Becoming Rom (male), becoming Romni (female) among

Romanian Cortorari Roma: On body and gender

Cătălina Tesăr

Much of the work on gender in Romany studies is centered on beliefs about the pollu-
tion of symbolically constructed female bodies. This article advocates, following Gay
y Blasco (1997), reconsidering the importance of physical bodies for Romany concep-
tions of gender. My findings among Romanian Cortorari Roma show that representa-
tions of gender are based on procreative capacities of the sex-differentiated bodies that
are called to enact a set of moral prescriptions in social behavior, relative to categories
of age and kinship. Marriages are arranged for pubertal boys and girls by adults. They
are legitimized through the spouses’ first sexual intercourse, and endure only through
procreation. Gendered personhood is thus achieved through proof of procreative cap-
acities. I analyze gender as a process that revolves around folk conceptions of bodies
and their lived experience in the culture.
Keywords: body, femininity, gender, hierarchy, kinship, masculinity, personhood,
public, private, sex

At the time of my fieldwork, twelve-year-old Neagra had been living for more
than one year with the family of her, back then, thirteen-year-old spouse,
Tamba. When the marriage was arranged, the couple’s families agreed that
Neagra would sleep with Tamba (soven k-o than) only when she would turn
fourteen. Yet as soon as she had her first menses, Neagra’s parents-in-law start-
ed putting pressure on the spouses to begin their sexual life. For a couple of
days, Neagra kept stubbornly rejecting the idea and went through several cry-
ing fits, all of them met by the same urgency on the part of her parents-in-law
to proceed at once to what was anyway going to happen. At this point negotia-
tions started to be carried out among the couple’s genitors and other relatives,
and culminated in their decision that Neagra and Tamba should engage in
their first sexual intercourse. At midday, the young couple was left alone in the
front room of the house (o kher d-anglal) and was asked to proceed to ‘their
business’. The grown-ups gathered in the street, peeping over the fence and
through the windows, and anxiously waiting to opinion on the masculinity of
the boy and respectively, virginity of the girl. The first attempt of the couple
failed, Tamba’s parents announced in the street after they had checked inside
and had seen no stain of menstrual blood on Neagra’s skirt, which would have
Cătălina Tesăr is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at University College London,
Department of Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom.
Email: catalinatesar@yahoo.com
Romani Studies 5, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2012), 113–140 issn 1528–0748 (print) 1757–2274 (online)
doi: 10.3828/rs.2012.7
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been a sign of her just lost virginity. The young couple were given a chance to
two more attempts that day, both of them unsuccessful. Tamba’s parents hastily
blamed Neagra for not having been a šej bari (a menstruating girl, still a virgin).
The offence brought shame (lažav) upon the girl’s extended family and espe-
cially upon her parents, who decided to take their daughter to a medical check
and leave the doctor conclude upon her virginity. When the doctor said she
was ‘untouched, as her mom made her’, in other words, still a virgin because
although she had slept with the boy, they had not had penetrative sex – the
boy had only played around with her (a balacit-o) – Neagra’s parents took the
opportunity of accusing their son-in-law of lack of masculinity. ‘The boy is not
good/virile’ (o šao n-ai de treaba) they told the world. This time a few Cortorari
accompanied Tamba to see a doctor who decided that the boy’s body was not
physiologically prepared for sexual intercourse. ‘The boy is not able bodied for
sexual intercourse’ (o šao n-ai romnjengi), people glossed the doctor’s sentence.
In this article I analyze Cortorari conceptions of gender, body, sex and per-
sonhood. I  will argue that, contrary to recent urges for the dismissal of the
old dichotomy between sex and gender (Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Butler
1990; Moore 1994), we need to retain the distinction originally employed in
anthropology to differentiate between what is given, that is, sex, and what is
culturally constructed, that is, gender (Astuti 1998), in order to make right to
the ethnographic material I collected among Cortorari.
Even if I agree with Butler’ s idea that sex, the same as gender, is culturally
constructed and ‘is replaced by the social meanings it takes on’ (Butler 1993:
5, emphasis in the original), I advocate, echoing Astuti (1998), the salvage of
the old distinction between sex and gender, which resonates with Cortorari
understandings of the person. Cortorari believe that people are born with sex-
differentiated bodies that require adequate anatomical development, and need
to observe a set of moral values based on categories of age and kinship, in order
to obtain acknowledged gendered personhood. Although one’s sex is fixed at
birth and is entangled with trajectories of gender, one’s gender is acquired
only through continuous performance, by ‘doing’ (West and Zimmerman
1987), with procreation being a prerequisite. Cortorari take heterosexual dif-
ferentiation and the production of children as axiomatic in the construction
of gendered persons. In other words, if gender is performative and enacted,
that is, it is a process – as suggested in the title of this article – sex is given and
unchangeable among Cortorari.
What Neagra and Tamba experienced is common to almost all Cortorari
young married couples whose first sexual intercourse, albeit consummated in
the confines of the boy’s parental household, becomes the concern of the whole
community. Two spouses’ first sexual intercourse is an outstanding event that
prompts everybody to speculate about the bodily capacities of the boy to pen-
 on body and gender 115

etrate the girl whose virginity, understood as a proof of her morality, is either
called into question or admitted. For the young spouses the experience of the
first sexual intercourse is a litmus test for the integrity of their physical bodies,
the bedrock on which Cortorari project their conceptions of gender and which
inform Cortorari gender ideologies. As the above ethnographic vignette sug-
gests, the two spouses, far from being represented as autonomous individuals,
are conceived of as persons enmeshed in a web of kinship relationships. The
success or failure to perform sexual intercourse impacts upon the moral evalu-
ation of their parental families, that is, their seizing public shame or honor.
When Tamba fails to penetrate his female partner, he is accused of lack of
masculinity and his virility is called into question. Not that he completely fails
to qualify for manhood, but his body is considered not to have reached sexual
maturity, that is, of the sex organs, which is fundamental in the exhibition
and performance of masculinity. Furthermore, virility is a sine qua non ingre-
dient in local representations of manliness, which is the by-product of male
procreative capacities. At the same time, a female baby acknowledged as such
at birth can only become a Cortorari woman once she procreates in wedlock.
Cortorari’s conceptions of maleness and femaleness can be said to consist of a
set of moral prescriptions that a man and a woman has to obey in order to be
acknowledged as belonging to the culture and which are intrinsically related to
their understanding of sexed bodies.
The typical Cortorari male wears a velour hat and black velvet trousers, he
knows to hammer copper artifacts, and engages both in horse dealing at home
and in begging abroad. The typical Cortorari female wears long pleated colorful
skirts and a headscarf over her braided long hair, she knows to cook and feed
her family, to keep the house clean, to raise pigs for selling, and to beg at home
and abroad. They both marry Cortorari of the opposite sex, have children and
claim relatedness through blood ties with Cortorari genitors. Cortorari men
and women deprived of procreative capacities are not denied ethnical belong-
ing, nor are they included in a third gender category, yet they are not acknow-
ledged maleness or femaleness, being thus considered ‘incomplete’ persons.1
Much of the anthropological work on gender in Romany studies was
inspired by Douglas’s symbolic and structuralist approach to the body as a
natural symbol with which to think about nature, society and culture (Douglas
1970; in Scheper‐Hughes and Lock 1987). In these accounts (Gropper 1975;
Miller 1975; Sutherland 1975; Okely 1983; Stewart 1997; Hasdeu 2007), ­gender
1. Note that I use ‘incomplete’ not in the sense employed by Strathern for describing Melanesian
dividual or partiable persons, who, represented as sites of relationships, are born ‘complete’ and
become ‘incomplete’ later in life, that is, ‘make visible’ only peculiar sets of relationships or only
one gender, in interaction with other persons (Strathern 1988). Echoing Strathern (1993), my use
of ‘incomplete’ reverberates with folk Western conceptions of persons who grow and become
whole through the process of socialization.
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­representations among Gypsies appear to rest on beliefs about ‘pollution’

(Douglas 1966) in relation with the female body and with the ethnic boundar-
ies. My ethnography does not concur with understandings of gender in terms
of binary oppositions, the ‘clean’ and the ‘polluted’, the lower and the upper
part of female body, us, the Gypsies, and the others, the non-Gypsies, the mod-
est and shameful women and the enterprising and honorable men.
I  will show that Cortorari create spaces of indeterminacy and boundary
transgression between what is clean and polluted, between private and pub-
lic, between sexual explicitness and sexual restraint, between concealing and
revealing bodies, between men’s access to power and women’s access to power.
Not that Cortorari are blind to the ontological differences between these vari-
ous domains of the social, but they continuously reorganize their meanings
in relation with lived contexts of experience. I will show, in turn, how sexual
awareness cultivated in children is downplayed later in life; how sexual desires
that reside in bodies irrespective of their sex are enacted in different ways by
the two genders; how the gender hierarchy which attaches more symbolic
value to men than to women in public spaces is reversed in the confines of the
household; and, finally, how the fixity of sex coexists with the processuality of
gender.
My ethnography resonates with the uneasiness of understanding ‘the physi-
cality of the body without abandoning the idea that maleness and femaleness
are culturally constructed’ (Gay y Blasco 1997: 517) that lies at the core of
Spanish Gitanos conceptions of gender. The mutual constituency of what is
‘given’ and what is performed, that I discuss in this article in relation with sex
and gender echoes Cortorari conceptions of relatedness as based on procrea-
tion and the idiom of shared blood, which needs to be constructed through
every day practices (Carsten 2000). This article focusses on the process of
growing up marriageable bodies among Cortorari. To answer the question of
how one becomes a male and respectively a female Cortorari, I look at the way
bodies are en-gendered through a process deployed at the intersection of folk
conceptions about the physical development of the body, and practices that
bodies enact.

1.  Introducing Cortorari

Cortorari (lit. Tent-dwellers < Rom. cort = ‘tent’) are a so-called traditional
Roma population from central Romania, speakers of the Romany Vlach dialect.
Ex-nomadic, Cortorari were forcibly settled down by the communist regime
in the late 1950s. Today they live along with their ethnic Romanian peasant
neighbors in houses spread across several villages in the historical region of
Transylvania. The biggest community of Cortorari live in a village that I will
 on body and gender 117

call Baleni, where I carried out the fieldwork for my PhD thesis between 2008
and 2010, and where the data for this article was collected.
In Baleni, Cortorari are clustered in a neighborhood that they call kumpa-
nia, and which comprises, based on my own estimations, approximately eighty
households and more or less 1000 individuals. Cortorari earn their livelihood
both through traditional domestic gender-differentiated economic activities
– men engage in the manufacturing of copper artifacts and in horse dealing,
women in pig husbandry – and, more recently, through gender-indifferent
begging activities abroad, which I described at length elsewhere (Tesăr 2011).
Cortorari differentiate themselves from other Roma in Romania through
their traditional outfit, housing, and their practices and representations of kin-
ship. Cortorari raised imposing houses which index their economic betterment
following the fall of communism in Romania. Despite this visible sign of their
economic standing, Cortorari consider their wealth (averea) to reside in the
possession of some male valuables, taxtaja (‘beakers’),2 which are kept hidden,
in the custody of Romanian neighbor peasants. Taxtaja are inherited along
male bloodlines and determine the value of dowries in ceremonial exchanges.
Cortorari arrange their children’s marriages at early ages and are therefore
concerned primarily with the circulation of wealth, both in money and in tax-
taja. Marriage exchanges set in motion a flow of cash dowries, male valuables
and persons. Because marriages endure only through procreation and because
there is strong competition for spouses on the marriage market, Cortorari are
expected to make proof of procreative capacities in their early puberty. This
article concentrates on the process of growing up marriageable bodies among
Cortorari.

2.  ‘What man sows, it shall grow’: Assigning sex to babies

Cortorari value male offspring more than female offspring. Daughters are
thought to be a burden for their parental family. On one hand, once they
become economically productive, they move out of their parental household
to live with their parents-in-law, divesting thus their parents of their labor
force. On the other hand, marital arrangements for a daughter cause serious
financial troubles to her parental family, save the form that marriage prestation
takes among Cortorari. Dowries are paid in several installments, sometimes
throughout a daughter’s life. Additionally, daughters’ burdensome lives in their
in-laws’ families can attract a lot of grief and suffering on the part of their
parental family. Mothers in particular, who had to put up with similar ill treat-
ment as daughters-in-law when young, condole with their severed d ­ aughters.3
2.  For similar practices among Gabor Roma see Berta (2007, 2009) and Olivera (2007).
3. At times I had the impression that mothers experienced even more grief than their married-
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The most affection is shown to the youngest son who does not leave the
parental household after marriage, and who is expected to sponsor and insure
proper funerals for his parents. ‘The son belongs to us, the daughter belongs
to the others’, or ‘belongs to people’, that is, to ‘strangers’4 (o šao i amaro, e šej
i avrenge/manušenge), Cortorari say to account for their different attitudes in
regard to male and female children. Therefore, the birth of a daughter is quite a
tragedy for a family, whilst the birth of a son, glossed metonymically as ‘birth of
happiness’ (bucurie) is always an outstanding event (see also Gay y Blasco 1997).
Cortorari prefer to conclude marriages through exchanges of daughters.
Therefore, the birth of a first daughter to a couple is never such a grinding event
as the possible birth of a second one. A couple who beget male offspring as their
first newborn is likely not to have other children. Should the first newborn be
a daughter, the two spouses are expected to produce a son afterwards. In the
early 2000s, Cortorari started using 3D pregnancy scans, which allows you
to see the sex of a fetus from the fourth month of gestation. Since then it has
become common practice for Cortorari women to learn the sex of their fetus
and to undergo abortions if the fetus proved to be female. In this sense, I heard
old Cortorari women judging new birth control local policies through sayings
such as ‘doctors ate (i.e. annihilated) half of the world’ (xalea o doftoru e lumea
paš). Irrespective of the danger a mother faces in such an advanced stage of the
pregnancy, doctors comply with the practice in exchange for quite small bribes,
notwithstanding the risk of losing their jobs. This situation will probably lead
to a lack of gender balance among marriageable Cortorari in the near future.
Stories about infanticide in case of female offspring are widespread. Although
I have not witnessed any during my stay in the field, I consider these stories to
be full-fledged evidence of Cortorari attitudes towards either male or female
offspring.
With such high gender hierarchy sensitivity, one would expect Cortorari
to have developed beliefs about procreation and the different roles men and
women play in the production and sexing of children. To these beliefs I now
turn. Cortorari believe that either men or women can imprint their own sex on
a fetus, and see the process of conceiving a baby and its subsequent sexing in
terms of a competition between the masculinity and respectively femininity of
the two spouses. The most vigorous of the two spouses, in Cortorari’s view, the
most energetic and active during the sexual intercourse, transmits his or her
off daughters. While the latter were kept busy with the entire burden of housekeeping in their
in-laws’ households on their shoulders, the former would have outbursts of tears while caught
in their daily life activities.
4.  Cortorari place the idiom of blood at the core of their conception of relatedness, and believe
that the wider the blood distance, the more likely a relationship would be infused with feelings
of insecurity, suspicion and distrust (see also Gay y Blasco 2005). Distant relatives are consid-
ered strangers.
 on body and gender 119

sex to the fetus. And the strength or the weakness of one’s body in copulation
can be acquired through ingestion of different substances such as food and
drink.
A  man planning to beget a male offspring, and whose desire to do so is
strong enough, should avoid strong alcohol (such as plum brandy or vodka)
long before copulation (a period which can extend up to six months). In con-
trast, he is advised to drink red wine just before sexual intercourse because
wine is believed to strengthen the body. Before copulation, women should
consume small quantities of strong alcohol (such as brandy), which is said to
tame them down to such an extent as to leave their partners lead the sexual
intercourse.5
In accordance with such beliefs, newly wed women – in particular those
who already had a daughter – keep an eye on their husband’s alcohol intake. At
midnight women rush through the village streets, their skirts training in the
dust or snow, to bring their husbands home from the taverns. On their way
back home, while dragging their inebriated husbands along, women complain
loudly about their spouses consuming the wrong type of alcohol when a son
is needed in the family. In this way, they absolve themselves of possible public
blame if they beget female offspring. During weddings and funerals, the two
genders arrange themselves in spatially segregated clusters. Women, standing
on tiptoes, peep over the heads of those gathered to watch what their husbands
are drinking. Whenever my boyfriend accompanied me to Cortorari celebra-
tions, he was always provokingly urged by men to drink only wine. The next
day, the same men would inevitably ask me if I  was satisfied with my boy-
friend’s sexual performance at night. It is thus believed that wine is an ingre-
dient for virility understood both as power for procreation and as corporeal
strength (zor). When strength is enacted by a man during sexual intercourse,
the sex of the baby is likely to be male. A man might lose his strength through
excessive physical work, such as feeding animals in the stable, working on the
construction of a house, making hay, or any other agricultural activities, all of
which are seen as menial.
Folk biology also advises men who want to beget male offspring to engage
in sexual intercourse in the last day of the woman’s menses. This prescrip-
tion appears striking both in relation to Western folk theories of reproduction,
which predict the lack of ovulation during a woman’s period, and in relation to
local polluting taboos. I will start by discussing the latter.
Gypsies worldwide consider the lower part of a woman’s body to be pol-
luting (Okely 1983; Stewart 1997; Gay y Blasco 1999), and the more so during
the woman’s menses, when she is not supposed to cook and is expected to
5.  These ideas echo Spanish Gypsies’ associating women with inertia and men with dynamism
both during the sexual intercourse, and in everyday life (Manrique 2009).
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refrain from sexual intercourse (Okely 1996). Among Cortorari, a menstruat-

ing woman should neither visit a newborn in his first six weeks of life, nor
enter the church. She should not walk into the cellar where wine, pickles, and
other preserves are kept, or participate in the preparations of any of these. She
should refrain from going up in the attic, where she would be above the pots in
the house and could therefore pollute the food. Also, a menstruating woman
should not touch another woman’s hair – which, as we will see later in this
article, is a sign of femininity – lest the latter would suffer from hair loss. How
then can we explain the belief that male offspring can be conceived through
copulation with a woman while she is menstruating?
Manrique, who found the same belief among Spanish Gypsies, explains it
in relation with local broader theory of procreation, whereby people are seen
as the product of merging male and female substances – that is, sperm and
blood – with the latter having more fertilizing qualities at the time of the men-
ses. During menstruation women take on a more active status and enter an
active male phase occasioned by the pouring of blood containing the woman’s
father and her maternal grandfather’s substances (Manrique 2009). However,
Cortorari have not developed such a folk theory of procreation and, echoing
the Vezo of Madagascar described by Astuti,
women’s and men’s different roles in creation of children are not used, as they are in other
parts of the world, to draw a distinction between male and female ­substances.  (Astuti
1998: 39, italics in original)

I would therefore like to suggest that conception of a male offspring during

a woman’s menses is premised on the conviction that during her period, a
woman is less active and energetic than at any other times. I  showed above
that a woman should refrain from a lot of her daily activities during the
menses. Although it has an acknowledged prominence in the passage from
childhood to womanhood (see also Manrique 2009) – and the vignette at the
beginning of this article is telling – menarche is also seen as a disease that
weakens a woman’s body. With this in mind, and introducing here an idea
that I will develop further in this article – any talk about corporeal fluids and
organs is tabooed among Cortorari women – it is possible to understand why
Cortorari gloss the menses as a ‘monthly disease.’ ‘She was taken ill this month’
(Kerdilea nasfali k-o šon), say Cortorari (women) to indicate that a woman
has her period. Drawing on the conviction that the more vigorous of the two
spouses during copulation imprints his/her sex on the fetus, it becomes clear
why Cortorari believe that a male offspring is likely to be conceived during the
woman’s menses.
I will now discuss the second aspect of copulating during a woman’s menses,
namely, the polluting taboo. By doing so, I anticipate here an idea that I will
 on body and gender 121

develop towards the end of this article, where I discuss gender in relation to
categories of age and kinship; namely, that a husband engaging in sexual inter-
course with his wife during her menses suggests the importance placed on
the intimacy of the couple at the expense of sanctioning the breaking of the
polluting taboo. As it will become apparent later in this article, women’s pol-
luting taboo, described in analyses inspired by Douglas’s (1966) structuralist
approach (such as Okely 1983; Okely 1996; Stewart 1997) as fixed and non-
transgressive, is for Cortorari only one among many folk models (Holy and
Stuchlik 1981) that change faces depending on private vs. public issues, kinship
distance, and age. I  thus infer that the transgression of the polluting taboo
during copulation is suggestive of the value Cortorari place on the unity of
the couple and the strength of the marital bond at the expense of the norma-
tive gender hierarchy which normally places women in an inferior position to
men, among others, because of their polluting capacities. A man engaging in
sexual intercourse with his menstruating wife, without fear of being defiled,
illustrates the downplaying of the public gender taboos in the confines of the
conjugal couple.
So far I argued that either of the two spouses can transmit their sex to the
offspring if they master their bodies in accordance with a folk model that
prescribes dynamism and virility to the man, and inertia and docility to the
woman, during the sexual intercourse. Compliance with these prescriptions is
translated in the sexing of the baby which, once conceived, starts communicat-
ing its gender through the air and bodily reactions of the pregnant woman. If
the woman feels miserable and sick in her first month of pregnancy, the same
if her features turn ugly, the baby is likely to be a female. If the fetus is placed
on the left side of a woman’s womb it would be a girl, whereas if it is placed
on the right side of her womb it would be a boy; and a mother can feel and tell
this. A pregnant woman craves for different foods and drinks. Yet it is not the
mother who craves, but the baby in her womb and failure to satisfy its desires
might result in a miscarriage. It is thus advisable for a person who passes by a
pregnant woman to offer whatever the person is carrying. Should it be a bottle
of fizzy drink or alcohol, the passer-by should open it and offer a sip to the
mother, or should it be a pack of biscuits, again the person is expected to share
it with the pregnant woman.
Apart from these beliefs, Cortorari have not developed a folk theory of the
conception of persons in relation to substances merged in the making up of
the body, as Melanisian and Indian populations did (Carsten 2002, 2011). This,
as we will see, has repercussions on Cortorari representations of gender and
relatedness.
In Melanisia the partiability of the person (Wagner 1977; Strathern 1988) is
predicated upon the radical distinction between male and female substances
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put into its constitution, which make male and female persons appear equally
alike as ‘mosaically constructed’ (Busby 1997). In Melanisia, people are born
androgynous and ‘it is therefore only as a result of transacting in male or female
things that cross-sex can be turned into single-sex and gender can be made
manifest (but only momentarily, before reverting back to cross-sex)’ (Astuti
1998: 38). The different gendered substances brought together in procreation
remain identified with ‘partiable’ and distinct parts of the body (Busby 1997, in
Astuti 1998; and Carsten 2002). This influences local understandings of relat-
edness as made up in relationships analogues to each other (Wagner 1977, in
Carsten 2002).
In south India, male and female substances are merged and thus indistin-
guishable in the final make-up of the body (Busby 1997). However, the Indian
person, resonating with the Dravidian kinship system, is born gendered (Astuti
1998), yet she shares sameness with either her female or her male genitors, who
are connected differently with the first; hence the difference they trace when
choosing to marry the right category of relatives, that is, maternal and paternal
cousins (Busby 1997). Kerala people are permeable and connected (Carsten
2002). Thus, in south India gender is substantive and ‘essentialized rather than
being performed or elicited’ (Carsten 2002); it is instilled in the baby and is
dependent upon transactions between cross-sexed persons which enable per-
sons’ reproductive potential (Busby 1997). Failure to do so results in a third
gender, hijra, which is necessarily a third sex (Busby 1997).
Where would Cortorari conceptions of gender and personhood stand then?
Before proceeding to answer this, it might be helpful to signal in advance the
direction of my argument. Among Cortorari, a person is born with a fixed sex
and achieves her gender through enactments of the expectations of her gender
category, among which procreative capacities are prerequisite. Opposite-sex
transactions are thus essential in the acquisition of gender. In some respects,
this is also what happens in south India. Yet in striking contrast with the
Kerala, Cortorari are, I would suggest, non-permeable. In south India, people
are represented as ‘internally wholes, but with a fluid and permeable body
boundary’ (Busby 1997: 269), which influences the configuration of kinship in
relation with male and female substances. Cortorari are both wholes, therefore
unbounded and non-permeable, which allows them to establish marital bonds
with a quite extended array of people, without fear of merging inappropriate
substances, or, in contrast, without having to combine appropriate substances,
as in the Dravidian kinship system.
In order to make Cortorari conceptions of gender and person clearer,
I introduce here a third example, the Vezo of Madagascar analyzed by Astuti
(1995). Similar to Cortorari, Vezo do not distinguish between the substances
contributing to the makeup of the body, believing that people are born sexed
 on body and gender 123

yet un-gendered and the acquisition of gender is processual and performa-

tive (Astuti 1998). Yet the similarities between Cortorari and Vezo end here.
The Vezo resolve the difference between what is given and inborn – sex – and
what is culturally constructed – gender – at death, when individuals related
in life through bilateral ties are re-arranged in tombs, in bounded and divi-
sive unilineal descent groups (Astuti 1995). Although Cortorari acknowledge
bilateral relatedness – as Vezo do – there is a crucial difference in the way
these two populations experience kinship. Whereas for the Vezo gender does
not differentiate people related bilaterally (Astuti 1993), for Cortorari gender
is crucial in the process of creating relatedness and gives a patrilineal tinge
to their cognatic kinship. Besides the preeminence of men in reproduction,
which I already discussed, I add here that men are also eminent in inheritance
and residence practices.
I argue that it is the pervasiveness of the patriliniality in the Cortorari bilat-
eral ideology and their normative gender hierarchy which attaches more sym-
bolic value to men in regard to women, that transpires in the belief that ‘what
man sows, shall grow’ (so mekhel o rom, kadea anclel). Cortorari believe that
during copulation the man ‘sows seed’ in the woman, with the former being
responsible for the sex of the offspring even in cases where the child takes
the latter’s sex. When this happens, the man is held responsible for not hav-
ing been vigorous enough during sexual intercourse to downplay the woman’s
assertiveness. The man is an active agent in procreation while the woman is
the passive one, the recipient of the seed. Cortorari are nevertheless aware that
a woman and her genitalia are imperative in procreation. They thus acknow-
ledge bilateral relatedness to an ego. When Cortorari make comments about a
child’s physical appearance, they say that the baby has taken after his mother
in this feature and after his father in that feature.

3.  Passing on knowledge from parents to children

So far I argued that people are born sexed among Cortorari. I am primarily
concerned with the acquisition of gender, and make an attempt to show how
Cortorari sexed bodies grow up into marriageable persons capable of engaging
in heterosexual intercourse at early ages. In what follows, I show how Cortorari
children become aware of their sexed bodies and acquire sexual knowledge.
Before I approach the specific question of cultural transmission of gender rep-
resentations, I introduce the reader to a few key points of the broader context
of learning to become an expert in the cultural repertoire.
The most striking feature of passing on cultural knowledge from grown-ups
to children is the lack of explicit pedagogy, either linguistic or non-linguistic.
After the first six weeks of their life, which the newborns spend together with
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their mother at home, children grow up amid mature persons and their lives
unfold enmeshed in the latter’s sociality. Children are present where mature
persons are; they appear as extensions of the latter. They are never excluded
from grown-ups’ gathering and talk, and their presence never hinders the flow
of conversation. Among Cortorari I could sense caution neither in regard to
topics nor to the language employed in communication in the presence of
children. Children are neither scolded for misbehavior nor taught explicitly
how they should behave. Most of the knowledge is passed on from grown-ups
to children through mocking, teasing, and scaffolding narratives, all of these
constituting means through which children’s socialization is achieved.
Children are given considerable leeway; acts that would be judged as
immoral once infants turn into marriageable persons and later – into wives
and husbands. On the one hand, children are thought to lack wisdom; on
the other hand, they are seen as potentially competent in the culture and as
such, they need to acquire cultural knowledge. It is on these two premises that
petty thefts, rudeness towards grown-ups, and almost any sort of mischievous
behaviors are rather encouraged than sanctioned among children. I remember
an occasion when visiting Cortorari with a friend, long before starting field-
work for my PhD, my photo camera disappeared from the table where I had
left it, in the house of a Cortorari family where we had dinner. Once I noticed
that, I expressed loudly my worry in front of my hosts, making use of an entire
artillery of fierce words that stereotypically portray Gypsies as burglars and
thefts. This caused an uproar, people moving in and out of the house, some
shouting while others pleaded and swearing innocence. When I  gave up all
hope of recovering my camera, our old woman host victoriously entered the
room brandishing the device. With no remorse or trace of shame in her voice,
she announced calmly that ‘the little one had taken it away’ and that I should
take no further action, saying ‘children will be children’, that is, ‘mindless’ (n ai
les godi).
Children are not taught what is good and what is bad. As with other popu-
lations who lack individual or institutional pedagogy, and whereby learning
is motivated by formulaic and counter-intuitive explanations, such as the
Mbendjele hunter–gatherers, moral reasoning is acquired through personal
experience (Lewis 2008). Children who have already learnt to steal will later
in life realize that it is not advisable or accepted to steal from neighbors and
acquaintances, as it was the case with me, whereas it is permitted to steal in
small quantities from shops and supermarkets, the latter being seen as con-
tainers of an abundance which does not belong to a perceptible person.
Socialized among grown-ups, children imitate the latter’s talk and prac-
tices. As soon as they can walk, boys are kept in the company of mature male
 on body and gender 125

Cortorari who make copper artifacts. Thus, the first toys a boy knows are ham-
mers, anvils, and copper plates. Girls, on the other hand, play with brooms,
buckets, and washing liquids. In more than one instance, I heard three-year-
old girls confess she was visiting churches to pray for a good match or for a son
to be born to her parents. These confessions should not be taken at face value.
They are, I am suggesting here, full-fledged evidence of children’s participat-
ing with no restriction in grown-ups’ sociality, and of the process of learning
through imitation. Celo, less than three, once asked me for some spare change.
When I asked if he needed the money for sweets, he denied assertively, trying
to convince me he had instead to pay the priest to hold Mass for his father to
quit drinking. Celo was definitely reproducing his mother’s discourses and
practices.

4.  Penis and vagina: Children’s becoming aware of their sexed bodies
Keeping in mind that children learn skills and knowledge that make them
culturally competent through participating and imitating Cortorari sociality,
I now turn to how children learn gender representations as contingent upon
their sexes. We will see that the core knowledge about what is expected of each
gender category is acquired through sexual teasing. Although sexual teasing
has scarcely been discussed in the ethnographical literature on Gypsies, it was
found central in the process of linguistic socialization through which infants
learn how to feel and how to express feelings and emotions according to the
patterns of the given culture (Reger 1999). In her study of children’s early lin-
guistic and social development in a Hungarian Gypsy community, Reger finds
that

Children from the moment of birth are considered full members of their community
and potential communicative partners, and . . . almost from the moment of birth on,
they are directly taught and trained for future gender specific roles.  (Reger 1999: 309).

Similar to the Spanish Gitanos studied by Gay y Blasco (1997, 1999) or to the
Romanian Gypsies studied by Engebrigtsen (2007), for Cortorari, overt talk
about genitals does not necessarily have obscene intensions, and ‘do[es] not
carry inherently polite or rude connotations’ (Gay y Blasco 1999: 71). A recur-
rent saying of praise to God, meant in the most affectionate yet pious way,
is: ‘may I eat God’s cock’ (xau le Devleko kar). The words for penis (kar) and
female genitalia (Rom miž) are probably the most frequently used in everyday
conversation. At birth, babies are either appraised or vilified in accordance
with their genitals, which are metonymically used to talk of a she or a he baby
(Gay y Blasco 1997).
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Surprisingly enough for a Gadgo who might judge such a sexually loaded
talk as ubiquitous, it pervades age borders. Kar and miž are the first words
babies learn (see also Gay y Blasco 1997). For a child in the pre-verbal stage of
development to know to point to its genitals when asked by grown-ups ‘Where
is your willy/fanny?’ (kaj lo kio kar/kaj la ki miž?) is widely acknowledged
evidence of its brightness. It is common to rub and kiss both the boys’ and
girls’ genitals to show affection (see also Gay y Blasco 1997, Stewart 1997). This
gesture is nonetheless accompanied by sayings clearly stating the normative
gendered distribution of roles in the sexual intercourse. One can often hear
somebody addressing a two-year-old boy ‘May your willy grow to fuck women’
(te barjol kio kar, te de bule k-al romnea). Whereas girls of the same age are
warned they will become objects of men’s lust: ‘You slut, men will fuck your
pussy’ (Kurva, te den tut bule al roma and-e miž).
Swearwords such as ‘Eat my cock/pussy’ (xa miri kar/miž), otherwise con-
noting rudeness when uttered by grown-ups towards peers, are taught to kids
whose ability to use them is highly praised. In infancy, during the process of
language acquisition (at the age of one and a half or two, when children pass
from receptive language to expressive language and repeat spoken words),
babies are exposed not only to sexually loaded talk – which might be meaning-
less for them – but also to gesturing meant to objectify grown-up utterances.
Mature people will point quite exuberantly to children’s willies and fannies
while facial expressions and the tonality of their voices, along with their display
of emotions, will encourage infants to learn sexual talk and its bodily objectifi-
cation.
After the age of two, children who are teased by grown-ups already know
to defend themselves using swearings such as xa mirri miž/kar, to which the
grown-ups usually answer teasingly: ‘Do you have a willy/fanny? Oh, you don’t.
Where is it?’ (Si tu kar/miž? N-aitu! Kaj le/la?).6 At the age when they become
bossy and bad tempered, kids start displaying their genitals unafraid, or even
on purpose, despite the grown ups’ scolding them because of such shameless
talk and behavior: ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ (Nai tu lažav?). Linguistic findings
show a decrease of the occurrence of direct sexual teasing as the children grow
older and become socialized into gender roles and affect (Reger 1999).
With age, Cortorari increasingly become aware of their sex as instilled in
their bodies. The man is a being endowed with a penis while the woman has
a vagina. As kids are never excluded form grown ups’ talk, they are always
exposed to discussions about men’s and women’s activities and behavior in

6.  Based on her linguistic samples, Reger (1999: 310) argues that ‘at the age of 2 the young child
has already proven to be an eager and relatively skilled partner in performing her part within
the teasing sequence.’
 on body and gender 127

a wide range of fields, economical, social, political or sexual, and learn that
their sex-differentiated bodies assign them different gender roles in life. As
most agonistic talks are around marriage arrangements, sex-differentiated kids
learn about what it is expected from each of them in the future. They are thus
psychologically and emotionally prepared for heterosexual relations, including
sexual activities.
If their marriage was arranged at an early age – and this might happen begin-
ning with their first months of life – future spouses are encouraged to display
reciprocal tenderness and courtesy in instinctual manners. They are teased
to kiss or to embrace each other and boys in particular, to pinch girls. Girls
should normatively be passive and show no affection in heterosexual relations,
and we will see later that controlling desires is a moral standard for women
(Gay y Blasco 1997, 1999). Boys on the other hand should be more assertive in
their display of affect. At these early ages, they are teased to show ostentatiously
their ‘love’ towards girls. ‘Do you like her? Show me how you love her’ (Čalol tu
latar? Sikias mange, sar čalol tu latar). I should mention here that the Cortorari
language does not have a word for ‘love’ as conceived of in the West, usually
associated with emotional desires and romance. They rather use the verb čalol
(‘to like’) to describe physical attraction grounded in impulses and physical
sensations rather than in a conscious subjective experience.
When they reach the age of ten and soon afterwards, boys are encouraged to
watch pornographic visual materials. It is at about this age that both kids of both
sexes engage in sexual games, which usually take place out of the grown ups’
sight. If until the age of six, boys and girls are jokingly encouraged to overtly
perform sexually connotated body-touching, after this age such behavior is
thought to be hazardous especially for girls who, once they begin dressing their
bodies in Cortorari women outfits, learn to control their desires and wishes.
A girl should know no man until the time of her marriage when she should
be a virgin. Yet children after the age of six, who usually play in mixed gender
groups, well aware that it is shameful and forbidden, might show their genitals
to children of the opposite children or might imitate sexual intercourse (which
they guess from the practice of their parents, at night, given that they share the
same room with them).
From early childhood, Cortorari are taught and learn – not necessarily
through verbally elaborated discourses but through embodiment of the gender
differentiated practices to which they are exposed, to become aware of their
sexually differentiated bodies. They are thus prepared both physically and
mentally to have heterosexual relationships which should lead to procreation
as this is the most important goal one has to attain in his or her life, and mean-
while to acquiesce into the social disposition of gender roles. I  now turn to
Cortorari conceptions of masculinity and femininity.
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5.  Masculinities and femininities

Boys and girls grow up to be constantly aware of their sex-differentiated genitals.
Since early age, they have their marriage arrangements concluded and broken
up several times. However, recognition of a union is premised on successful
sexual intercourse between the two spouses. The endurance of this union and
the deployment of transactions it entails (a series of exchanges among affines)
are legitimized through procreation. I chose to open this article with an eth-
nographic example of a failed first sexual intercourse between two spouses.
Tamba does not succeed in deflowering Neagra, and the story occasions people
to speculate, on the one hand, about the boy’s anatomical development, and,
on the other, about the girl’s virginity. How does folk theory conceive of body
development?
In the discussions I  had with aunt Tina about Tamba and Neagra’s failed
sexual intercourse, she assertively blamed the two spouses’ parents for the
failure. To her mind, the latter were guilty at least for two reasons. First, they
should have known the spouses’ bodies were not anatomically prepared for
engaging in sexual intercourse. Secondly, if these children’s bodies had not
attained proper maturation, this was a sign of their parents’ failure to nurture
them according to Cortorari standards.
I  will start with revealing the meanings of aunt Tina’s first accusation.
Leaving aside my Western bias and received wisdom about Tamba and Neagra
being too young to begin their sexual life and recalling that there are societies
around the world that know coitus earlier than we do, I was nonetheless bewil-
dered by the explanations aunt Tina give me. I was reasoning that the young
spouses were both at the onset of puberty, and therefore right in the middle of
a physical process that turns a child’s body into an adult’s, capable of reproduc-
tion. I somehow expected aunt Tina to mention the development of more or
less visible secondary sex characteristics (such as male facial and pubic hair,
musculature and body shape; and female breast and hip development, and
menstruation) which Western folk biology describes as peculiar to puberty.
Yet she made reference – no traces of pudence in her voice – to the length of
the boy’s willy and to the girl’s bodily corpulence and menstruation. ‘Haven’t
you noticed how thin she is, this Neagra? She’s only skin and bones, Catalina,
she’s got no flesh.’ Whereas regarding Tamba, she added that ‘He should have
a small (jekh cira) willy, all covered in fat.’
These characteristics of the very physicality of the body are loci of inference-
making about masculinity and respectively femininity. Not only does the first
sexual intercourse between two spouses legitimize the alliance, but it is also a
locus of enacting peculiar understandings and ‘mythologies’(Barthes 1957) of
the body. Successful accomplishment of the first sexual intercourse equates for
 on body and gender 129

a boy with publicizing his masculinity. With masculinity achieved and com-
municated, the boy qualifies for access to maleness, which is contingent upon
procreation. Whereas for a girl, successful accomplishment of the first sexual
intercourse equates with acknowledgement of bodily premises which should
in time move her up to female status. With these in mind, one can understand
the young spouses’ eagerness to engage in their first sexual intercourse. If suc-
cessful, boys will afterwards boast about their masculinity. Whereas girls will
take pride in their abilities to survey their bodies and control desires, objecti-
fied in their virginity.
A girl is considered bodily capable of engaging in sexual intercourse once
she has her menses. However, the decision as to when a girl should start her
sexual life belongs to her parents and to her parents-in-law. Take Neagra’s case.
When they had arranged her marriage, the two parties agreed that she would
have her first sexual intercourse when she was fourteen. Yet her parents-in-law
decided the event should be advanced, and there were more claims at stake.
As they were planning a trip to Poland, they needed to deal with Neagra’s new
bodily transformations in advance – given that among Cortorari they count as
well as changing of the social relations around the girl and of her own under-
standing, intellectual and emotional, so as to correspond to the new place she
is to occupy. As a menstruating girl, still a virgin, Neagra had to be carefully
surveyed, never left home alone or allowed to walk on her own in the streets;
or else she risked to be deflowered. Were her parents-in-law to leave for Poland,
nobody would be left at home to be in charge of Neagra’s chastity, given that
that her parents were always on the move, going back and forth between
Poland and Italy. Under these conditions the parties agreed that Neagra and
Tamba should engage in sexual intercourse and that afterwards Tamba could
stay at home and take care of his wife.7
As to boys, Cortorari believe they can assess their bodily capacities for
engaging in sexual intercourse according to the length of their penis. Therefore
a boy’s parents constantly and thoroughly check the child’s genitals. This usu-
ally happens in rather intimate contexts, in the confine of the nuclear family;
when a mother bathes her son she pays attention to his penis, or when the
boy is asleep, his father might check his penis. With marriages being of public
concern, other people than the boy’s parents are also inquisitive about a male
child’s penis development and they might challenge the boy to exhibit his geni-
tals.
I  already mentioned that sexual teasing occurs increasingly less frequent
when children grow up. Twelve-year-old boys are unlikely to find themselves
in situations such as those discussed above. At this age, they are still challenged
7.  Had the couple not have started their sexual life, Tamba would have accompanied his parents
on their trip to Poland.
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to display their genitals, but now in groups of people confined by gender and
kinship principles (i.e. close male relatives, such as uncles and cousins). When
they go for a bath in the village river during the summer, premarital boys
get caught in peer sexual games, such as measuring the length of one’s penis
against the others’.
I showed that a father might pass on his sex to his offspring. However, a male
child does not inherit his father’s masculinity, which in the Cortorari’s view
appears processual, and attainable through maturation of the sexual organs.
Even if sex is an essence, is fixed and inborn, bodies are ‘historical’ (Foucault
1979) and ‘constructed artifacts’ (Errington 1990). Cortorari relate the process
of proper anatomical development of bodies to practices of nurturing. Male
and female bodies are believed to acquire masculinity and femininity through
parental care, objectified in feeding children on meat-based meals, constantly
keeping an eye on their physical health and keeping them from menial jobs.

6.  Engendering bodies

Cortorari male and female bodies undergo more stages of physical develop-
ment marked by changes in their denominations. In their early childhood,
boys and girls are designated with denominations common for the Gadge.
The Romanian word baiatul is used for a boy, baiata, for a girl. These appella-
tions allude to the sex of the children. Although nobody would deny ethnical
belonging to children confined to this age category, the use of the Gadge words
for small children, I would like to suggest, is confined to folk representations
of the latter as senseless in reasoning and therefore unaware of peculiar codes
of behavior that gendered differentiated persons are supposed to enact in
everyday life. Any baiatul or baiata are represented as confined to a given sex
category. Yet they are believed to occupy a liminal status from which they can
move upwards to qualify for a gender differentiated status, once their body
attains physical maturation and they become aware of the ethically specific
code of conduct of gendered persons.
Shortly before the onset of puberty, children are referred to using Romany
words for boy (šao) and girl (šej) – sometimes in their diminutive forms (šaoro
and šori) – which appeal to the premises for ethnical belonging acknowledg-
ment. When their bodies are considered to have reached sexual maturation,
which allows them to engage in sexual intercourse, both boys and girls are
designated by terms that make reference to the relation with the opposed sex.
In this sense, šao romnjengi (lit. ‘boy prepared for ‘having girls’/for engaging
in sexual intercourse with girls’) designates a male child capable of engaging
in sexual intercourse with the opposite Cortorari sex. Similarly, šej romnjenge
designates a female child capable of engaging in sexual intercourse, again with
 on body and gender 131

the opposite Cortorari sex. At this stage of development of her body, a girl is
also called šej bari (‘a girl who knows the menses, still a virgin’). Only fertile
bodies, which enact procreation capacities inside the wedlock, can be qualified
for the status of male (rom) or female (romni) Cortorari, which assign them
gender differentiated roles and unequal access to power in life. Rom cumu-
lates more meanings. It means ‘husband’, ‘man’ (or ‘male person’), and also
‘human being’ (in opposition with Gadge, outsiders). Romni means ‘wife’ and
‘female Cortorari’, and also a de-flowered Cortorari šej. For a woman in general,
Cortorari use the ethically unmarked term žuvli.
That rom and romni designate both gender and ethnical identity became
apparent for me later in the fieldwork, when I  could speak Cortorari and
I was doing my best to live up to Cortorari gender expectations. Half-jokingly,
Cortorari told me that I was turning into a romni. However, they never stopped
calling me e rakli (non-Cortorari girl, in the age category of šej). I challenged
them to tell me if in the hypothetical scenario in which I married a Cortorari
man I would be called a romni. The Cortorari gave me a prompt answer: my
hypothetical husband would call me his romni (wife) whereas nobody else
would consider me a romni (Cortorari female), save my lack of blood related-
ness with Cortorari.
While girls should ideally be virgins at marriage, boys are encouraged to
engage in sexual intercourse with Gadge women before starting their sexual
life with female Cortorari spouses. Pre-marital boys leave their hats at home,
believing thus to conceal their ethnical identity, and go to discos where they
look for Romanian girls with whom to have furtive sexual relationships. In
this way, their bodies are trained into the skills of sexual intercourse. Yet their
masculinity is only acknowledged as an outcome of a sexual intercourse with
Cortorari spouses. Even if women’s virginity is usually medically scrutinized
before her first sexual intercourse, it should nonetheless be made visible as an
outcome of different-sex Cortorari spouses. ‘The boy is the doctor’ (o šao i o
doftoru), Cortorari say to convey the idea that proof of masculinity and femi-
ninity should be made exclusively through sexual intercourse among Cortorari
persons. Maleness and femaleness are premised on procreation inside the wed-
lock.
In a manner reminding of the teachings of Mauss’ Techniques of the body
(1950), women, once they reach a marriageable age, train their head, neck, and
eyes to always look down to the ground when in public spaces surrounded by
men. Their look indexes their modesty. When they sit together at the side of
a ditch by the street or on the edge of a bed in a room with men seated at the
table, women keep their look down. To get a glimpse of the surroundings, they
roll their eyes and glance underneath their eyebrows. Cortorari believe that a
woman’s chastity can be predicated upon tenure of her body. If a girl keeps her
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body straight up when walking, this is taken as a sign of her chastity. On the
other hand, if her posture is round-shouldered, this is taken as a sign of her
lost virginity. ‘Look what signs she’s got’ (Dikh če semne si la), Cortorari say
when they make comments on the femininity of a woman whose femaleness is
acknowledged through enactment of her procreative capacities inside wedlock.
In contradiction to infertile men whose marriages endure, infertile women are
doomed to celibacy.
Apart from the proper anatomical development of their sexual organs,
the general health of marriageable bodies weighs in the negotiations carried
on for arranging alliances. It became common among the Cortorari to take
future spouses for a general medical check before the arrangement of a mar-
riage. Three or four Cortorari people, usually of the same sex of the future
spouse, accompany the latter to a physician who issues a medical certificate.
The Cortorari chosen to accompany the spouses should not be closely related
to the spouses’ families in order to be unbiased in the account of the diagnosis
issued by the doctor. The results are communicated through ritual oath-taking
in front of an audience that gathers almost all the Cortorari who happen to be
at home.
Physical disabilities impact on a persons’ life course and social position, and
are not divorced, in the Cortorari’s view, from one’s moral behavior. Moral
judgments of a person comprise evaluation of the posture and integrity of the
physical body. A woman’s loss or shortness of hair – save that length and thick-
ness of one’s hairs is a sign of her femininity – objectifies both her ill-nurturing
and her lack of femininity. Sight problems as well as any other small physical
disabilities disqualify bodies for advantageous marriage arrangements. Not
only that the persons’ nicknames reflect these disabilities (O Bango ‘crooked’,
E Cori ‘blind’), but disabilities attract moral judgments about them.

7.  Sexual desires

Surprisingly enough for a population that instills sexual awareness in small
children, Cortorari place at the core of their conception of masculinity and
femininity people’s capacities to control sexual desires and feelings of affec-
tion towards the opposite sex. Cortorari, like the Gitanos described by Gay y
Blasco, create a sense of commonality through emphasizing emotions, either
of love towards kin or of hate towards non-kin (2005), and these intense emo-
tions are expressed, discussed, and rehearsed all the time. Nonetheless, they
conceal, do not name, and deny the expression of emotions, sexual desires, and
passions in the conjugal relationship. In what follows I consider this ambiva-
lence and tension, between the sexual explicitness that I discussed in general
terms above, and sexual continence. Following Gay y Blasco, I maintain that
 on body and gender 133

Cortorari, like the Spanish Gitanos, consider sexual desires to be an attribute

of the human body irrespective of its sex, and to account for sexual desires
(1997: 522). However, Cortorari morality stresses the difference in the degree
of expression and control of sexual mores in women and men (Gay y Blasco
1997, 1999).
The incentives of sexual desires are normatively attributed to men. Women
who underwent several abortions would blame their husbands for not having
had controlled their sexual desires, which led to unwanted pregnancies. Yet
this kind of talk, rooted in tactical usage at the discourse level of an ideol-
ogy that conceives of masculinity as a blend of virility and sexual desires and
asserts to the male body the authority over sexual intercourse, disguises female
sexual desires which although acknowledged, should be kept under control.
Not that women are deprived of sexual incentives, but they should normatively,
as Gay y Blasco (1997, 1999) observed of Gitanos, constrain their desires, thus
performing a female-gendered expected behavior.
Boasting about one’s sexual activity in contexts of homosociality (Bird 1996)
proves one’s motivation for action, a prerequisite in establishing a man’s repu-
tation. In such contexts, women’s sexual incentives are played down, and so are
they in public spaces whereby women should demonstrate their ‘shame’ (lajav).
Yet in clusters of young women in their twenties, I could often participate in
talks about female sexual desires and sexual behavior. Ana, who was in her
early twenties and had already undergone about fifteen abortions, once told
me that if she wanted, she could prevent a new pregnancy notwithstanding
her quite intense pleasurable sexual activity. ‘How would you do that? Using a
condom?!’ I asked jokingly, well aware of Cortorari’s reluctance to using any
contraceptive methods. ‘Well, no. What I have to do is to finish myself (have an
orgasm) after my husband had finished himself (ejaculated). I have to be wise
(godiaver)8 and strong (zurali),9 to keep him going, to be able to finish him.’
If women can contain their sexual desires, and therefore overcome their
instincts through brain mechanisms, they can also exacerbate their sexual-
ity through the same rationale. We should however keep in mind that sexual
desires and pleasures are widely acknowledged as intrinsic to human body
irrespective of sex. After Neagra’s first failed sexual intercourse with Tamba,
aunt Tina explained to me how Neagra needed men and sexual activity once
she had began her sexual life. Because it had already got into her head (ando
šero), sexual activity was imperative for Neagra from then on, or else she would
lose her mental health. In Cortorari’s Cartesian understanding of people’s

8. Note that the adjective godiaver is derived from the noun godi (‘brain’), and therefore godiaver
translates literally as ‘having brains’.
9. Note that the adjective zurali is derived from the noun zor (‘strength’), a quality that we have
seen earlier, should be specific to men.
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motivations for action, there is a back-and-forward movement between brain

and body, with the latter seen as container of sexual desires.
Subordination of sexual desires to brain and consciousness can be achieved
only through gratification of otherwise natural sexual impulses normal and
intrinsic to the human body. After a long period spent on my own in the field,
Cortorari became inquisitive about my sexual life. Time and again men and
women would ask me how I managed to avoid going insane whilst lacking sex-
ual activity and thus fulfillment of my ‘natural’ sexual desires, save that I had
started my sexual life long ago. In the beginning I considered the Cortorari
preoccupation with my sexual life, their inquisitiveness about a potential med-
ical treatment they imagined I underwent in order to survive without sexual
activity, to be a tease intended to test my moral stance. I took it as a provoca-
tion through which they could assert my degree of fidelity to one man and
therefore morally judge me either as an easy or as a decent woman. Yet I soon
understood that in the Cortorari view, gendered moral behavior is contingent
upon the very physicality of the body, which is thought to have sexed genitalia,
sexual impulses and a head endowed with brain, and to be flushed with blood.
The demeanor of such a body is thought to be grounded in the work and coord-
ination of all these body components. Claudia, for example, who comes into
prominence for being an infertile and thus single woman, is considered to
stink because her vagina discharges stenches, a process perceived as natural
and grounded in her lack of sexual activity, otherwise imperative to the proper
functioning of the body.

8.  Gendered moral behavior of the two sexes

I maintained that an early age, boys and girls are designated with Gadge denom-
inations (baiatul, baiata) which allude to their representation as differently
sexed yet engendered persons. Ungenderdness of children is also conveyed
by the sameness of their code of dressing. Before the age of six or seven, girls’
outfit resembles boys’; in the sense that both sex children wear trousers. When
they reach schooling age, namely at around seven, girls start wearing skirts,
ethnically undistinguished from common Gadge dresses. At ten, when girls
are withdrawn from school, they start wearing the specific Cortorari skirts
which publicize their marriageable status together with their ethnic inclu-
sion. Similarly to other so-called traditional Roma groups in Romania, the
Cortorari outfit for the female lower body is made up of an apron (surta) and
a skirt (rokia), both vividly colorful, plaited on a string, hanging down to the
ankles. The apron is tied in the front and the skirt in the back, around the waist
(Hasdeu 2007, 2008a; Olivera 2007). What differentiates Cortorari skirts from
the Kelderash’s studied by Hasdeu and from the Gabori’s studied by Olivera, is
 on body and gender 135

the fabric. Cortorari skirts are woven in colorful check-patterned wool.

Girls wear a plain skirt underneath Cortorari woollen skirts. Before they
have their menarche, girls might take off the Cortorari rokia and wear only
skirts on hot summer days. However, menstruating girls would never take off
the Cortorari rokia in public spaces as they would lay themselves open to accu-
sations of shameful behavior. On the other hand, in the privacy of a household,
at evenings when all guests have left, menstruating girls and married women
might take off the Cortorari rokia in front of their male blood relatives.
On the occasion of her first menses, once she becomes šej bari, a girl adds
one more skirt, a poghea, made of white cotton and worn straight on the body.
The transformation of a šej bari in a deflowered woman (romni) is publicized
by the covering of the girl’s head with a scarf and the re-arrangement of her
hair. Starting with early childhood, girls wear their hair braided in two plaits
hanging down their backs. Once they had their first child, women tie their
plaits at the back of the head. This hair style communicates the transition from
marriageable girls, whose length and abundance of hair is considered a sign
of femininity, to married women and mothers who should control their sex-
ual potential.10 Therefore, the anatomical developments of female bodies, on
which conceptions of gender are projected, are made visible through the dress-
ing code.
Cortorari women’s code of dressing should be understood in relation with
common Mediterranean discourse on pollution and shame. Like Gypsies
world-wide, Cortorari emphasize the distinction between the upper and lower
body, and consider the female lower body the most unclean and having defil-
ing potentialities. Cortorari respect a series of taboos – separate wash basins,
clean cooking utensils, etc. – which have been described at large in the Romany
anthropological literature (Gropper 1975; Miller 1975; Sutherland 1975; Okely
1983; Stewart 1997; Gay y Blasco 1999; Engebrigtsen 2007; Hasdeu 2007), which
I will not repeat here. The upholding of the distinction between the lower and
upper parts of the body, together with the modesty of women and their con-
cealment of sexuality, contribute to the policing of borders between Gypsies
and Gadge and, therefore, to the construction of ethnic gendered persons (see
Okely 1983; Gay y Blasco 1997; Stewart 1997; Hasdeu 2008b).
As I mentioned earlier, these beliefs about women’s capacity for polluting are
rather impermanent and transcendent than fixed and non-trangressable. My
own experiences in the field lead me to such inferences. When my landlord’s
wife Maria caught me rinsing my laundry, garments for the lower part of the
body included, in the clean bucket used for giving water to the horses, she cried
10. Stewart (1997) argues that Gypsy women’s head hair carries symbols of sexuality and fertility
and its display or, on the contrary, concealment under the headscarf alludes to normative social
behaviour in relation with age and marital status.
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out that I had defiled (spurcat) the recipient and therefore their animals. I tried
to defend myself, saying I had only placed washed and therefore clean clothes
in the bucket. Maria convincingly explained to me that Cortorari conceptions
of cleanliness were not defined in relation with filthiness, but with symbolic
pollution. I immediately volunteered to buy a new bucket. Maria rejected the
idea, suggesting that we keep the secret of the defiled bucket to ourselves, and
not reveal it to her husband. ‘Leave it like this; he (my landlord, m.n.) won’t
know you did it.’ This incident made me think that pollution beliefs and their
transgression are context dependent. They become efficient, in this case only in
female–male relationships.
On other occasions I  witnessed the negotiability of polluting beliefs. My
landlord deposited a box with corn for the animals in my kitchen. Whenever
women alone visited me, they sat on the box, remaining watchful towards my
landlord’s potential arrival. When the latter happened to be present, menstru-
ating women avoided sitting on the box, for fear of being blamed of pollut-
ing the animals’ food. Once I borrowed a washing machine from a Cortorari
neighbor family. The oldest woman in the family reminded me not to put my
lingerie in the machine. However her daughter-in-law, who helped me carry
the device to my place, secretly encouraged me not to follow the old woman’s
advice. ‘When she’s not at home, I wash all my underclothes in the machine,
Catalina’, the young woman tried to convince me.
In this latter example, the pollution belief becomes efficient not in cross-­
gender relations, but in same-gender relationships negotiated in relation with
kinship and age. Woman solidarity in peer groups is breached by power relations
that dictate social interactions between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.
For that matter, I argue here that gender relations are continuously negotiated
according to kinship distance and age. Normatively, men are attached more
symbolic value than women. The latter walk behind men in the streets, their
backs crooked under the burden of the sacks they carry. Segregation of the two
genders is highly visible at public events, when men usually occupy the center
stage, while women cluster themselves in more secluded spaces, such as along
the walls of a house. Men are shown more respect than women, and they usu-
ally eat seated at ritual events, whereas women stand and eat the leftovers.
Yet, echoing conceptions of gender in Greece (Loizos and Papataxiarchis
1991), the public model of gender is contested by the domestic one. In the con-
fines of a household, women are excluded from commensality unless other
men than those belonging to the extended family are present. Then, inclusion
or exclusion of women from commensality is predicated upon their kinship
status. Until they become mothers-in-law (sasuj), daughters-in-law (bori)
never sit and eat at the same table with their parents-in-law. Inside the conju-
gal family, woman and man are not discriminated in decision taking. Even if
 on body and gender 137

men appear more prominent in public spaces, that is, in the context of mar-
riage arrangements, in the confines of the household a woman’s words weigh
as much as her husband’s. Usually women have more knowledge about the
distribution of chances for spouses on the marriage market, and husbands
acknowledge their wives’ discernment. It is generally believed that men’s deci-
sions are driven by irrational impulses rooted in men’s everyday experiences
of homosociality. When a man comes home from a male drinking session and
announces his wife he had almost negotiated his son or daughter’s marriage
with one of his male peers, his wife will double think over the whole proposal
and there are high chances that her decision prevails.
I do not deny the existence of an ideal folk model of gender which asserts
men’s power over females in public spaces. I argue that this folk model offers
a maneuvering space for lived experience of gender roles in everyday practice,
depending on kinship and age. An example comes to mind. When negotiating
the marriage of their offspring, family A found the conditions made by family
B unattractive. Yet neither wife nor husband was eager to take on their shoul-
ders the rejection of the arrangement. In their discourse, the two spouses were
playing with the normative prescription of gender roles. The man addressed
his wife: ‘Now you have a say.’ His wife replied ironically: ‘Of course I should
have a say, because I’m the one with a hat on my head.’ In a nutshell, my argu-
ment is that normative gender hierarchy displayed in public spaces is contested
and renegotiated depending on the context.

9. Conclusions
I have shown that in order to understand Cortorari conceptions of gender, we
need to reconsider the importance of the very physicality of the body. Stewart
argued that the Hungarian Rom,

through the symbolic separation of their bodies, denied or masked their involvement
in biological, bodily reproduction in favor of a higher form of social reproduction and
in so doing obviated (symbolically) the very things – their bodies – that kept them in
a state of dependency to the gazos.  (Stewart 1997: 205)

In stark contrast with the Hungarian Rom, and echoing the Spanish Gitanos
studied by Gay y Blasco (1997), Cortorari acknowledge corporeal matters in
the construction of social meanings. However, their concern with bodies in the
construction of gender should be understood, as I indicated in the introduction
to this article, in relation with broader representations of identity. Contrary to
other Gypsies, Cortorari developed a highly essentialist definition of kindred-
ness. In spite of that, they are continuously preoccupied with performing their
belonging. How Cortorari manage this interplay, between what is given and
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what is achieved and culturally constructed, is the topic of this article.

Stewart (1997) maintained that the ideal of Hungarian Rom non-bodily
existence was primarily rooted in the shame of the body. The shameful body
is sensed among Cortorari as well. As a matter of fact, Cortorari do not have a
word for ‘body’ and use, instead, either the Romanian trup (‘flesh’), which has
rather vulgar and sensual connotations, or occasionally the Romanian corp
(‘body’). Women should not only control their sexual desires, but also conceal
their bodies from men’s view. It is shameful for women to show their ankles,
hence women wear socks irrespective of the season. In the same vein, wom-
en’s forearms are always covered in long sleeves. Also, talk about the internal
organs of one’s body is considered shameful for women, so that whenever they
discuss their illnesses with men, women apologize (iertisar man) for uttering
words denoting internal organs such as lungs and kidneys.
Yet Cortorari are well aware of the importance of the body in physical repro-
duction, and we could therefore not obliterate bodies from our analyses or
relegate them exclusively to the domain of symbolism. It is this negotiation
between what is given – the very physicality of the body – and what is socially
constructed and performed – gender – that is the constant preoccupation of
Cortorari.

Acknowledgements
This article is based on materials collected during fieldwork for my PhD in Social
Anthropology at Uiversity College London. Without the support of my funding bod-
ies – a Wadsworth International Fellowship from Wenner Gren Foundation, a UCL
Research Bursary and a Ratiu Foundation Fellowship – my work would have not been
possible. I am grateful to Romelia Calin, Janet Carsten, Sophie Day, Rebecca Empson,
Iulia Hasdeu, László Fosztó, Jerome Lewis, Yaron Matras, Martin Olivera, Raluca
Pernes, Michael Stewart, Elisabeth Tauber, Radu Umbres, Miruna Voiculescu, my col-
leagues in the UCL 2010/11 ANTHR thesis-writing seminar for valuable comments
and criticism. Paloma Gay y Blasco and Adrian Schiop encouraged me to explore gen-
der issues, which I had thought beyond my interests. To the Cortorari I feel indebted
for life. They let me in on the most intimate spaces of their existence.

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