Social Role
The term sworn virgin has come to refer to a traditional social role in the highlands of Albania and Montenegro. Among the highlander groups, a similar, cross-cultural clan-based orientation and highly marked sexual roles have created a situation where there has been a shortage of adult males. One suitable alternative is the sworn virgin (South Slavic tobelija or tybelí, ostajnica "she who stays" or muskobanja "man-like woman"; Albanian virgjineshtë), a female-born person who takes on the social (but not sexual) role of a man. They dress, work and live as men, but remain chaste and unmarried.
The origins of the "sworn virgins" are disparate: some choose this role (as early as childhood and as late as just before their marriage ceremony) while others are raised or forced into it by circumstance. These societies have suffered a severe shortage of men due to interclan violence and Ottoman oppression; a clan without a patriarch might choose a female as an ostajnica, or female replacement, who would subsequently take on a male social role.
Read more about this topic: Sworn Virgin
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or role:
“Play is a major avenue for learning to manage anxiety. It gives the child a safe space where she can experiment at will, suspending the rules and constraints of physical and social reality. In play, the child becomes master rather than subject.... Play allows the child to transcend passivity and to become the active doer of what happens around her.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“His role was as the gentle teacher, the logical, compassionate, caring and articulate teacher, who inspired you so that you wanted to please him more than life itself.”
—Carol Lawrence, U.S. singer, star of West Side Story. Conversations About Bernstein, p. 172, ed. William Westbrook Burton, Oxford University Press (1995)