Afsaneh Najmabadi

"This book is groundbreaking, at once highly original, courageous, and moving. It is sure to have a tremendous impact in Iranian studies, modern Middle East history, and the history of gender and sexuality."—Beth Baron, author of Egypt as a Woman "This is an extraordinary book. It rereads the story of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality in ways that no other scholars have done."—Joan W. Scott, author of Gender and the Politics of History

Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity

Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards

Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran

Professing Selves

Farzaneh Milani

William L. Hanaway

Michael Hillman

The four essays in this volume discuss the autobiographical writings of Iranian women. The contributors to the collection include William Hanaway, Michael Hillmann, and Farzaneh Milani. Milani asks why modern Persian literature, with its rich self-reflective tradition, has not produced many autobiographies, and what particular problems confront Iranian women engaging in autobiographical writing. Najmabadi discusses one of the earliest modern autobiographical writings by a woman, Taj os-Saltaneh’s Memories, and Hillman projects Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry as an autobiographical voice. Hanaway investigates the possibilities of going beyond lack of Western-style autobiographical form and looking for what Persian literary forms and categories provide for the autobiographical voice.

Women's Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran

Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials—which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being—grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

In 1905 Iranian women had been sold to pay taxes or taken as booty in a raid by tribesmen from a village. The narration of this event took all Iran by storm and shortly after the opening of the new parliament in 1906 relatives of these women demanded that parliament punish those responsible. Najmabadi investigates why this incident was so powerful.

Gender and National Memory in Iranian History

The Story of the Daughters of Quchan

Afsaneh Najmabadi draws on her family history to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran.

Untold Stories of Love and Marriage in Modern Iran

Familial Undercurrents

Suad Joseph

A unique collaboration of over 900 scholars from around the world, the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures crosses history, geographic borders and disciplines to create a ground-breaking reference work reflecting the very latest research on gender studies and the Islamic world. No other reference work offers this scale of contributions or depth and breadth of coverage. Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures is set to become an essential reference work for students and researchers in the fields of gender studies, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, as well as scholars of religion, history, politics, anthropology, geography and related disciplines. This encyclopedia consists of six volumes (including an Index volume), published from 2003 to 2007. The Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures is also available online. For more information see Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures Online.

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures: Practices, interpretations and representations

Associate Professor of Iranian History and Culture Kathryn Babayan

Kathryn Babayan

Harvard University. Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Babayan explores different genealogies of sexuality and questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic assumptions affecting current histories of sexuality.

Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire

Islamicate Sexualities

In 1905, the year preceding the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, Iranian women and girls were sold by peasants to pay their taxes, and taken as booty in a raid by Turkoman tribesmen against a village settlement in Northeast Iran. This event became the focus of outrage and contributed to popular mobilizations against autocracy. This study investigates what made the incident so powerful, and explores what later "amnesia" of the event tells us about the political culture of modern Iran and about modernist historiography in general. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Afsaneh Najmabadi

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