Thinking Inside and Outside the Box: Women and Gender in Iran

Abstract

Thinking Inside and Outside the Box:Women and Gender in Iran Houri Berberian (bio) Afsanaeh Najmabadi . Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 377 pp. ISBN 0-520-24263-7 (pb). Lois Beck and Guity Nashat, eds. Women in Iran: From the Rise of Islam to 1800. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 272 pp. ISBN 0-252-07121-2 (pb). Lois Beck and Guity Nashat, eds. Women in Iran: From 1800 to the Islamic Republic. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 304 pp. ISBN 0-252-07189-1 (pb). In the past few years, many important contributions have been made to the study of Middle Eastern women's past and present. Three welcome additions to the field are Afsanaeh Najmabadi's Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, and Lois Beck and Guity Nashat's two edited collections, Women in Iran: From the Rise of Islam to 1800 and Women in Iran: From 1800 to the Islamic Republic. Of course, these are very different texts with varying approaches and methodologies and certainly different audiences. Beck and Nashat's collections are more appropriately geared toward undergraduate students supplementing more general works such as Judith Tucker and Guity Nashat's Women in the Middle East: Restoring Women to History (1999), and more recently Nikki Keddie's Women in the Middle East. Najmabadi's theoretically rich yet accessible monograph is certainly geared toward a more sophisticated audience with some grounding in women's history and gender issues. Afsaneh Najmabadi's aim is similar to her previous work. She attempts, as she has in the past, to push the envelope and reinstate that which has been lost, consciously or not. Much like Daughters of Quchan, which sought to rectify the historical amnesia surrounding one of the most important factors in mobilizing Iranians during the Constitutional Revolution—the sale of Iranian women and girls by peasants in order to pay their taxes—in her most recent monograph, Najmabadi strives to reinsert the amrad (the young male adolescent who was an object of desire for adult males up to [End Page 154] the early 1920s) into Iran's premodern history. She argues that our own twentieth- and twenty-first-century experience that perceives gender as a binary of men and women has overlooked alternative modes of sexuality and sociality (3). By breathing life back into the amrad, she is most interested in restoring the significant place of homoeroticism and homosociality in premodern Iran. She accomplishes this by tracing the shift from homoerotic and homosocial to the heteroerotic and heterosocial normative. In a collection of essays, some of which have appeared in different forms elsewhere, Najmabadi asks and attempts to answer the following question: "How did this sex change, so to speak, happen" (2)? The "sex change" or shift from homosociality to heterosociality and heteronormalization, she argues, is part and parcel of Iranian modernity. She explains how heteronormalization of love and feminizing of the "beloved" both opened the way for nationalist defense / protection of Iran as female beloved, and transformed marriage from one with a primarily procreative mission to marriage as romantic. This change in the purpose of marriage led wives to demand the removal of same-sex relationships from their husbands' lives (7). Najmabadi's mapping out of the "sex change" begins by setting up the premodern milieu where depictions of men and women were so similar in royal portraits that only the different headgear sometimes, but not always, makes gender clear (11). She believes the shift to be a direct consequence of the European displeasure or disgust toward Iranian sexual practices. She does not argue that there could have been no other causes, including internal transformations, but she does see the main cause or culprit as European. In the nineteenth century, Iranians realized that Europeans viewed adult male-amrad love and sexual relations as undesirable and unacceptable and so began to mask their homoerotic desire and practices. Through the use of Iranian travel narratives, she demonstrates Iranian anxiety over European evaluation of Iranian sexual practices. By the end of the nineteenth century, beauty, which up to that point had been fairly...