Universalization of particulars: The civic body and gendered citizenship in Iran*

Abstract

The logic of nation‐state building in the context of modernity is inextricably bound to the founding of politics—both as conceptual and practical possibility—on the basis of a binary dissociation of the public from the private, of rights from needs, of reason from passion. Thus politics in its modern sense becomes tied to a secularized theological‐political notion of responsibility. Further, such binary concepts are implicated in those temporal and spatial metaphors which naturalize the spheres of family and civil society, and distinguish them from the sphere of politics. These distinct spheres are essential to the construction of modern rational subjectivities and liberal citizenship. This essay, which focuses on the case of Iran, introduces the notion of the ‘civic body’ in an attempt to bring clearly into view the connection between sexed corporeality, cultural nationalism and gendered citizenship. Through a theoretical examination of the ‘civic body’ as both a site of political citizenship and a field of racial and sexual codification and recodification, such historical and discursive constructions as modernity, Westernization. ‘Westoxication’, Orientalism, universalization, particularism, masculinity and femininity will be brought into the nexus of analysis. The purpose of this essay is both to engage with the literature in the field of Iranian and Middle Eastern studies and to intervene critically with respect to citizenship as an analytical category.