Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (review)

In her study of Iranian modernity, Afsaneh Najmabadi queers Islamic history in the best sense of the term. She demonstrates how a variety of nationalist projects worked to rewrite gender roles and desires for modern Iranian citizens. Providing persuasive evidence for the disciplining of male and female bodies and sexualities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Najmabadi reveals how much we have missed in our readings of the Iranian past. In her analysis of patriotic poetry, romantic novels, paintings, medallions, political cartoons, and travelogues, she brings together and puts into dialogue voices from a variety of discursive fields. Noteworthy about Najmabadi’s archive is the respect with which she treats the different voices as she listens to the valences and sounds of contestation that give texture to her rich narrative. Her creative use of visual and literary materials proves how rich scholarship can be when it incorporates the image within the very social and cultural spheres that produced the written word.

In the first part of her book, Najmabadi demonstrates the complexity of the history of love and its intertwinement with registers of desire and beauty. She examines numerous discursive spaces that gave expression to patriotic and romantic love for an object of desire, be it Iran or another human being. Najmabadi presents a sensitive analysis of the self-representation—most notably through the production of a national iconography—of the emerging nation state in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi eras. Tracing the gendering of the lion and the sun, twin symbols of Iranian nationalism, Najmabadi identifies the anxious and yet titillating play around male-male sexual desire as these symbols emerge into public view. To provide an accessible reading, she initiates the audience into the artistic practices and visual aesthetics of the late Qajar period, and elucidates how male and female forms of beauty were undifferentiated, possessing attributes which, until the final decades of the nineteenth century, were perceived and depicted as similar and what we may label today as androgynous. At this point in the work, readers are introduced to the central figure of sexual anxiety, the amrad or the beautiful male youth, an object of male desire both adored and insulted in daily public life as well as in mystical love poetry, painting, erotica, and satire. Najmabadi argues persuasively that the vanishing of the amrad figure from public representation was integral to the formation of gender-binaries and to the reformulation of modern male sexuality. In fact, the amrad “haunts” Najmabadi’s telling and the history of love in Iran.

From spaces of national representation, Najmabadi takes us into the more private realms of the family, looking at the reorientation of desire’s multiple effects. She explores the pervasiveness of such discourses in the household where the education of female and male citizens began and the formation of modern subjects was to be practiced before the performance in public. After highlighting the various material representations of the processes of gendering the beloved as female, Najmabadi relates these processes to discourses on romantic marriage, the education of housewives, and fraternal bonds of solidarity. Najmabadi gives voice to women in this second part of her book; women appear not only as objects of discipline but also as agents who pressured husbands to de-sexualize their homosociality. The two-part structure of the book echoes Najmabadi’s own linkage of women subjects’ social and political “coming out” with the “closeting” of the amrad. The hetero-normalization of love and the opening up of public spaces to women required the unveiling of modern Iranian women, but no less importantly the veiling of male homoeroticism. Najmabadi’s scholarship uses the gaze of audiences past and present as an analytical category, but her explanation does not limit this gaze to an easy colonial fixation with the West. Her analytical moves encourage fresh and new ways of...