Last week Jenny Nordberg published a fascinating piece on the Afghan practice of Bacha Posh. Much of Afghanistan’s civil culture is close to full-blown gender apartheid. This creates serious trouble for families that have no sons. Their daughters can’t attend schools, don’t have access to most jobs, can’t leave the house without a male escort, and so are unavoidably unproductive in the family.
To deal with this problem there’s a practice called Bacha Posh, by which families can effectively re-assign the gender of one of their daughters. They can decide, one day, to start dressing up a daughter as a boy, and then everyone treats her as a boy. Continue reading “Bacha Posh and masculine civil spheres”
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