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Reviewed by:
  • Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran by Afsaneh Najmabadi
  • Amira Jarmakani
Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. By Afsaneh Najmabadi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 450. $99.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

The permissibility of sex reassignment surgery in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is a fruitful starting point for an investigation of how sex reassignment surgery itself and all of the debates about identity and sexuality that cluster around it are already embedded in an intricate network of interconnected and inseparable legal, religious, social, and medical discourses. Professing Selves confronts the seeming paradox that the 1979 Iranian revolution “immediately made what we would name and recognize as transgendered lives impossibly hazardous,” while at the same time the revolution “led to [transsexuality’s] official sanction” (6). In order to unpack the paradox, Afsaneh Najmabadi traces the “coming together of biomedical and psychosexological discourses with Islamic jurisprudential (fiqhi) rulings after 1979” and explains how this process ultimately served to shape the categories used to describe same-sex desire and identifications and distinguish them from the trans category (20). Perhaps more compellingly, though, the book demonstrates the creative navigation of these discourses, particularly among subjects for whom trans is a politically useful and flexible category of identification.

Professing Selves offers a critically important intervention into the conversation about the implications of official IRI policies toward transsexuality, most importantly by explaining its discursive creation and therefore solidification as an identifying category. Najmabadi skillfully charts the emergence and shaping of the trans category in Iran, noting how definitions shifted [End Page 376] from an early affiliation with intersex, to a conflation with homosexuality and therefore to psychosexual deviancy (39), and finally into a category of its own. She argues that the current understanding of transsexuality is based on the assumptions of the heterosexual matrix, or at least on the “public expression of gender normativity” (162). In tracing how the IRI has arrived at such a conceptualization of transsexuality, Professing Selves necessarily expands beyond the terms outlined in the subtitle—transsexuality and same-sex desire—to discuss the contingencies and fluidities of deploying such terms. If current understandings of transsexuality in Iran reify the M/F sex/gender binary and the heterosexual matrix (assuming as they do that same-sex desire can be “corrected” by sex reassignment surgery), they nevertheless remarkably affirm the subject’s ability to gain self-identity and to act upon individual desires by dedicating a significant amount of material resources to enabling bodily transformation.

Building on her earlier work in Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, Najmabadi continues the project of complicating scholarly conversations about Islamicate sexualities.1 In Professing Selves she is in conversation with scholars who seek to historicize the categories of sex and gender and to extend Foucauldian analysis beyond European examples,2 and she draws inspiration from those who are interested in exploring regulatory and disciplinary notions of identity and their impact on the concepts of sexuality and desire.3 Professing Selves traces how individuals feel an obligation to self-define or to “know oneself,” which could be literally translated from the Persian as “selfology.” While Najmabadi demonstrates how medical and juridical discourses compel her interlocutors to self-define as either trans or “same-sex playing”—an awkward but literal translation of the Persian word for homosexuality—the most interesting moments in the book are those in which her interlocutors reject the rigidity of such distinctions even as they participate in them. For example, Yasaman, one of the participants in Najmabadi’s ethnographic study, notes that “one has to be flexible for important desires in one’s life” (281). Yasaman’s comment at once acknowledges the ways that subjects are bound up in narratives of authenticity—about gender/sex, identity, self-identification, and nationalism—even as they necessarily breach the boundaries of those narratives.

Despite the helpful narratives of her interlocutors, Najmabadi’s helpful charting of the discursive construction of the trans category sometimes makes it seem as though the distinction between homosexuality and [End Page 377] transsexuality in contemporary Iran is more firmly entrenched than it actually is. While she...

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