Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran: The Life and Legacy of a Popular Female Artist

Ideology, Sexuality, and Sexual Agency: An Afterword

205 Ideology, Sexuality, and Sexual Agency An Afterword Have they ever stolen your love letters during an interrogation? They know who they are but don’t know that I am a superior woman. Shahrzad The study of Shahrzad’s life and work indicates that Iranian culture has suffered from highly complex dichotomization between nudity and poetry, sexuality and intellectuality, sex and art, all to locate women’s so-called wrong or right place. As I have shown in previous chapters and will reiterate in the pages in this chapter, a true feminist criticism in Iran cannot circumvent the reality of these dichotomies; instead, it should take them all, as a whole, into the study of the problematics of sexuality. That is, for a feminist methodology to work well, attention should shift to all elements of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production. To deny the reality of these dichotomies or to leave them unaddressed is tantamount to obscuring the highly unequal power relations in Iran. Indeed, the exclusion of sexuality from aesthetics, literature, and other art forms has led to a more general dichotomization between the body and mind. In this context, every time any representation of sexuality did find its way into the media and public arena, it created problems rather than prompting a serious dialogue around gender and the human body. Shahrzad’s story also proves the pressing relevance of the study of sexuality in popular culture and the arts, which also have their own set of binary oppositions. Iranian intellectuals’ ideological criticisms of the performing arts as Western and corrupt in the decades prior to the revolution led them to become disillusioned with both the West and Enlightenment principles. Their 206  Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran disillusionment with these, and eventually with modernity, left the issues in the hands of the producers of popular culture. These promoters, following their commercial exigencies, represented what they perceived of the West, modernity, and sexuality in a most troubling manner. Shahrzad’s life story further explicates some of the problematics of the theories of ideology. At every turn in her life, she seems to have faced some sort of ideological dichotomization, some sort of social predicament. More generally, the study of the career and fate of women performers further confirms that ideology —whether that of the state, the opposition, or religious or secular societal sectors—has played a decisive role in determining the course of women’s lives in Iran. In this final chapter, the prevalence of ideology (and not only of fundamentalism ) in Iranian life is discussed to show how it influences the course of intellectual development, women’s personal achievements, the understanding of sexuality, and national progress. Today in Iran: Shahrzad and Kayhan Two decades after the revolution and during the reform movement, mainly because of women’s resistance, the authorities were required to pay more attention to women’s issues, to relax their ideological grip on gender. They did so to the extent such causes became a significant aspect of the reformists’ election campaigns in late 1990s.1 The ruling elite were forced in the late 1990s to lessen their pressure on women to stay home. In 2000, among other developments, Googoosh was allowed to perform in glamorous North American concert halls, and Marzieh joined an oppositional group abroad to sing in praise of its leaders, but it was too late for Shahrzad to make a comeback. After her release from prison and the hospital and particularly during the reform period, Shahrzad traveled throughout Iran and to Europe. In the early 2000s, owing to the kindness of a few people, Shahrzad became somewhat healthier and found a small place in which to live for a number of years. Nevertheless, she continued to be on or off the street and in or out of the country with incredible regularity. The journal Kayhan’s recent joyous report on her predicament of being homeless and her nightmare of “having no access to a shower in the morning or a place to store her few belongings” clearly shows how the fundamentalists Ideology, Sexuality, and Sexual Agency  207 continue to reconstruct and proliferate such bothersome dichotomies. Cultural outsiders and “crazy” people are labeled as villains in order to justify their own (i.e., fundamentalists’) suppressive rules. Under the title “The Alarming Fate of the Famous Actress of the Trite Cinema : A Special Report,” Kayhan writes: Some sources and...