Who Said That Love is Forbidden? Gender and Sexuality in Iraqi Public Discourse of the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This chapter portrays some of the gendered and sexualized images that accompanied the massive militarization of Iraqi society during the 1980s in the regime-sponsored national discourse, particularly in the realm of popular culture. It explores what additional factors might have triggered the backlash against women in Iraq, with regard to women's sexuality, in 1986-87. The chapter applies Anne McClintock's approach to the Iraqi context. Demographic considerations could have had an impact on the regime's gender policies at the outbreak of the war. Notions of sexuality were tolerated in public discourse and partly encouraged by the regime as part of masculinized fantasies, be they in cinema or later in its war propaganda of the 1980s. During war, soldiers sacrifice their private selves and their own self-interest for a public and communal cause in this case, national identity as represented by military uniform. In both the early 1970s and the mid-1980s there is evidence of decisive shifts in the Iraqi patriarchal bargain.