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

Notes

237 Notes 1. Academic Writing and Writing about Lives: An Introduction 1. The postrevolutionary authorities and Islamic judges used such terminology to define and condemn those who opposed the new regime. 2. Women’s opposition to the compulsory dress code continued in a series of demonstrations in Tehran and other cities, and the first independent women’s movement, large and loud, arose. Women continued to hold public meetings, marches, and street discussions, and violent encounters lasted for several days. Many women were wounded, and many were arrested. These events were reported in the journals Ayandigan (Mar. 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 18 and 19, 1979) and Ittila’at (Mar. 8–12, 1979). The leftist opposition, particularly the larger organizations, did not officially support the women’s movement. The Organization of Iranian People’s Fada’i Guerrillas (OIPFG) and the Organization of People’s Mojahedin of Iran (OPMI) had boycotted the rallies. They had decided not only to keep quiet on the issue of veiling but also on some occasions to condemn the women’s demonstrations. For an analysis of these events, see Kamran Talattof, The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2000), chap. 4, 136–38. Oppositional organizations likely avoided getting involved because they believed that feminism was associated with bourgeois ideology and that independent women’s movements would jeopardize the sense of unity necessary for the struggle against imperialism. In the end, despite those few memorable weeks and their bravery, women were deprived of their freedom of dress. 3. Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991), x. 4. Susanna Scarparo believes that the study of diaries, autobiographies, and correspondence and the reevaluation of the status of historical documents challenge the idea that only the lives and the deeds of the great deserve attention. This challenge is possible particularly because in many cases the documents relate to previously unknown women and, as such, stimulate a historiography based on what has been forgotten. Susanna Scarparo, Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction (Leicester: Troubador, 2005), 89. 5. Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1993), 58–82. 6. See Virginia Woolf and Rachel Bowlby, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), xxi; and Scarparo, Elusive Subjects, xi. 238  Notes to Pages 3–8 7. Scarparo, Elusive Subjects, xii. 8. I should define the term intellectual as it will be used in this work. By an intellectual, I mean a person who reads about and follows the current political, social, cultural issues and who advocates (and often contributes to) a social discourse critical of the hegemonic powers, often in competition with other discourses. Such advocacy might result in unwanted consequences such as persecution in third-world countries. A famous prototype of an intellectual emulated by Iranians is Jean-Paul Sartre. Another, again French, is Régis Debray, a journalist and public figure, and his entourage who sat in the street side cafés in Paris, thinking and talking about world affairs—political, cultural, and revolutionary . He became most famous for writing a handbook on guerrilla warfare entitled Revolution in the Revolution? (1967) that for the first time theorized the Cuban revolution. When he was captured and imprisoned in Bolivia, many world politicians and personalities, including Jean-Paul Sartre, petitioned for and helped secure his release. In Iran, political activists, student activists, most poets, writers, journalists, and workers who pursue political activities fall into the category of intellectual. 9. Following Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in which she wrote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” many Western scholars have investigated the ways people (women or men) are engendered through a variety of discourses and practices. Such an investigative approach is even more pertinent and more urgent in the case of countries such as Iran because there the engendering process involves ideologies, the state, the workplace, the public and private spaces, the economy , and the arts, so that gendered subjectivities are wholly institutionalized. The Western feminist critiques of Enlightenment phallogocentrism, of modernity’s sexual difference, of the notion of the bourgeois formulation of gender equality are all irrelevant in the face of dire gender problems in Iran where people still can only dream of the bourgeois self and where all powerful ideologies task women with transgressing gender boundaries for the sake of securing man’s masculinity. 10. I use the words tradition, traditional, and traditionalist to...