than that, it is hurting citizens' feelings" (Woods, Palkki, and Scott 2011, 210). The sheikhs apparently refused to engage Hussein on his homophobic terms, indicating that cross-dressers were not scandalous to them. Further, they were courageous enough to point out that they understood the cause of social unrest in the neighborhood to be the rising crime rate attributed to deserters from the Iraqi army.Homosexuals and male-to-female transgender persons were visible and widely known to be part of Baghdad society at the time. Ali al-Hilli, an activist in the organization Iraqi LGBT, who left Iraq in 2000, remembers that the regime "allowed a measure of liberation" between the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. There was increased visibility of male homosexual scenes in more affluent parts of Baghdad: "There were so many guys, from Kuwait, from Saudi Arabia, guys in the streets with makeup" (Buckley 2007). The conversation between Hussein and the tribal leaders indicates that such communities also existed in poor neighborhoods. Dhia al-Saray (2009) mentions that in the late Baʿthist period, female hormones were freely available in Iraqi pharmacies. In a 2007 interview, al-Hilli mentions an old friend named Haidar "Dina" Fayek who was murdered shortly before the interview. Haidar/Dina "worked in the prostitution industry as a transsexual madam, was a fixture in Baghdadi gay circles, [and was] always loud and fun and quick with a laugh. She never hid her orientation and indeed lived openly as a woman" (France 2007; see also Ireland 2006). But as al-Hilli's account of his own experience demonstrates, the regime's intelligence services exploited the vulnerability of gay men in Iraqi society by attempting to blackmail them into becoming spies, particularly if they were in contact with foreigners (France 2007). Nevertheless, the situation was not desperate in the 1990s for most men with nonnormative gender and sexual embodiments and identities or for those who engaged in same-sex relations.In 1994, a few years after the conversation between Hussein and tribal leaders in Saddam City, the daily newspaper Babil, owned by Hussein's eldest son ʿUday, ran an article on the "scandal" of an ensemble of "Egyptian" mukhanathiyyin (male-to-female transvestites) performing in a Baghdad restaurant. Numerous published photos depicted the performers in drag. According to the published account, which included the restaurant's name and address, "Babil's secret camera managed to collect these gleanings of a roaming band of Egyptian queers [al-nafar al-dal min al-mukhanathiyyin al-misriyyin] who can be seen in these pictures like morally corrupt women. . . . Is this tolerable in the country of struggle and brave people?" (Babil, January 13, 1994; my translation). This article was published when the regime was clamping down on Baghdadi nightlife. Saddam Hussein had banned the public sale of alcohol and ordered all nightclubs closed as part of an Islamization campaign, the National Faith Campaign (Bengio 1998, 176–91; Rohde 2013, 714–17). These efforts were widely understood as symbolic gestures aimed at appeasing religious forces and suppressing conspicuous consumption, given the severe UN sanctions; at the time most Iraqis could hardly afford to buy food. As a result, such performances were no longer publicized (fig. 1).Despite Saddam Hussein's declared aversion, the regime did not conduct organized assaults on gay men, and queer life continued. An Iraqi gay man ("Kemal") described in an account by Afdhere Jama (2008, 49–53) reports moving from his native Najaf to Baghdad in the 1990s, where he eventually lived in a romantic relationship with a wealthy older man in the upscale Mansour district. Both participated openly in social life in the permissive enclaves of well-to-do Baghdadis. Later in the 1990s, after they had split up, Kemal worked for international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and charities and lived "a good, stable life" in the Zaytouna neighborhood. Of this period, he says: "It was work, have fun, and [I] lived my life without any stress. I met various guys as lovers and although none of them worked out, I was still happy with my life" (Jama 2008, 52). Of course, Kemal's account does not reflect the experiences of most Iraqis, who suffered greatly under UN sanctions, and it might be inflected by a degree of nostalgia, given the deterioration that occurred after 2003. Still, by all available accounts, popular nightclubs known to be frequented by gays remained in 1990s Baghdad, including in upscale hotels, "gay cafés and cruising points on Abu Nuwas Street . . ., among other gathering spots" (Luongo 2010, 99–100; see also Buckley 2007).Although there was relative openness to male nonnormative gender and sexual practices, by 2000 there was a full-fledged campaign against women deemed prostitutes by Saddam's Fedaʾiyyin, a paramilitary group founded in 1994 and run by Hussein's son ʿUday. This militia formed part of what is called the "shadow state" in late Baʿthist Iraq since it existed outside the Ministry of the Interior and reported directly to ʿUday Hussein (Sassoon 2012, 149–50). In 2001 a team of French researchers collected human rights testimonies from Iraqi refugees in Damascus and Amman, and then composed biographical accounts of fifty-six women who were publicly beheaded in daylight by the Fedaʾiyyin. According to their findings, these "were often single women (widows, spinsters) who may have been prostitutes but who most often have been or are mixed up in some form of opposition to the regime" (International Alliance for Human Rights/Human Rights Alliance France 2002, 21–22). Reportedly, party and security service personnel often accompanied the executioners, shouting slogans like "Hurrah for the glory of Iraq! Down with those who shame us" (ibid., 22). The victims' families and neighbors were forced to witness the events. Heads and bodies were exhibited in front of their homes for up to twenty-four hours after an execution. Estimates of the number of women killed in the course of this campaign vary widely but fall between sixty and two thousand (ibid., 23).In times of conflict, the killing of women is regularly connected to the concept of national honor. The fusion of women's bodies with a discourse of honor and shame is amply demonstrated by ʿUday Hussein's henchmen in this violent campaign against women (Al-Ali and Pratt 2009, 10, 80). This violence occurred outside formal state frameworks. The Iraqi Penal Code of July 1969 stipulates that prostitution should be penalized with a three- to six-month prison sentence and a fine.1 The code does not penalize consensual same-sex activities between adults unless committed in public or by married men, which makes them grounds for a woman to be granted a divorce. In 1981, Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) decree no. 125 amended the personal status law, declaring acts of "sodomy" by a married man to be adultery.2 The often-cited RCC decree no. 234 that turned prostitution into a capital crime was issued on October 30, 2001, after the end of the violent campaign against women "prostitutes." Regarding homosexual practices, the decree added "sodomy" committed without consent to the list of capital offenses, but it did not outlaw homosexual activities, as was often reported.3 In 2003, the decree and all amendments to Iraqi law issued after 1984 were declared null and void by Paul Bremer, who was appointed presidential envoy to Iraq by George H. W. Bush and led the Coalition Provisional Authority during the occupation (Global Justice Project: Iraq 2009). This effectively turned back the clock, applying the Iraqi Penal Code and all amendments issued up to the beginning of 1985. The 1981 RCC amendment to the personal status law was not declared invalid after 2003.Conservative forces in the region argue that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities and lifestyles are expressions of Satanism, contradict Islamic precepts and human nature, and are the result of corrupting foreign influences (Tolino 2014, 78–82). Ryan Richard Thoreson (2014) reminds us, however, that just as in contemporary Africa, the trope of a rising tide of homophobia elides political-economic differences in incidents of antiqueer animus. According to available evidence, targeted killings of supposed or known gay and transgender boys and men started as early as 2004 but went largely unnoticed in the generalized violence of the US war in Iraq, insurgency, and militia infighting. Reports of these killings surfaced in international media in 2006 and 2007. Based on testimonies from Baghdad and Basra, these reports attributed the 2004 killings to the Iran-backed Badr Corps, which form part of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).4 A fatwa issued in 2005 on Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's website legitimized the killing of men engaging in acts of "sodomy." The fatwa was removed from the website as a result of protests by advocacy groups, according to media reports (Ireland 2006; Howden 2006; Buckley 2007; France 2007).After 2008, the decreasing violence in daily life led to a surge in nightlife, including gay nightlife, in Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, and other cities (Williams and Maher 2009; LGBT Asylum News 2010).5 Sadrist militiamen, part of the Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi, established in 2003) and its offspring, the League of the Righteous (ʿAsaʾib Ahl al-Haq, formed in 2006), responded by "repositioning themselves as agents of moral enforcement" (McAllester 2009, 2).6 In 2009, these young men, who were from the same Baghdad neighborhood that was a site of the 1991 uprising against Hussein's government, embarked on a campaign that targeted and killed men and boys identified as homosexuals (Human Rights Watch 2009). The masculine political agency of this younger generation was based on a brand of Islamism that took root in the late 1990s under the influence of Mohammad Sadiq as-Sadr, the father of Muqtada al-Sadr (Baram 2014, 271–78). According to a New York Times story in April 2009, Shiʿi clerics in Baghdad "devoted a portion of Friday Prayer services to inveighing against homosexuality." The journalists report that in a sermon the previous week, Sheikh Jassem al-Mutairi instructed the congregation that the "community should be purified from such delinquent behavior like stealing, lying and the effeminacy phenomenon among men." Homosexuality, he reportedly said, is "far from manhood and honesty" (Williams and Maher 2009).In a September 2012 BBC "assignment" documentary by Natalia Antelava titled Hunted to Death—Gay Life in Iraq, the filmmaker's interlocutors discuss their experiences of violence and report frequent arrests and being raped at police checkpoints (Antelava 2012, 3:00ff., 8:10ff.). A spokesperson for the prime minister contends that the state cannot protect homosexuals, emphasizes that homosexuality is alien to Iraqi culture, and states that gay people should respect local customs (ibid., 17:32ff.). There is only anecdotal evidence of targeted killings of lesbian or bisexual women as part of this campaign. The lack of available data may reflect the focus of Western NGOs and researchers "on 'public,' political patterns of attacks on men," or the general invisibility of lesbian or bisexual women in Iraqi society (Human Rights Watch 2009, 42–43; see also International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission 2014a, 5).The 2009 Islamist campaign against Iraqi boys and men targeted as gay was largely ignored by the government and Iraqi media.7 When addressed by mainstream Iraqi media sources, the narrative was hesitant and all but explicitly condoned the killings. An article by Sabah Mohsen Kazem (2009) published in the daily newspaper Al-Sabah criticized what he called the "feminization of young men" due to Western cultural influences and warned against their corrupting effects on Iraqi society as a whole (see also Whitaker 2010, 5). Al-Saray (2009, 37), in a published background report on the ongoing campaign, argued: "They are homosexuals [al-mithliyyun jinsiyyan] or puppies [jarawi], as these effeminates are being called here, who suffer from the kidnappers [al-shiyala]. These are groups that hunt and mostly kill them. The police are observing, because there is nothing in the text of the Iraqi law that forbids this phenomenon." According to reports in international media, the police indeed turned a blind eye to these organized killings and at times even participated in the persecution of supposed gays (see, e.g., Williams and Maher 2009). Killings of men and boys targeted as gay also occurred in 2012 and 2014, though on a more limited scale, and were again attributed to Sadrist Shiʿi militias (International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission 2014b, 6–8).8The US invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime altered the parameters of nonnormative sexual and gendered living in Iraq. The more prevalent availability of the Internet in Iraq after 2003 "increase[d] gay networking within Baghdad and outside of Iraq" and made gay sites like www.manjam.com or www.gaydar.co.uk known to a local audience (Luongo 2010, 106). In the chaos and economic crisis that followed the invasion, sex work increasingly became a source of income for younger men and even children, which heightened the visibility of homosexual practices and attracted the attention of Islamist militias (Jama 2008, 52). There was a parallel increase of women and girl sex work after 2003, particularly forced prostitution (Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq 2010, 6). The feminization and queering of colonized men has long been understood as an imperial strategy of projecting power, and US forces in Iraq, including in the Abu Ghraib prison, followed this trodden path (Trexler 1995, 1–37; Razack 2005, 341–63; Tétreault 2006, 159–63; Hasso 2007, 34–37). There is not sufficient evidence, however, that interaction with global gay culture or invasion and war have significantly changed the meanings and experiences of homosexuality in Iraqi society.For several weeks in early 2012, a wave of murders against teenagers and young adults who were identified as "emos" (this label was used loosely to capture a range of nonconforming behavior) was reported in Baghdad and southern Iraqi cities. The murders were attributed to the Sadrist Mahdi Army and League of the Righteous. The victims, estimated to number between "well under two dozen to 100," were largely male (LeVine 2012; see also Al-Sharaa and Mohammed 2012; Al-Bayati 2012). Emos were accused of being devil worshippers, effeminate, and homosexual. The emo subculture originated in the 1980s US punk scene and refers to "emotional hardcore" music (LeVine 2012). Emo music has a "more 'pop' sound" and lyrically focuses "on emotional, expressive or confessional lyrics" (ibid.). According to Mark LeVine (ibid.), critics "consider the music effete, or feminine, as it lacks the hard and supposedly masculine edge of more traditional punk, hardcore or heavy metal." More recent adaptations became popular in various Middle Eastern countries in the 2000s (Büsser, Engelmann, and Rüdiger 2009; Le Renard 2013, 68). According to Shawkat Al-Bayati (2012), "Emo kids first started to appear in Iraq in 2008; most of them are aged between 12 and 18, the vast majority are male and one imagines the same elements of rebellion that attract Western teens, also attract the Iraqi youth." A fifteen-year-old emo girl from Najaf described by Ned Parker (2010) tells of her love of US goth music, her attraction to the Twilight Saga film series, and fashion accessories affiliated with emo subculture. In 2012, this subculture was ubiquitous in upscale urban districts, particularly in bars, schools, music shops, salons, and certain clothing shops (Al-Arabiyya TV 2012; LeVine 2012; Jawad 2012). There was a revival of emo subculture in some Iraqi cities in 2016, as "today these kinds of young men are more courageous and one sees more of them in the south; militia are preoccupied with other issues and that gives them some small freedom to dress as they like" (Jihad 2016).In contrast to the relative silence in the Iraqi media regarding the targeted killing of assumed homosexual men in 2009, the spring 2012 violence against emo youths triggered a much broader reaction among leading clerics, government officials, and media pundits. Reactions were largely critical of the killing campaign and argued for focusing on addressing the sources of youth alienation. The emo subculture was considered to be a protest against prevailing conservative social traditions and the bleak situation in Iraq after years of civil war. One article compared the phenomenon of emo youths with the emergence of break-dance subculture in 1980s Iraq. Whereas state authorities had suppressed break-dancers by arresting young men and shaving their hair, according to one account (Daʾud 2012) in the weekly Al-Usbuʿiyya, today's emos are being killed outright. The article implies that under the former regime social nonconformity had not been as brutally repressed; it also highlights the impact of social media, especially Facebook, on the spread of emo subculture in Iraq. A female student identifying as emo is quoted as saying that being emo is solely about fashion and music and is not a sign of Satanism.ʿAbd al-Hādi Al-Babi (2012) declares that emos are "a scandal for Iraqi cultural and national identity" and calls for a concerted effort to imbue adolescents with values and a solid cultural identity in order to prevent such developments. Nevertheless, he argues that the difficult social, political, and economic situation in Iraq under the former regime and the US occupation is responsible for the estrangement of Iraqi youth. Hassan Daʾud (2012) argues that violence is the wrong way to deal with the emo phenomenon and calls on state authorities to protect emos. Trying to counter the image of emos as alien to Iraqi culture, Daʾud relates their black clothes to the ʿabaya worn by war widows and argues that emo culture is an attempt to break out of the cycle of violence. The writer of an unsigned op-ed in Al-Usbuʿiyya (Anonymous 2012a) declares that emo subculture is a harmless reaction by youths to the difficult circumstances of life in Iraq. The author criticizes the condemnation of emos as contradicting individual freedom and democratic values. Similarly, a report on the proceedings of a conference at a teacher training college regarding emos suggests that most participants thought they were harmless kids and saw the phenomenon as a response to the violence and insecurity of life in Iraq (Mawzan 2012).Most accounts strongly criticize violence against emos. Saʿd Al-ʿUbaidi (2012) likens the killing of emo youths to the brutality of the former regime and calls on today's authorities to act differently and according to democratic values, to protect young people, and to offer them chances for employment. ʿAdel Kazem (2012b) differentiates between those for whom being emo is a temporary adolescent phase and those who are homosexuals (mithliyyun) or third sex (al-jins al-thalith). He cites social scientists who declare that in either case emos cause no harm to society. Adel Al-Jaburi (2012) identifies the "American occupation" as the main reason for the spread of Western cultural imports in Iraq such as emos, but his criticism is directed against the government, which he attacks for failing to support youths and provide opportunities for them. He also identifies frustration as a main cause for the rise of sectarian extremists who turn against minorities. According to him, the killing of emos is condoned by high religious authorities (shakhsiyyat diniyya kabira) and aims to spread fear in society as a whole.An elaborate portrait of emo culture published in the daily Al-Zaman by an unsigned author (Anonymous 2012b) explicitly counters erroneous views about emos in Iraqi society. According to this article, being emo is mainly about expressing emotions and is a way for young people to come to terms with challenging transitory phases in their lives. The author notes that it is difficult to distinguish between male and female emos because of their similar clothing. He stresses the difference between emos and heavy-metal fans in Iraq. He contends that heavy-metal fans are the real devil worshippers who should be approached and reintegrated into society.9In a marked contrast with the reaction to the violence of 2009, Iraqi parliament members publicly condemned the killing of emos and vowed to act against the perpetrators; leading Shiʿi clerics, including Muqtada al-Sadr and Ali al-Sistani, denounced the killings and called for "ending the phenomenon in the framework of the law" (Anonymous 2012c; Human Rights Watch 2012). The chairperson of the human rights committee of the Iraqi parliament called for educational efforts to push back against the influence of emo culture while still noting that violence is no solution (Kazem 2012a). Although they denounced the killings, these figures also believed that emo subculture should have no place in Iraqi society. It is impossible to determine whether the parliamentarians issued these condemnations out of personal convictions or merely paid lip service to human rights and rule-of-law discourse. It is also possible that the broad public condemnation of the killings influenced their behavior.In the executive branch of the Iraqi government, discourse regarding emo subculture was similarly disapproving but more repressive. In August 2011 the Ministry of Education "circulated a memo that recommended schools to curb the spread of Emo culture, which it called 'an infiltrated phenomenon in our society'" (Human Rights Watch 2012). The Ministry of Education issued a statement in 2012 that emo youths would be prevented from entering schools, arguing that pupils had to be shielded from their corrupting influence (Zahrawi 2012). Statements from the Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the police, called for the violent containment of emos. On February 13, 2012, the ministry issued a statement on its website, announcing that officials had been "following up on the phenomenon of 'emo' or Satanists, and that they [the police] have official approval to eliminate them as soon as possible, because the dimensions of this community have begun to move in another direction, and are now threatening danger."10 Only a month later the ministry was compelled to issue a warning about "radical and extremist groups attempting to stand as protectors for morals and religious traditions from any conduct against people based on a fashion, dress or haircut" (Human Rights Watch 2012). At the same time, the Ministry of the Interior initiated a campaign to curb the further spread of emo culture by sending out police to close shops that sold emo fashion and accessories, starting in Baghdad's Kadhimiya neighborhood. Local functionaries there claimed that emos contradicted the cultural values of Iraqi society and negatively impacted young people, whom they accused of blindly imitating Western practices (Al-Rawi and Kazem 2012; Human Rights Watch 2012). The repressive stance regarding social nonconformity reflected in these statements and the evidence of police involvement in repression suggest that a significant degree of overlap exists between parts of the Iraqi government and the informal militias behind most of the killings.Nonnormative gendered and sexual practices and identities are long-standing in Iraq and other parts of the region and coexist with hostility to same-sex relations and gender and sexual nonconformity (Rowson 1991, 671–93; Murray 1997a, 244–55; 1997b, 204–21; Westphal-Hellbusch 1997, 233–43). Despite Saddam Hussein's homophobic outbursts, there is no evidence of organized violence against supposed gays or cross-dressers by the Baʿthist government or allied nonstate actors before 2003. Recent waves of violence against gender and sexual queerness in Iraq target the country's cultural heritage and are part of continuous attacks on Iraqi civil society, whose gender and sexual diversity is often unaccounted for in conventional narratives. Some observers have interpreted such attacks in Iraq and elsewhere as expressions of a struggle between tradition and modernity, constructing an Arab-Islamic civilizational bloc that refuses to respect human rights, with progress sometimes identified with the proliferation of visible gayness (Whitaker 2006, 2010). This position is indefensible and has been criticized (Haritaworn, Tawqir, and Erdem 2008).Violence against nonnormative gender and sexual behaviors, enactments, and identities has convincingly been attributed to the general erosion of the Iraqi state and the normalization of violence after decades of war, embargo, and societal conflict (Al-Rachid and Méténier 2008, 114–17, 127–32; Green and Ward 2009, 612–16). A "culture of war" that centers the male soldier-hero as the acting subject is ubiquitous (Rohde 2010, 124–43; 2011, 100–104, 109–10; Dodge 2013, 256; Abdulameer 2014). This ideal of masculinity marginalizes and delegitimizes Iraqis who do not conform. The radical and traumatic changes experienced by Iraqis since 2003 have increased organized gender and sexual violence and outbreaks of moral panic that scapegoat nonconformists (Whitaker 2010).It is clear that several sectarian entrepreneurial formations have emerged in post-Saddam Iraq. Politicians and other figures preside over "informal" militia forces that act outside formal state structures. Some of these militias are widely understood to be associated with leading Shiʿi actors in the central government, and some are aligned with the Sunni insurgency. Although these militias are not formally attached to the state, their acts are condoned by executive state officials who fail to prosecute the crimes and often issue inciting or endorsing statements. Moreover, police are often involved in violence against gender and sexual nonconforming people. All the dominant players pursue authoritarian political visions (Dodge 2013, 246, 249). In their fight for political control, they turn against Iraq's social and cultural diversity, notably in the realms of gender and sexuality. The organized antiqueer campaigns in post-2003 Iraq are reminiscent of the killing of women deemed prostitutes in 2000, when Saddam Hussein's son ʿUday initiated the campaign and the government legitimized the murders ex post facto by issuing a decree that made sex work a capital offense. Before and after 2003, the victims' alleged deviant gendered and sexual practices were understood to embody ideological opposition.Despite armed and well-financed attempts to repress diversity, Iraqi society remains multiple and vital in its gendered and sexual practices. Many communities, social spaces, and subcultures with different value systems exist and are not completely isolated from one another. Darle (2003, 145–60) has termed this state of affairs a "polysémie." While there is not necessarily widespread endorsement of such diversity, the vivid public debate and broad condemnation of the killings of emo youth in 2012 is an encouraging sign that sexual and gender diversity will continue to be embraced in Iraqi society.I would like to thank the anonymous readers of JMEWS and Frances Hasso and miriam cooke for their comments and criticism that helped to improve this essay.