Women's Shame – 2: Embodied
In the last post we discussed how shame (and blame) is often ascribed more to women, including in situations of crisis or violence. Rather than avoidance or even private counselling, thus colluding in the hiddenness and trauma of shame, Jesus openly encountered women who were carrying ascribed social shame, thus exposing the shame and at the same time publicly restoring their status.
As well as socially ascribed shame, which comes to women through life situations, women also experience shame in embodied form.
Embodied shame
Young women and men in the west and beyond experience shame associated with their bodies. An article suggests that for children as young as six to eight years old, more than half of girls, and a third of boys, think that their ideal weight is thinner than their current size.[i] Eating disorders have been linked with shame. External shame, feeling of less value than others, is associated with anorexia nervosa symptoms. Internal shame, believing that we have not lived up to our own standards or expectations, is connected with bulimia nervosa symptoms.[ii] While both women and men experience this, it is more prevalent in the female population.
But shame is more particularly localized in a woman’s body. The proverb that ‘a man’s honour lies between the legs of a woman’ (quoted in the previous post) locates the honour of men, of families, even of nations, in a woman’s sexual chastity. This contrasts with male sexuality, where the expression of virility can be even valorized, or at least not sanctioned in the same way. In his article on shame and gender, Kressel discusses “the Arabic notion of ird,[iii] and its related frame of thought that encodes femininity with shame.”[iv] The strength of this association governs not only what happens to women in sexual terms, but also shapes where and how women may move, what they wear, and what they can or cannot do. Lama Abud-Odeh suggests that Arab women “are supposed to perform a “public” virginity with a certain body “style,” the body moving within a defined and delimited social space. Each one of the above borders, the vaginal, the bodily, and the social is enforced through a set of regulations and prohibitions that the woman is not supposed to violate.”[v] So where women can walk (particularly in public places), how they walk (bodily comportment), with whom, how they dress, how loudly they can talk or laugh, are all mandated towards the goal of guarding their modesty. Sadaf Ahmad notes that for women in Pakistan “any activity deemed culturally inappropriate thus results in the loss of honor, and not just hers but also her family’s, and eventually her nation’s.”[vi] Family and national honour is then protected through ensuring that women keep within carefully prescribed community cultural guidelines for modest dress and behaviour.
When shame is located in the woman’s body, if she is thought to have transgressed community expectations for female behaviour, then family honour may be restored by killing her.[vii] The UNPF estimates that 5000 women are killed each year in ‘honour’ killings (almost all in the Muslim world). Authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn estimate that the real figures are at least 6000 annually.[viii] Beyond honour killings, women are also victims of ‘honour rapes’. Allying women’s sexuality with shame allows the use of rape as a weapon to disgrace the victim’s family, clan or nation. Mukhtar Bibi[ix] in Pakistan has given other women courage by her refusal to suicide after a gang rape ‘punishment’[x] of her family, but rather being willing to face public shame to see her rapists charged, and provide help for other women.[xi] Militias in many countries have recognized that the most effective way to terrorize a civilian population is to commit brutally savage rapes. Rape was formally recognized as a ‘weapon of war’ by the United Nations in 2008, now so widely used that one commander suggests “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.”[xii] I heard of rape stories of unspeakable sadism from Syrian refugee women at the hands of occupying militias.
A related dimension of embodied shame is the injunction for Muslim women to cover or hide their ‘awrah.’ Awrah is ‘that which must be concealed’. While it is often translated as ‘nakedness,’ in literary Arabic it actually means ‘defectiveness, faultiness, deficiency, imperfection; genitals; weakness.’[xiii] What constitutes awrah differs both according to different Muslim schools of law, and also according to context. It includes some parts of men’s bodies, but it is more extensive in relation to women’s bodies and can include their voices also, and even their whole body form. Gabriele Vom Bruck comments about Yemeni women: “On attaining physical maturity, a woman is said to be ‘aurah, literally, that which is indecent to reveal. … One of the guiding principles of learning to be female is to conceal one facet of identity – the surface of the body –from non-mahram[xiv] both at home and in the street.” Women’s perfume and voices are included in their ‛awrah.[xv] The inclusion of women’s voices in their awrah is the reason that women Qur’anic reciters do not perform in public today in the Middle East. I have been told that if a woman’s voice is heard outside her apartment, it is as if she walked outside naked. Even in Indonesia, where women reciters of the Qur’an are common, they may face restrictions in international competitions, and also around the question of whether they can perform if they are menstruating.[xvi]
Fedwa Malti-Douglas quotes Nawal El-Saadawi’s childhood “sensation that my body was ‘awra.”[xvii] The English translation of El-Saadawi’s book translates it as “Shameful! Everything in me was shameful, and I was a child of just nine years old.”[xviii] In early twentieth-century Indonesia, Ahmad Dahlan (1868-1923) asked his female students, “Aren’t you ashamed of showing your awra to men?” “It would be a deep embarrassment, Sir!” they replied. “Then why do you go to male doctors when you are ill, even when you deliver your baby [and let them see your awra]? If you are ashamed, then continue studying and become doctors, so that we have female doctors for women.”[xix]
The enforced hiddenness of women’s bodies reflects hierarches of gender and power, which embed shame in women as bodies. This hiddenness allows the perpetration of abuse and violence on them. The embodiment of shame in women makes rape a weapon of warfare, which is used to demonstrate the shame and weakness of the enemy, and their failure to preserve or defend their honour in their women. And weakness, with shame, is made female in form.
Shame embodied – God incarnate, and crucified
What is the good news for those who experience shame embedded in their own bodies?
Redemption begins at the point of incarnation, where God All-powerful emptied himself of divinity to take on human form in Jesus Messiah. As the eternal Word took shape in human flesh, all flesh receives dignity and meaning. Dualisms of good and evil described in terms of flesh and spirit, or female and male, are disrupted. The very objections that some have to God Incarnate as One who had to sleep, eat, go to the toilet – these are precisely the point of incarnation in bodily form: as the divine Word lived among us, taking on our flesh, gloriously entering into and so transforming what is perceived as shameful within human systems.
But Jesus Messiah went beyond incarnation, even to the point of shameful death on a cross. Brittany Wilson examines how Jesus’ life and death challenge masculine norms of his time, in particular his crucifixion. She describes how “Crucifixion was a form of execution that particularly ‘unmanned’ its victims because it involved a series of bodily invasions that disfigured and disempowered the one being crucified. … victims could be beaten, flogged, tortured, and then stripped naked…. Death itself was protracted and painful, with the powerless victim suffering bodily distortions and experiencing a loss of bodily control. … In the ancient world, crucifixion equated to bodily violation in its most gruesome form.” Cicero described it as a “cruel and disgusting penalty,” and claimed that “the very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears.”[xx] Jesus Messiah broke the ‘manly’ norms of his time, particularly through his publically exposed, bodily-penetrated, most shameful death. It is then through that shame, suffering and death that he is now publically vindicated in his resurrection, and highly exalted in his ascension, given the name above all names. And now he continues to undergo suffering and physical abuse through his followers who are his Body on earth.[xxi]
In Jesus’ incarnation in flesh and his suffering and shameful death, those who follow him experience their own shame and violation taken by him (Isaiah 53), as they are redeemed to share his exalted life above.
The third blog will look at bodily shame associated with menstruation.
[ii] Troop NA, Allan S, Serpell L, Treasure JL, Shame in women with a history of eating disorders. 2008, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18240123.
[iii] Honour, good reputation, dignity
[iv] Kressel, G.M., 1992. Shame and Gender. Anthropological Quarterly 65, 34–46.
[v] Abu-Odeh, L., 2010. Honor Killings and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies. American Journal of Comparative Law 58, 911–952. doi:10.5131/ajcl.2010.0007, p.923.
[vi] Ahmad, S., 2009. Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women, Gender and Globalization. Syracuse University Press, New York, L.681.
[viii] They suggest that many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides. Kristor, N.D., WuDunn, S., 2010. Half the Sky. Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, p.82.
[xi] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jun/03/mukhtar-mai-pakistani-woman-gang-rape-punishment-hope-belated-justice, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/04/pakistan.declanwalsh.
[xii] Half the Sky, p.84.
[xiii] A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Hans Wehr (1974). Awrah is a term used within Islam which denotes the intimate parts of the body, for both men and women, which must be covered with clothing. Exposing the awrah is unlawful in Islam and is regarded as sin. The exact definition of awrah varies between different schools of Islamic thought. http://islamic-dictionary.tumblr.com/post/5658467793/awrah-arabic-%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A9-is-a-term-used.
[xiv] Non-related males.
[xv] vom Bruck, G., 2002. Elusive Bodies: The Politics of Aesthetics among Yemeni Elite Women, in: Gender, Politics, and Islam. University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, pp. 161–200: p.172, 178.
[xvi] van Doorn-Harder, P., 2006. Women Shaping Islam. Reading the Qur’an in Indonesia. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, pp.237-9. See forthcoming blog for a discussion of reciting the Qur’an when menstruating.
[xvii] Malti-Douglas, F., 1991. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word. Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing. Princeton University Press, Princeton, p.121.
[xviii] El Saadawi, N., 1988. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. Saqi Books, London, p.10.
[xix] Aryanti, T., 2012. Shame and Borders: The ’Aisyiyah’s Struggle for Muslim Women’s Education in Indonesia, in: Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World. Springer, Netherlands, pp. 83–92. The same impulse took Nawaal El Saadawi on to study medicine and become a doctor, and eventually Director of the Ministry of Public Health in Egypt.
[xx] Wilson, B.E., 2015. Unmanly Men. Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, pp.202-3.
[xxi] Unmanly Men, p.240. Acts 8:4-5, 22:8, 26:9-11.
Moyra Dale spent over two decades in the Middle East (particularly Egypt, Jordan, and Syria) with her family working in education, specialising in Adult Literacy (Arabic) and teacher training. She is an ethnographer whose research has included exploring adult literacy in Egypt and the women’s mosque movement in Syria through women’s accounts and understanding of their own lives and realities. Currently based in Melbourne, Australia, she writes, teaches, trains, and mentors students, with a focus on Islam and cross-cultural understanding. Moyra holds a ThD (Melbourne School of Theology), and PhD in Education (La Trobe University). This article was first published on her site, When Women Speak
