Milla Khodai

Milla holds a Bachelor and Master Degree from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany and joined UNSW as a PhD candidate to investigate the Afghan customary practice of Báchá Push, whereby families in need of a son raise a daughter as a boy. This gender transposition usually comes to an end when honorary boys reach puberty, and henceforth lead life as women, although in rare cases they maintain their masculine role and transition into ‘honorary men’.

To gain an in-depth understanding of the practice Milla collected ethnographic material in Afghanistan. Over the course of her fieldwork she conducted in-depth interviews with females raised as a báchá push and with carers raising a báchá push, so as to collect life stories enriched with observational notes and visual data. Being fluent in Farsi/Dari and having a large network of support among the Afghan diaspora and within Afghanistan shaped the quality of her ethnographic material and allowed her to gain insights as someone deeply embedded in the Afghan society. Drawing on her life background, she interpreted her ethnographic archive by a culturally sensitive approach.

Milla's work explores the many ways in how the practice of Báchá Push can be lived and how such an upbringing resonates over the life-cycle. She challenges perspectives on the practice that understand it as a form of resistance aiming at the empowerment of women, rather showing that it constructs and reinforces systemic gender discrimination beyond individual lives. Raising an honorary boy is not a secretive act as commonly portrayed and all parties involved in bringing it to life take the ‘liberty of not knowing’. By playing its part in performances of social knowledge, the public becomes a central figure in this paradox-riven staging of gendered inequality.