Afsaneh Najmabadi in Reading ‘Wiles of Women’ Stories as Fictions of Masculinity

Afsaneh Najmabadi in Reading ‘Wiles of Women’ Stories as Fictions of Masculinity provides a Freudian literary analysis of the emergence of a male gaze and desire. 

A popular theme in Islamicate cultures was the “insatiable female heterosexual desire”, driving plots of treacherous adultery or a young man’s flight from the woman. In response to similar themes in Thousand and One Nights, Adrienne Rich attributes this theme to the “fear of male redundancy” as opposed to an accurate observation of the female libido. Similarly, Najmabadi reads this theme as the fear that “women could be indifferent” to men altogether; I add that it also caters to the male fantasy of a hyper-sexual woman the man has to “perpetually escape” or commandeer for his desires. The projection of hyper-sexuality onto women’s behavior or bodies, self-deceivingly serves to justify an objectifying or sexualizing gaze. Abdelwahab Bouhidba considers this theme for its cultural equivalences to the story of Oedipus which Freud so famously appropriated. 

Najmabadi observes that although Freud’s theory was developed and modeled after Euro-American cultures, some insights of his theory are universal. Namely, that “femininity and masculunitiy are cultural productions, rather than natural attributes… that they are performances and enactments” we always fall short of and that depend on continuous reproduction and “revisitation” of the values we’re socialized to attribute to masculinity and femininity (148). Pre-19th century child-rearing practices in the Middle East bring up a generation of sons who grew up in the ‘women’s world’ while men were working the fields of wreaths or bullets. This world is a female social space that extends to “women’s festivities, to the public baths…and to the women’s section of the mosque (148). 

Sons are welcomed in these spaces until the “age of recognition…around eight or nine” when the transition into the world of men gradually commences. The boy might gaze on a woman in the public baths in the ‘wrong’ way, or touch a woman inappropriately with intent short of pure. The boy consequently experiences “repeated acts of exclusion” from the spaces he has now outgrown. Najmabadi and Boudiba mark this moment with a “sense of betrayal by other-than-mother women” who assigned to a “thoughtless gesture” a newly discovered othering of male bodies from female bodies. As Bouhdiba puts it “for a boy the hammam is the place where one discovered the anatomy of other and from which one is expelled once the discovery [of otherness] takes place” (149). Along with the ahkam-i nigah, the rules of gazing, this transition from “an exclusive ‘maternalism’ to a ‘paternalism’” displaces the mother’s world to an “idealized past enveloped in fantasies, with the infantile, the feminine, the playful…”

Entering the world of men becomes an othering by women, and by a reinforcing role of men to ensure the boy has “outgrown his originary contamination with womanliness, has ended his in-between-ness.” By disavowing femininity, the boy became a man. This traditionalist right of passage for Najmabadi is the “production of a heteronormative sexuality within the domain of homosociality” where a looming threat of homoeroticism hangs over men’s bodies. The theme then, of wileness of women, is accompanied by “flights from the female, whose existence can only threaten to destroy the harmony of a male-centered universe.” At once the woman’s incessant passes are turned down, and at once “she is also destroyed.” This is especially evident in the Salman and Absal story (151). The story goes a little like this:

There was a king once who didn’t desire women and chose instead to artificially enseminate a surrogate mother. The product of this union was Salman. After years as his wet nurse, Absal plots to make the prince fall in love with her once he hits puberty. An attempt which succeeded in Salman’s obsessive and throne-abdicating infatuation with Absal. Enraged, the king set a spell on Salman so that his desire for Absal may no longer be quenched. Salman and Absal attempt a suicidal act of loving rebellion; Hijacked by the king, only Absal dies. Najmabadi notes the masogynist femicide of the motherly figure, a burning away of “impurity” and a radical detachment from the world of the mother. Instead, Salman is instructed by his tutor the hakim to distract his distress over Absal with curiosity for the constellation Venus; the love of an earthly subject for the love of a heavenly object (153).