[A-List] Sworn Virgins of Albania

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sworn Virgins of Albania -- women who renounced marriage and children
for the right to live as man and enjoy male privileges -- are a
fascinating example that highlights gender as a historical construct
that varied greatly across cultures and has changed over time (and
still culturally varies significantly, though capitalism has tended to
standardize gender into the model first idealized by the Western
bourgeoisie).  It's especially interesting that some of these sworn
virgins were Communist officials, a peculiar combination of the
residual and then dominant social structures. The New York Times and
the Washington Post claim that capitalism has now made lives of women
equal to men, but capitalism in itself does not eradicate wage and
other inequalities between men and women due to interruption in labor
participation caused by pregnancy, birthing, and care-giving (to say
nothing of increased inequalities among women as well as among men
under neoliberal capitalism).  Capital actually wants women workers to
work like men, or like sworn virgins, and penalizes -- especially
cumulatively -- women who have children or other dependents to take
care of (and men, too, if they choose, or are compelled by
circumstances, to take up the burden of unpaid labor usually performed
by women) _and_ to be happy subjects and objects (more the latter than
the former) of sexual consumerism. -- Yoshie

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/world/europe/25virgins.html>
June 25, 2008
Albanian Custom Fades: Woman as Family Man
By DAN BILEFSKY

KRUJE, Albania — Pashe Keqi recalled the day nearly 60 years ago when
she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls,
traded in her dress for her father's baggy trousers, armed herself
with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.

For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural
northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution
for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood
feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a
vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with
all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the
obligation to avenge her father's death.

She says she would not do it today, now that sexual equality and
modernity have come even to Albania, with Internet dating and MTV
invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to
be boys anymore. With only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the
sworn virgin is dying off.

"Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an
animal were considered the same thing," said Ms. Keqi, who has a
bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and
relishes downing shots of raki. "Now, Albanian women have equal rights
with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to
be a woman."

The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke
Dukagjini, a code of conduct passed on orally among the clans of
northern Albania for more than 500 years. Under the Kanun, the role of
a woman is severely circumscribed: take care of children and maintain
the home. While a woman's life is worth half that of a man, a virgin's
value is the same: 12 oxen.

The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region
plagued by war and death. If the family patriarch died with no male
heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and
powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the
role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and
move freely.

They dressed like men and spent their lives in the company of other
men, even though most kept their female given names. They were not
ridiculed, but accepted in public life, even adulated. For some the
choice was a way for a woman to assert her autonomy or to avoid an
arranged marriage.

"Stripping off their sexuality by pledging to remain virgins was a way
for these women in a male-dominated, segregated society to engage in
public life," said Linda Gusia, a professor of gender studies at the
University of Pristina, in Kosovo. "It was about surviving in a world
where men rule."

Taking an oath to become a sworn virgin should not, sociologists say,
be equated with homosexuality, long taboo in rural Albania. Nor do the
women have sex-change operations.

Known in her household as the "pasha," Ms. Keqi said she decided to
become the man of the house at age 20 when her father was murdered.
Her four brothers opposed the Communist government of Enver Hoxha, the
ruler for 40 years until his death in 1985, and they were either
imprisoned or killed. Becoming a man, she said, was the only way to
support her mother, her four sisters-in-law and their five children.

Ms. Keqi lorded over her large family in her modest house in Tirana,
where her nieces served her brandy while she barked out orders. She
said living as a man had allowed her freedom denied other women. She
worked construction jobs and prayed at the mosque with men. Even
today, her nephews and nieces said, they would not dare marry without
their "uncle's" permission.

When she stepped outside the village, she enjoyed being taken for a
man. "I was totally free as a man because no one knew I was a woman,"
Ms. Keqi said. "I could go wherever I wanted to and no one would dare
swear at me because I could beat them up. I was only with men. I don't
know how to do women's talk. I am never scared."

When she was recently hospitalized for surgery, the other woman in her
room was horrified to be sharing close quarters with someone she
assumed was male.

Being the man of the house also made her responsible for avenging her
father's death, she said. When her father's killer, by then 80, was
released from prison five years ago, Ms. Keqi said, her 15-year-old
nephew shot him dead. Then the man's family took revenge and killed
her nephew. "I always dreamed of avenging my father's death," she
said. "Of course, I have regrets; my nephew was killed. But if you
kill me, I have to kill you."

In Albania, a majority Muslim country in the western Balkans, the
Kanun is adhered to by Muslims and Christians. Albanian cultural
historians said the adherence to medieval customs long discarded
elsewhere was a byproduct of the country's previous isolation. But
they stressed that the traditional role of the Albanian woman was
changing.

"The Albanian woman today is a sort of minister of economics, a
minister of affection and a minister of interior who controls who does
what," said Ilir Yzeiri, who writes about Albanian folklore. "Today,
women in Albania are behind everything."

Some sworn virgins bemoan the changes. Diana Rakipi, 54, a security
guard in the seaside city of Durres, in west Albania, who became a
sworn virgin to take care of her nine sisters, said she looked back
with nostalgia on the Hoxha era. During Communist times, she was a
senior army officer, training women as combat soldiers. Now, she
lamented, women do not know their place.

"Today women go out half naked to the disco," said Ms. Rakipi, who
wears a military beret. "I was always treated my whole life as a man,
always with respect. I can't clean, I can't iron, I can't cook. That
is a woman's work."

But even in the remote mountains of Kruje, about 30 miles north of
Tirana, residents say the Kanun's influence on gender roles is
disappearing. They said erosion of the traditional family, in which
everyone once lived under the same roof, had altered women's position
in society.

"Women and men are now almost the same," said Caca Fiqiri, whose aunt
Qamile Stema, 88, is his village's last sworn virgin. "We respect
sworn virgins very much and consider them as men because of their
great sacrifice. But there is no longer a stigma not to have a man of
the house."

Yet there is no doubt who wears the trousers in Ms. Stema's one-room
stone house in Barganesh, the family's ancestral village. There, on a
recent day, "Uncle" Qamile was surrounded by her clan, dressed in a
qeleshe, the traditional white cap of an Albanian man. Pink flip-flops
were her only concession to femininity.

After becoming a man at the age of 20, Ms. Stema said, she carried a
gun. At wedding parties, she sat with the men. When she talked to
women, she recalled, they recoiled in shyness.

She said becoming a sworn virgin was a necessity and a sacrifice. "I
feel lonely sometime, all my sisters have died, and I live alone," she
said. "But I never wanted to marry. Some in my family tried to get me
to change my clothes and wear dresses, but when they saw I had become
a man, they left me alone."

Ms. Stema said she would die a virgin. Had she married, she joked, it
would have been to a traditional Albanian woman. "I guess you could
say I was partly a woman and partly a man," she said. "I liked my life
as a man. I have no regrets."

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/10/AR2007081002158.html>
The Sacrifices of Albania's 'Sworn Virgins'
A Rockville Filmmaker Tells Of an Old Custom That Both Liberates and
Limits Women

By Joshua Zumbrun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 11, 2007; C01

When the Albanian journalist and author Elvira Dones was traveling in
the mountains of northern Albania, she asked for directions from
someone she thought was a man walking his mule through a village,
rifle on shoulder.

After the exchange, her guide whispered, "That is one of them."

Dones, who lives in Rockville, had just met an adherent of an ancient
northern Albanian tradition in which women take an oath of lifelong
virginity in exchange for the right to live as men. The process is not
surgical -- in these mountains there is little knowledge that
sex-change surgery is even possible. Rather, sworn virgins cut their
hair and wear baggy men's clothes and take up manly livelihoods as
shepherds or truck drivers or even political leaders. And those around
them -- despite knowing the sworn virgins are women -- treat them as
men.

The idea that a woman would need to forsake love and live as a man to
control her own fate seems primitive to modern eyes. But perhaps, in
the context of a once-upon-a-time culture, a culture before feminism,
it can be seen as progressive. The existence of sworn virgins reveals
a cultural belief, however inchoate, that a biological woman can do
all the work of a man.

"Why live like a man?" one virgin, Lule Ivanaj, asks herself
rhetorically in an English-subtitled documentary that Dones
(pronounced DOH-nez) made on the women for Swiss television called
"Sworn Virgins." Ivanaj looks like a man in his 50s, with short hair,
thick arms and a wide metal watchband on one wrist. "Because I value
my freedom. I suppose I was ahead of my time."

Dones, 47, learned about sworn virgins 25 years ago from her
university classmates in Albania's capital, Tirana. The practice has
existed at least since the 15th century, when the traditions of the
region were first codified, according to Dones. The sworn virgins came
into being for emergencies: If the patriarch of the family died and
there was no other man to carry on, a provision was needed so that a
woman could run her family.

When Dones was in college, the country was under the control of
communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled for more than 40 years until
his death in 1985. Dones had the itch to tell the story of the sworn
virgins, but the communist regime tightly controlled the media and
travel to the north was not allowed.

In 1988, Dones -- then a journalist for state-run television --
defected, in part because of frustration with her country's
government. She moved to the Italian-language region of Switzerland,
where she worked for Swiss television and wrote novels.

Three years ago, she moved to Rockville, where she continues to write
and make documentaries for Swiss television. She is now a popular
novelist in Italy and Albania, having written eight books of fiction;
her most recent novel, published this year in Italian and Albanian, is
about a 34-year-old woman named Hana, who comes to regret her decision
to live as a sworn virgin. For her book, Dones read up on the
tradition, which has been documented by historians and sociologists.
But until recently she had never met a sworn virgin, except for that
brief, unwitting encounter with the rifle-toting virgin while filming
a documentary on another topic.

"I was happy with the novel, but I wanted to see them," Dones says, "I
was obsessed by them."

So last year Dones traveled to meet with them. There are only about 30
to 40 sworn virgins remaining in Albania, Dones says, with perhaps a
few in the neighboring mountains of Kosovo and Serbia and Montenegro.
Dones interviewed 12, from elderly women to 20-somethings. The
documentary debuted on Swiss television this year and has been
accepted into the Baltimore Women's Film Festival, which takes place
in October. It also is available through Dones Media, the U.S.-based
production company Dones co-owns with Swiss television.

In the mountains of northern Albania, throughout modern history, women
have had very few rights. They cannot vote in their local elections,
they cannot buy land, there are many jobs they are not permitted to
hold; they cannot even enter many establishments. An ancient set of
laws called the Kanun still helps govern the region. The Kanun says,
"A woman is a sack made to endure."

Other traditional practices of the north were repressed by the
communists, but leaders in Tirana simply never cared if a woman in the
impoverished and remote mountains wanted to dress and labor as a man.

Over the years, women became sworn virgins for different reasons. Some
swore the oath if the patriarch of the family died. Others swore the
oath out of a fierce streak of independence, and others because it was
the only way to avoid an arranged marriage without disgracing the
family of the selected groom. The oath is traditionally sworn in front
of a town's elders, though some women take the oath privately.

One virgin that Dones interviews in the documentary, Shkurtan
Hasanpapaj, once served as the local secretary of the Communist Party,
the top office in her region. She was in charge of all the men, and
though they knew the reality of her anatomy, her authority was
unquestioned.

Asked if she would have felt restricted in a marriage, the virgin
Ivanaj responds, "Absolutely! More like squashed than restricted. . .
. Even when there's love and harmony, only men have the right to
decide. I want total equity or nothing."

"I wanted to tell their stories and respect the way they told their
stories," Dones says. "I found an extreme sense of beauty in them.
They are not bitter. They carry the stories with such dignity. . . .
They are so comfortable with their role."

But the virgins in Dones's documentary acknowledge there are many
sacrifices with this lifestyle. The women may enjoy the rights of men,
but they are denied their womanhood. They will never experience the
pleasures of having a lifelong partner or bearing children.

Sanie Vatoci, a 50-year-old who took the oath as a teenager when her
father died, speaks of how she has slowly come to regret the life she
now leads as a solitary truck driver.

"While looking at other couples, reading books, watching movies -- I
began to wonder: Why don't I have a partner? Why am I acting like a
man?" Vatoci says. "There must have been a man out there for me."

But it may be too late for her. Even as movies and television creep
into northern Albania, even as traditions slowly die, Vatoci could
never go back on her oath, she says. Breaking the oath was once
punishable by death, and though Dones doubts such punishment would be
enforced today, a deflowered sworn virgin would nevertheless be
shunned, she says. She would certainly never be accepted as a woman.

It's easy now for people to come down from the mountains. Travel is no
longer restricted. The city beckons. And just as many members of the
new generation leave their ancestral homelands for a modern life,
modern life slowly trickles back into the mountains. The choice
between being a woman and having the rights of men is no longer
absolute.

"I asked the young girls of the region what they think of the sworn
virgins," Dones says. "They said they respect them, but they would
never follow their path. Not now."

Vatoci, the truck driver, has applied to immigrate to the United
States, where her sister has lived for seven years, and maybe here,
Vatoci figures, she could have a fresh start.

"She deeply feels that she needs to give love to someone else," Dones
says. "And of course, she's not delusional. She knows that perhaps she
will never find a man. And perhaps she could never start a life as a
woman at 50."

Though Vatoci speaks no English, she has the "skills of a man," and
Dones thinks she could make it in America: "She went to school for
being a truck mechanic. She's a tough guy."

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2007/08/08/VI2007080802191.html>
In this clip from the documentary by Elvira Dones, Shkurtan Hasanpapaj
discusses the decision to live as a man.