Allah Made Us book presentation

The Centre for Democracy and Development Wishes to Invite you to the Presentation of a book titled: Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City
by Rudolf Gaudio Associate Professor of Anthropology at SUNY, Purchase College.

Friday Sep 25th, 10am - noon, Denis Hotel.

In Hausaland, Sharia (Islamic Law), requires strict separation of the sexes and different rules of behavior for women and men in virtually every facet of life.

“Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in and Islamic African City” is about men who break those rules. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the ancient Islamic city-state of Kano, Allah Made Us analyses the social experiences and expressive culture of the ‘yan daudu (feminine men) in relation to local, national and global debates over gender and sexuality at the turn of the twenty-first century. Rudolf Gaudio explores how yan daudu use language, their bodies and other media (including food, clothing, and video) to play with what it means to be a male and a female.

In this innovative text, cultural anthropologist and linguist Rudolf Gaudio offers not only a rich and highly engrossing ethnographic account of these sexual outlaws, but also provides those readers with litter background in linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and queer studies a primer to key concepts by presenting a range of sophisticated ideas in an accessible manner.