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

2. Modernity, Sexuality, and Popular Culture Iran's Social Agony

21 2 Modernity, Sexuality, and Popular Culture Iran’s Social Agony Have you ever tried to prove your innocence to a wall? Shahrzad In this chapter, I expand my argument that since the beginning of the debate on modernity in Iran, the question of sexuality has mainly been absent from the debates. Instead, only traditionalists and religious fundamentalists have offered their archaic and well-formulated notion of sexuality, often wrapped in anticolonial packaging. Because of this awkward bifurcation, and in the absence of certain modern values and practices, culture and cultural debates have become unstable, constantly changing in a disorderly fashion. This partially explains why despite all its struggles and desires for modernity, Iran, through a series of paradigmatic responses, has become what I term modernoid; a society that resembles a modern one in some areas but lacks other essential modern structures.1 To illustrate this notion of modernoid in Iran, a theoretical and comparative look at the concept of modernity is valuable. American modernism presents a good example of what has been achieved through adaptation and creative modernity and not through paradigmatic response to it. The American Approach In explaining the expatriation of the modern authors Henry James and William James, Mark Bauerlein believes that to realize one’s Americanness, one must search out “forms of civilization not our own” and “fuse” and “synthesize” them into a vision of future “achievement.” He continues, “Rather than rebelling 22  Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran against the (European) past by casting it as some obsolete feudal mistake or preserving one’s innocence or ignorance through some illusory commitment to nature, Americans embrace those from other cultures, incorporating them and using them as an opportunity for growth.” He exemplifies this process in his book using the Hegelian language of “‘fusion and synthesis,’ a language that does away with simple oppositions of nature and culture, past and future, East and West.”2 In contrast, Iran fails to do this and consequently does not fall into any of the definitions of modernity as differentiated by Mike Featherstone. These include “‘modernity’ proper as an epochal or historical category; ‘modernité’ as a state of mind and being or a human experience; ‘modernisation’ as material development ; industrialisation, or development in technology and economic relationships ; and ‘modernism’ as a realm of cultural and aesthetic values and practices.”3 Three decades after the 1979 Revolution, thinkers and academics, in Iran and abroad, are still debating voluminously Iran’s modernization. They ponder the tensions among religion, tradition, and modernity—the same set of concepts that were the preoccupation of their predecessors in the late nineteenth century. A new generation of political activists, such as Akbar Ganji, Abbas Abdi, and Said Hajjarian, and religious reformers, such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, Mostafa Malekian, and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, began to reinterpret the tenets of Islam to highlight religious tolerance. Soroush, who broke away from the mainstream Islamic revolutionaries soon after the 1979 revolution, particularly shook the theological foundation of the state discourse when he argued for a liberal interpretation of the faith in numerous published works and lectures. Worthy of Special Note There are two key questions in their writing: Are modernity and Islam compatible ? How can Iran and Islam achieve democracy and a civil society, and is this even possible? A number of scholars have been concerned with modernity in trying to introduce, define, and redefine the concepts related to and the connection between the issues of modernity, tradition, and in some cases the 1979 Revolution .4 Others look at these issues from a historical point of view. For example, Afsaneh Najmabadi notes that Qajar backwardness was “an internally generated Modernity, Sexuality, and Popular Culture  23 problem” rooted in the “unwillingness of the wealthy classes to diversify from commerce and land to industrial ventures.”5 She further notes that intellectuals’ answers to the question “why is Iran backward?” changed constantly. Initially, intellectuals sought answers in the structures of government; then in the mid–twentieth century they shifted toward the “economic structure of international capitalism” as a factor; and by the end of the 1970s they shifted internally to see the erosion of traditional Iranian and Islamic values as the cause.6 These scholars provide critical studies of the pioneering modernist thinkers and present Eastern society as the “other,” the nonmodern .7 Some believe that, according to the existing definition of modernity, Iran can be understood as a modern state...