Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City

In the Hausa-speaking region of northern Nigeria, Shari'a or 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 an Islamic African City is about the men who break those rules. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the ancient Islamic city-state of Kano, Allah Made Us analyzes the social experiences and expressive culture of ‘yan daudu (feminine men in Nigerian Hausaland) 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 male and 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 little 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.