The Afghan Murat : A Queer Subject at Transnational Crossroads

Introduction

Jawid, a retired dancer: There was freedom in the time of Karzai [President of Afghanistan between 2001–2014]. There was no day passing without an event. We were busy all the time, dancing throughout the night, thinking about what to wear for the following event throughout the day. You would go into a room and see twenty īzaks from Pakistan or... do you understand muratī [the argot of Afghan murats]?

Over the past 20 years in Afghanistan, the self-ascribed identity of “murat” (مورت) has become a viable category of personhood and a practical term of reference among a community of “non-masculine” dancers and sex workers living and working in Kabul and in other major cities. Murats are not perceived as masculine figures because they engage in activities that are generally not associated with manhood, such as wearing makeup, dancing in suggestive ways, and, more importantly, playing the receptive role in sex with other men. Nevertheless, murats cannot be readily characterized as feminine or effeminate. Murat subjectivity escapes and evades the binary epistemologies and ontologies that often govern theorization of gender and sexuality: neither the man/woman binary, nor the heterosexual/homosexual model, nor even the male/female sexual dimorphism, is apt for approaching and theorizing the murat subjectivity.

In their thinking through the notion of “minor transnationalism,” Lionnet and Shih (2005) observe that academics often view minority subjects in opposition to a dominant discourse rather than vis-à-vis each other and other minority groups. According to Lionnet and Shih, the ubiquity of discourses that adhere to the binary notions of center/margin in the context of theorizing a cultural model forecloses the possibility of future exploration. In their own words, “What is lacking in the binary model of above-and-below, the utopic and the dystopic, and the global and the local is an awareness and recognition of the creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries” (Lionnet and Shih 2005, 7). As a revision to both nation-state-based and postcolonial models of studying cultures, they invite us to explore the understudied lateral connections between people in margins and between minority communities across nation-states. ¹

In what follows, I show that the formation of Afghan murats’ gender and sexual subjectivities is an illustrative case for “minor transnationalism”—an interpellation of minoritized subjectivities in the Global South that crosses over fixed linguistic, ethnic, and national boundaries. More precisely, I will show that the constitution of Afghan murat-hood is a consequence of a curious intersection of three other marginalized categories of personhood in the region: the South Asian hijra, the Turko-Persianate bachah, and the Afghan īzak. Murat subjectivity is thus not bound to one spatial or temporal territory but thrives within a network of transnational and transhistorical connections and diverges from the gender and sexual dimorphism model. It is a gender and sexual formation that encompasses multiple configurations of biological sex, gender expression and performativity, and sexual desire. In delineating the Afghan murat subjectivity, I will show that bachah—or the beardless young male—and īzak—defined as “neither man nor woman” among Afghans—are two well-established and intelligible gender figures in the Afghan context. The vitality and vibrancy of bachah and īzak as distinct gender possibilities besides man and woman turn the sex/gender world of Afghanistan into a non-binary system with intimate and unpredictable practices of subject-making.

As Henri Myrttinen, Lana Khattab, and Jana Naujoks (2017, 112–14) suggest, queer masculinities are largely absent from studies of masculinities in conflict-affected contexts, and queer men’s experiences are overshadowed by studies focusing on hegemonic masculinities, as well as on soldiers, combatants, and commanders. This article is thus among the first studies of (queer) masculinities in Afghanistan and the entire Southwest and Central Asia and of non-hegemonic and oppressed masculinities in a conflict environment. It encourages and enables a conversation between Iranian studies, Afghanistan studies, and South Asian studies, showing how making bridges between ethnographic and historical works of these distinct “areas” yields a more rigorous scholarship in the field of gender and sexuality (and beyond).

Methodology

This article is based on the findings of an ethnographic research project on the culture of same-sex desire in Afghanistan that I conducted between 2016 and 2021. Even though I arrived in Kabul in the middle of 2016 to work on an “emerging gay sub-culture” about which I had heard from several Afghan gay men in New York and Toronto, it was in 2018 and after learning about YAAR—a government-certified, low-profile, and Kabul-based clinic funded by USAID and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS—that I was introduced to the community of murats. Until the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021, YAAR (a pseudonym) provided free medical and health services to “men who had sex with men” and organized job-oriented trainings (tailoring, computer skills, English classes, etc.) for its clients. With the approval of YAAR’s manager, I began working there as a volunteer consultant and gradually built rapport with its outreach workers, most of whom were from the murat community. In turn, murats helped me meet and interview several other dancers, whom I accompanied at cafes, tea-houses, street corners, buses, parks, swimming pools, public baths, and private rooms. Overall, I interviewed more than eighty murats, men interested in bachahs, murats’ clients, gay men, masculine sex workers, men having sex with men, and musicians, who came from various ethnic and class backgrounds (though not everyone’s voice is reflected in this article). I also asked Zabih, one of the elder murat employees at YAAR, who was a clandestine pimp with extensive connections across Afghanistan, to assist me in this research. As a paid research assistant, Zabih opened my way to several celebratory gatherings where I watched murats dancing for the entertainment of enchanted crowds.

Murat: A Transnational Category of Selfhood

Self-identification using the term “murat” is recent in Afghanistan. The word is neither Dari Persian nor Pashto, the two official languages of the country. Apart from the circle of murats and their friends, including gay men and masculine sex workers, I did not come across many other residents of Kabul who were familiar with the term. There was a consensus among elder murats that the community had no or little currency in Afghanistan as recently as 20 years ago. It was only in the aftermath of the Taliban fall in 2001 and the subsequent return of more than a million Afghan refugees that murat began circulating among certain communities of dancers in Kabul and Jalalabad in the east. Murat was initially a popular category of selfhood among Afghan dancers who had come back from Pakistan, and it expanded over the years. By the time I left Afghanistan in July 2021, a month before the Taliban’s takeover, “murat” had become the favored term of reference among communities of men who were making a living as dancers and sex workers and performing at public wedding celebrations or private home gatherings in Kabul (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

A self-identified murat making quick turns to finish a dance episode at a wedding celebration in Kabul, November 2018. Such celebratory gatherings were the only social occasions where murats were allowed (if not encouraged) to profess a queer self in public. (Photo courtesy of the author)

The term “murat” is derived from the argot of hijras in Pakistan who are known alternatively today as Khwajasiras. There is now a growing body of literature on Pakistani Khwajasiras. ² Broadly conceived, Khwajasiras belong to the South Asian family of hijras, comprising a marginalized group of often male-born, gender variant, and sexually non-conforming individuals who are popularly referred to as khunsā, “the third gender/sex,” or as “neither man nor woman.” Similar to the hijras of South Asia, Khwajasiras self-organize within households of chelas (disciples) and gurus (masters) while subsisting through begging, singing and dancing, collecting alms by conferring blessings to the newborn or the newlywed, and sex work. According to Faris A. Khan who worked with a community of Khwajasiras in the southern city of Karachi, “murat” is extensively used in the context of their everyday speech to refer to “a variant of gender ambiguous people” (2014, 69). One of Khan’s Urdu-speaking interlocutors explained that the “m” in “murat” comes from mard (man), and the remaining letters, “urat” comes from ʿaurat (woman) (63).

As refugees in Pakistan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of my elder interlocutors had joined and lived in Khwajasira households (deras), where they socialized with and worked alongside their Pakistani fellows as dancers and sex workers. Living in hijra households in Pakistan provided Afghan dancers with a more stable flow of resources than working on their own. Even though they were paid less than their Pakistani colleagues for their perceived national difference, being affiliated with hijra households gave Afghan dancers more bargaining power as refugees, especially when confronted with local authorities. Both Afghan and Pakistani dancers had a common faith in Islam, and most of them spoke and understood the two languages of Pashto and Urdu. They shared comparable experiences in closely related cultures as well: they often had distressing relationships with their families or been excluded from the larger network of their kin; they had been socially ostracized for violating gender and sexual norms; and their profession did not bring them respect (ʿizzat) in their neighborhoods and hometowns. Both groups had a low standing in their cultures’ gender and social hierarchies, which provided a common ground for affinity and collaboration.

With the end of the Taliban regime in 2001, young Afghan dancers returned to their homeland with optimism. After years of war, insecurity, and social restriction, there was now an aura of freedom with a remarkably increasing demand for celebratory events involving music, singing, and dancing that had been banned for years. Such festivities were happening at a time when there was no operating government in sight, money was pouring into the country through international aid, and the collective exuberance of the new era was loosening social controls. As this article’s opening interview excerpt suggests, social, economic, and political conditions encouraged Pakistani dancers to travel to Kabul and perform alongside their Afghan peers. The transnational horizons of identity formations and respective pleasures were mobile across space and time.

Through increasing interaction between Afghan and Pakistani dancers, as well as their participation in shared and competitive activities in both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1990s and the 2000s, murat was introduced to the homoerotic, dancing scene of Afghanistan. The foreignness of murat to Dari Persian and Pashto, as well as its wider, positive uses and connotations in Pakistan where dancers were perceived to enjoy more freedom and prestige, made the term increasingly popular among Afghan dancers. ³ Meanwhile, the establishment of several branches of YAAR clinic around Afghanistan in the late 2000s provided dancers with a rather safe space where they could nurture a sense of belonging to a growing murat community. The clinics made it possible for curious newcomers to entertain the possibility of integrating into a homoerotic subculture and for long-time dancers and sex workers to mingle with ease.

With the security and economic situation deteriorating in the 2010s, the frequency of celebratory events declined, and with it, so did the public visibility of Afghan and Pakistani dancers. As non-masculine persons with vulnerable and multiply desired and stigmatized bodies, murats were perhaps among the first communities who sensed that the freedom of earlier years was being replaced by a more hostile and violent environment. The frequency of explosions in urban areas was on the rise, and so was the rate of poverty and inflation, meaning that not many people could afford to organize dance events and keep them safe and secure. Elder dancers in Kabul emphasized in our conversations that the possibility of armed fights breaking out at such events had become a major concern. At the same time, Afghanistan was slowly losing its strategic value to the international community, and foreign aid was shrinking, leaving local organizations such as YAAR underfunded. Those developments had direct, unwelcome consequences on the mobility and livelihoods of both Afghan and Pakistani dancers.

Nevertheless, over the past 20 years, along with the forces of displacement and migration, the signifier “murat” has moved from Pakistan to Afghanistan and found a life of its own in its new setting. As an identity term, murat now lies at the heart of lafẓ-i muratī (or simply muratī)—the distinct, secret code of Afghan murats, with many borrowed terms from the argot of Khwajasiras, which are also inflected with Dari Persian and Pashto. Muratī consists of as many as one hundred words and phrases, corresponding to the community’s means of livelihood, various types of clients, gender and sexual expressions, and body limbs—to name a few. Being able to understand and communicate in muratī serves as a unifying thread within the murat community. It generates a sense of belonging to the community of murats, marks the community’s boundaries, and fosters intimate connections among its members. Before the Taliban’s recent takeover, there were murat communities in Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Jalalabad in the east, and Qandahar in the south. Many of the members of the murat community in (and out of) Afghanistan knew each other in person. They may have run into each other at YAAR, participated in the same celebratory gatherings, or had similar clients or patrons over the years. Altogether, they made up a gender queer family consisting of hundreds of people who shared information, accommodations, money, cosmetics, and other resources in an otherwise unwelcome environment.

Afghan Murats and Pakistani Khwajasiras: “They Have ʿIzzat, We Have Ẕillat”

The term “Khwajasira” that has recently been adopted by hijra community leaders and activists in Pakistan is a title once endowed upon chief eunuchs with eminent status in the Persian-speaking Muslim courts of the Safavids (1501–1736) and the Mughals (1526–1857). Choosing “Khwajasira” for identification was a strategic move by Pakistani hijras; the term invokes respectability and legitimacy in a Muslim majority context by tracing their lineage back to the noble eunuch world of an Islamic past (Khan 2019, 1147–51). In a series of hearings that took place between 2009–2012, the Supreme Court in Pakistan ordered the government to recognize the “third gender/sex” status of Khwajasiras, subsequently granting them a range of political and economic rights, including having new national IDs and benefitting from welfare programs (Nisar 2018, 64–65).

Afghan murats were not closely following the contours of recent cultural and legal debates happening around Khwajasiras. Nevertheless, they were acutely aware that in a nearby Islamic setting with a constellation of shared cultural values and social norms, members of their own ṭabaqah (category/class) had fought for their rights and subsequently risen on the ladder of social hierarchies. Whenever I asked Afghan murats about what might distinguish their lives from those of their Pakistani counterparts, I often heard them saying, “They have qadr-u-ʿizzat [respect and honor] in Pakistan. We have nang-u-ẕillat [disgrace and abjection] in Afghanistan.” Thirty-two-year-old Fawad, who was a dancer in both countries, shared his experience:

Murats who dance in Pakistan walk freely around the city in women’s clothes, with full makeup, long hair. No one bothers them. Neither the police, nor the people, nor the shopkeepers. Nobody. They are highly respected because everybody knows that murats are harmless people. People even ask for their blessing, to have a son, to have a daughter. If someone harasses them, they’ll go on hunger strike; they’ll burn tires on the street; they’ll fight until the government agrees to sign a deal with them. Now, if I dared to put on makeup here in Kabul and go out on the street, what would happen? Everybody would stare at me. Everybody would insult me. Someone might even take out a gun, cut my hair with a knife, and take away my money and phone. In Afghanistan, thieves have respect, thugs [badmaʿāsh] have respect, smugglers have respect, even murderers do, but not murats. The weakest people after the heroin addicts [pūdarī-hā] are us.

Fawad’s sentiments were widely echoed by my interlocutors who were murat-identified dancers and sex workers. The romanticized image they portrayed of the life settings of Pakistani Khwajasiras is to be understood as an extension of their deep dissatisfaction with their Afghan predicament. More than four decades of war and a worsening security and economic situation led to a shared sense of hopelessness and frustration among a majority of Afghans. Fawad’s reference to thieves and murderers is couched in a general consensus among a majority of Afghans that former war commanders had become rich and powerful through organized crime and that most politicians were corrupt and unscrupulous. In the months prior to the Taliban’s takeover in mid-August 2021, rarely did a day pass in Kabul without bomb explosions, targeted assassinations, kidnappings, or mishandling of public properties and resources. The people’s mistrust in the political and military establishment was deep, acute, and widespread.

What made life even less bearable for murats, compared to other Afghans, was that the queer subjectivity they embodied and practiced as non-masculine dancers and sex workers did not bring them any respect. There are not many human types in today’s Afghanistan who are as stigmatized and abhorred as a man desiring to be penetrated. Penetrating or threatening to penetrate one’s inferiors—namely women, beardless youth, sex workers, dancers, or political rivals and enemies—is a marker of one’s masculine dominance, reflecting broader age, gender, class, ethnic, social, and political hierarchies in the Afghan context. The penetrated man, however, is doomed to lose his honor and reputation in the public eye. Should he willingly play the receptive role in sexual intercourse, he is further stigmatized and despised for transgressing gender and sexual norms.

Like the quandary of public performers and entertainers in the history of Islamic societies from Cairo to Anatolia to Baghdad to Tabriz (Shay 2014), murats’ “scandalous” and “transgressive” careers as dancers had turned them into “sexually available bodies,” which invited constant abuse. In 2020, most of the clients of murats were either local strongmen (who could have been on the run from the state) or the local police and security forces (who often promised murats protection in exchange for murats’ sexual obedience)—engaging with both of whom was always risky and fraught with tension. Even though murats were making public and private events more animated and entertaining through their bold and suggestive dance moves, their diminished social stature elicited a profound sense of fear of the police, parallel militias, and society at large. They were subjects of fascination, joy, amusement, and sex, but also of abjection, aversion, discrimination, and bullying. ⁴

There may exist not a contradiction, but an agreement, between the two states of abjection and fascination that murats simultaneously hold. In theorizing the mechanisms of ordering and sense-making in European cultures since the Renaissance, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note that, “Again and again we find a striking ambivalence to the representations of the lower strata... in which they are both reviled and desired” (1986, 4; emphasis is mine). The authors suggest that what is socially marginalized and denounced as “low” (the urban poor, the lumpen-proletariat, the gypsy, etc.) is often symbolically central and engaging in the constitution of the dominant categories of that particular culture. As members of a “low” layer of the Afghan society, murats generally evoke disgust among the “high” layers (among classical music artists, the rich, academics, etc.), which may initially appear incongruent with the central role they play at celebratory gatherings. Yet, if one gets a hint from Stallybrass and White’s contention that the ideological construction of the low-Other entails a peculiar nexus of power and desire in a way that “low domains [...] return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination” (191), then the double positions murats simultaneously occupy is perhaps not always contradictory, “for the classificatory body of a culture is always double, always structured in relation to its negation, its inverse” (20). It is indeed through dancing at celebratory gatherings and playing the receptive role in sex that murats’ marginal and abject non-masculinity is temporally translated into entertainment and desirability.

When the Indian World Meets the Turko-Persianate World

Unlike Pakistan and other South Asian societies, where the well-established hijra subculture hosts a range of queer persons, Afghanistan has no equivalent cultural repertoire to agreeably accommodate murats. There are no religiously sanctioned mythologies with dancing figures with which murats of Afghanistan identify, nor is there an appreciation in popular culture of eunuchs’ respected role in the Islamic courts of a recent past—of when Kabul was the capital of the Mughals, for instance. Afghan murats are generally not perceived to possess spiritual power to bestow blessings, nor do they self-organize and live in guru-chela households. I propose, instead, that it was through association with both the tradition of bachah-bāzī and the culturally rich notion of īzak that murats’ non-conforming gender and sexual behavior became intelligible in the public imagination in Afghanistan. This association provides murats with an admittedly abject but still meaningful cultural space within which to pursue their profession as dancers and sex workers.

Are Murats Effeminate? Imagining the Sex/Gender Spectrum in Afghanistan

Murats, when they are working as dancers and sex workers, are considered non-masculine/non-men: contrary to what is generally expected of men, they wear makeup and androgynous or female clothes and often play the receptive role in sexual encounters. Nevertheless, murats’ gender and sexual expressions cannot be accurately characterized as “effeminate” because the sex/gender spectrum in Afghanistan is not neatly divided into a masculine/feminine binary. A young, beardless, soft-skinned, and delicate man, for instance, might be teasingly referred to as bē-rīsh (beardless), suggesting that he looks like the desirable figure of bachah, or, if he has long hair with perhaps kohled eyes and colorful clothes, he may be classified as īzak, implying that he does not have “proper” or “functional” sexual genitals. In both of these perceived scenarios, the young man with the non-masculine look is not compared to women, but to two other non-men characters.

A binary understanding of gender is limiting. I propose that the gender pool in Afghanistan consists of at least two other figures: the bachah, who eventually grows up to become a man, and the īzak, whose designation as such is more permanent (even though īzaks may be perceived as men, as women, or as īzak in different social circumstances) (see Figure 1). Neither bachahs nor īzaks are perceived as complete or real men, but they are not necessarily regarded as effeminate either. I contend that the vigor and liveliness of bachah and īzak as two non-male categories in the Afghan world does not allow all fractures of masculinity to be readily equated with femininity and effeminization. ⁹ Given that the formation of the murat subjectivity is made possible through its association with both bachah-hood and īzak-hood, I maintain that it is analytically significant to characterize murats not as effeminate subjects who exclusively imitate women in appearance and behavior, but as non-masculine ones who may resemble any of the non-men figures that are available in culture, including women. Here, non-masculinity encompasses femininity but also includes other possibilities (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Visualizing the four gender figures of the Afghan world.

In this prefatory model, which illustrates the configuration of sex/gender in contemporary Afghanistan, what mainly demarcates a man from a non-man is that the latter is not imagined as the penetrator of other bodies. Penetrating or threatening to penetrate another body reflects broader social inequalities, maintaining a gender hierarchy with men at the top. Penetration is the prerogative of men, and a penetrated man loses his manhood and respect in the public mind—even though he may ask bachahs, sex workers, or other men to penetrate him in secret. All non-men characters are thus seen as both inferior to men and penetrated by them. At the same time, there are remarkable differences among these non-men figures. Both bachahs and women symbolize men’s honor, and they represent the beautiful and the desirable for the men’s gaze. Bachahs, however, especially if they are in their late teens or early twenties, generally enjoy more social mobility and autonomy in their relationships with their patrons (kātah) than women do in their relationships with their husbands (or in relationships with other male family members). Īzaks, on the other hand, are rarely noted for their beauty or desirability but often for their strangeness and abnormality. Bachahs and īzaks are more readily accommodated in men-only spaces because, unlike women, they do not continue the male lineage through procreation, and their presence among men is not as socially disruptive or dangerous to patrilineality as the presence of women is. There is indeed an exhaustive body of ideas and practices related to proper womanhood, determining the boundaries, terms, and contents of female chastity and respectability in different circumstances and stages of their lives. No parallel set of guidelines exists for bachahs and īzaks, although bachahs are generally expected to be faithful, witty, coquettish, “bright”-faced, and artful. Moreover, bachahs enter manhood upon growing out of adolescence and losing their hairless faces, and women (together with men) play a central role in the organization and reproduction of family life. Īzaks, however, are considered impotent and sexually dysfunctional, incapable of making families and reproducing, and thus always incomplete and aberrant. As “neither men/males, nor women/females,” īzaks represent the odd and the unwanted, as well as the diseased and the perverted, if not the despised and the fearful. Compared to other non-men characters, īzaks occupy the most abject location in Afghan public imagination (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Comparing the Four Gender Figures of the Afghan World.

	Man	Woman	bachah	īzak
Perceived Role in Sexual Intercourse	Penetrating	Penetrated	Penetrated	Penetrated
Generally allowed in men-only spaces	✓	X	✓	✓
Generally allowed in women-only spaces	X	✓	✓X*	✓X**
Desirable/beautiful for the men’s gaze	X	✓	✓	X
Continuing the (male) lineage	✓	✓	✓X***	X
Normative features and characteristics	Top of gender hierarchy, family-head, breadwinner	Chaste, secluded, procreative, needs protection	Young, witty, artistic, beardless	Impotent, odd, diseased, scary, pervert

As much as this model explains the non-binary gender world in Afghanistan, it equally obscures a more complicated picture. Importantly, there exists no homogenous group of men, or of women, bachahs, or īzaks. In the world of men, for instance, class, ethnicity, age, and education are the four other major axes around which social hierarchies revolve. A senior Pashtun merchant and a young Hazara laborer both belong to the category of men, but their gender alone does not bring them similar material and symbolic privileges. ¹⁰ As men, they may have comparable advantages in relation to the women of their lives, but they share an asymmetrical relationship along other social axes, notably class and ethnicity. ¹¹ A similar assertion may be made about members of other non-men groups, as, for instance, there is often a stark power imbalance between a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, even though that may change as the latter produces (male) offspring and climbs the ladder of family hierarchies. Therefore, in so far as the proposed model is seen as a heuristic device leading us to imagine a non-binary sex/gender system for today’s Afghanistan, it is a useful visualization. However, like all models, it is unable to completely reconstruct social reality.

Conclusion

What I have argued in this article suggests that the emergence of the murat subject position in Afghanistan resulted neither from any resistance against or assimilation into the globalized LGBTQI+ identities and lifestyles, nor within a dimorphic sex/gender matrix. The formation of the subjectivity of Afghan dancers, in other words, had less to do with major normative and non-normative gender and sexual categories, such as “transgender,” “homosexual/heterosexual,” or “man/woman,” or with the mainstream politics of visibility, coming out, and social mobilization that are more common in the West. Instead, my interlocutors’ various senses of self were largely framed at the productive transnational and transhistorical intersection of the South Asian figure of the third sex/gender, the Central/West Asian (Turko-Persianate) tradition of bachah-bāzī, and the culturally rich notion of Afghan īzak. The unique geographical location of Afghanistan—in the South of Central Asia, East of the Iranian plateau/Southwest Asia, and Northwest of the Indian subcontinent—enabled a polyamorous relationship to happen in Kabul among the three figures of bachah, īzak, and hijra/khwaja sira—the offspring of which was the figure of murat. Afghan murats thus creatively crafted their subjectivities in various spatial and temporal settings and through multiple modalities of differentiation within a non-binary sex/gender system. By identifying with arguably more respected minority communities in the region, a “minor transnationalism” in Lionnet and Shih’s (2005) formulation, and by imagining a transnational community of equals and unequals living in nearby countries (or ever further, in Thailand for instance, as a senior murat once told me that “murats live there too”), Afghan murats sought ʿizzat (respect) and recognition and critically questioned their otherwise abject location in their own society and culture.

I emphasize Stanley I. Thangaraj’s suggestion that, in studying masculinities, one should “conceptualize masculinities within circuits of local, [regional,] and global power… without being bounded and contained by the nation and its organizing logic” (2022, 6). Studying the formation of murats’ gender subjectivities encourages us to move away from treating (Afghan) masculinity as singular and toward a focus on multiple, heterogenous, and hybrid masculinities and men’s experiences in their various social and historical formations. Murats’ senses of who they are irrefutably challenge nation-based, binary, and normative framings of gender—especially in a context where four decades of war and conflict have resulted in the maintenance and celebration of particular forms of masculinities that are more closely associated with violence, aggression, and militarization. As an abject community with vulnerable bodies, murats fall outside the purview of moral decency and masculine respectability. Yet, their lived experiences reveal how interconnected histories and transnational connections between minority groups with shared moral and cultural universes lead to the creation of competing notions of personhood and alternative lifeworlds.