This review is drawn up in response to Josh’s call for a bibliography on gender issues in Afghanistan. It concerns Qajar era Iran; however, there is much that Afghanistan shares with Iran. As a historian has once remarked attempting to understand the region without paying heed to Iran is equivalent to ignoring New York and California while looking up the US.
Najamabadi begins the exploration of gender in pre-modern Iran by examining early Qajar era artistic representations that are often populated by “beautiful men and women” who are “depicted with very similar facial and bodily features” (11). She suggests that the male and female subjects represent hurs and ghilmans from paradisaical paintings (15). The latter is associated with amrads; a category that populates both literary and visual arts of the era and represents the object of desire in early Persian male homoerotic culture. As she notes:
“Pre-modern Islamic literature considered gender irrelevant to love and beauty. Alternatively, male beauty and male homoeroticism were considered the superior sentiments” (17).
This culturally informed focus, as Najambadi points out in a later chapter, was to resolve the problem of women as objects of desire (since love for women would necessarily subjugate the lover–the superior male–to the beloved–the inferior female).
The male object of desire represented as the amrad is yet an additional gender category to the male, the female and the mukhanas (16). Even in Sufi practices, “the figure of young adolescent men as object of desire was linked with the practice of gazing” (17). This was not necessarily considered as sin since sin belonged to the realm of deeds (18). Hence, while the practice was censured and occasionally punished, it nonetheless thrived.
However, as Najamabadi notes, “by the end of the nineteenth century, portrayal of beauty became differentiated by gender” (26). This shift in aesthetic was towards realist representations of men and women (26). Eventually, the ghilman/amrad disappears entirely the art of the later Qajar period (27). In order to understand this shift, the author invites us to interpret the art of the era in a novel way:
“Reading the female-male couple not simply as an ‘amorous couple’ but as a scene of multiple desires is grounded in iconic points: the male figure in the male-female ‘amorous couple’ is always a very young man, without a beard or mustache, at most with a hint of newly emerging down, that icon of young man’s beauty: he may be a nawkhatt, but never an adult man…
The figures in these paintings have a strong outward gaze… [which may] be inviting the viewer to be an accomplice in the pleasures of the visual text, to become actively engaged in the production and circulation of desire inside and outside of the visual text” (30-31).
Why this profound cultural shift? As Najamabadi shows this aesthetic disruption corresponds with the Iranian encounters with Europe (32), such that:
“The anger at European readings of Iranian social and sexual mores began to reconfigure structures of desires by introducing a demarcation to distinguish homesociality from homesexuality” (38).
Thus, the ghilman in Iranian paintings came to be replaced by their heavenly female companions the hurs (thereby rendering both positions as feminized). Furthermore, “human beauty and with the beloved became irrevocably feminized” ( 39).
Najamabadi’s analysis of visual material while very novel is also very limiting. She says little about power, coercion, or class and she gives little room for other possible interpretations. The convergence of both religious and secular elite in their opposition to gender ambiguity and homosexuality may have contributed to affecting what Najamabadi claims to be a collective cultural amnesia of the associated categories and practices. However, it is worthwhile to note that the views of both these categories of elite also converged in censuring or promoting other cultural practices with seemingly little effect. For example, as Aghaie argues in “The Martyrs of Karbala,” the more extreme practices of the Shi’a during the commemoration of the Karbala events remain current to this day despite being censured relentlessly by the elite and the ullama (who were responding not only to critique from Westerners but also their Sunni coreligionists). A case therefore will have to be made that the pre-modern gender ambiguity wasn’t universal or that the amnesia may not be as total as Najamabadi suggests (perhaps the willful and insistent modernist emphasis on a transcendental and a-gendered emphasis on the interpretation of Sufi poetry is a marker that would support this later point).
The shift in gender symbolism is also traced in the evolution of the lion-and-sun state symbol. Initially conceived as the “condensed… double meanings if shah-king and holy man, Jamshid and Ali” (69), the sun was initially appears as [fe]male to us but would have been gender neutral to observers of the time (since ideals of beauty were gender neutral and not feminized). Yet the anxiety of European opprobrium as well as emergence of modernist state power induced a shift and the eventual adoption of an a-gendered symbol. As Najamabadi notes this process took place against the backdrop of: “the gendered construction of modernity [whereby] the homeland was a female body, the military masculine was the protector of the female homeland” (89).
The second part of Najamabadi’s book focuses on the emergence of modern Iranian nationalism and as Kian-Thiebaut succintly point out Najamabadi “argues that binarization of gender and the heteronormalization of love and sexuality should also be seen as the work of nationalism and patriotism” (166), i.e. “Iran as a female beloved, in turn, consolidated love as heteroeros” (ibid). The genesis of this transformation can be found in the concept of vatan:
“vatan meant national homeland, but its emotive force still depended on one’s affiliation with and affection for the land of one’s birth. The sentiment associated with the known, tangible soil of one’s birthplace was transferred to the larger more mediated Iran’zamin” (99).
In their attempt at reconfiguring the notion of vatan, the modernists appropriated the concept of love for vatan–”understood as an allegorical concept denoting the world beyond the material and the mundane” (101)–and insisted on “its concrete, earthly materiality” (ibid). Vatan thus came to displace the beloved in the Sufi discourse as a “physically defined geobody” (104). Formulation of vatan as the new beloved necessitated the gender transformation of the Sufi “male beloved” (108) to that of an “abject female” (ibid) that needed to be possessed, protected and cared for by her sons. This formulation of vatan conceived the nation as composed exclusively of “sons” (119), but it created the space for female participation as well. This formulation also made unrelated male and female interaction (as brothers and sisters) conceivable, thereby reifying heterosociality and sexuality.
Najamabadi notes that whereas the unveiling of women has been a constant point of contention between the modernists and anti-modernists, historically the prime figure of modernity’s excess is not female but the “farangi’ma’ab” (138) who occupied the discussion as a “figure of superficiality and excess” for the modernizers (139) and that of the mukhanas to the conservatives, and both factions saw “the physical marks of the amrad” in him (ibid). Both the factions blamed the prevalence of homosexuality and pederasty on gender segregation and female homosociality (147).
Modernity therefore became a condition that demanded the heteronormalization of eros and sex, and imposed the reconfiguration of public space and family life to achieve that end. These norms called for “disciplinary reconstruction of the … female body” (152) which was to proceed concomitant with the replacing of the physical veil with “an invisible metaphoric veil: the veil of chastity” (ibid). This veil was to be “acquired through modern education, as an internal quality of the self” (ibid). This transformation also involved the re conceptualization of marriage from a procreative contract to a sexual contract such that it would surmount the homoeroticism of classical love and also to overcome the problematic of loving an inferior (in the women). The realization eventually led to the emphasis on female education by male modernizers as well as the internalization of education and literacy as an alternative to traditionally prescribed roles for women.
These reconfigurations allowed for increasing female contestations for equal rights of citizenship as signified by the shifting of the discourse of parity to full equality. The prerogative of female education enabled women to “contest notions of citizenship through schools, the press and the courts” (221).
In light of these socio-cultural and political transformations, Najamabadi argues that the historiography of Iranian modernism should not be understood exclusively in the binary terms of male and female gender or strict homo and heterosexuality. She notes that “from its inception, Iranian Feminism has been deeply enmeshed in disavowal, denial, and eradication of male homo-eroticism” (235). To fully understand the process of modernization the historian must be aware that modernity imposes its own discipline and categories. She proposes a new feminist historiography whose program should engage in the question posed by her:
“What if instead of disavowing male homosexuality and same-sex affectivity, feminism would being to inquire into the kinds of affinity, “avowable knowable proximity” in place of the disavowed masquerading substitition, that could be crafted between feminism and sexual others who have been placed in times and places before and beyond the modern national?” (243).
Najamabadi’s book is heavily theorized and may not be everyone’s cup of tea (it is quite controversial in its claims) but nonetheless for those interested in understanding gender in the region this will be a worthwhile stop.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
That the Buddhas in Bamiyan were many things to many people is portrayed very convincingly in this film. Nothing but praise in that regard, but the various threads diverge so wildly across time and space that the window for discussing the events surrounding their destruction and the larger political maneuvering of the Taliban are ignored. The film rather easily accepts the premise of Taliban irritation at the attention being paid to the “idols” rather than the poor and hungry people of Afghanistan. This narrative was offered by the Taliban themselves and widely propagated through Pakistani and Arab sources (one of whom is interviewed in this film).
