Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran by Afsaneh Najmabadi (review)

Introduction

In this fascinating forum on Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Professing Selves: Trans-sexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran, the five reviewers and Najmabadi’s response highlight the challenges faced by negotiating histories of sexualities and gender in an ever-changing global context. Taking on conventional presumptions, this scholarly conversation calls into question long-standing binaries—East and West, male and female, hetero- and homosexual, among others. It also draws from canonical texts (Michel Foucault, among others) and offers a series of possibilities for moving our inquiry beyond such presumptions and canons.

The major fields engaged by Najmabadi and her respondents are Islamicate studies, transgender studies, and sexuality studies. To understand the agency of historical actors and the social, political, religious, and juridicomedical apparatuses framing their lives, the most recent iterations of these fields emphasize the significance of local systems of meaning and relations of power at particular temporal moments. Those working in Islamicate studies, for example, seek to engage and refute Western scholars’ stereotypes and presumptions of the “trajectory of tolerance” (or intolerance) of states and peoples of the Islamicate world in relation to non-normative sexualities and genders. The historians Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi describe this tendency in their preface to Islamicate Sexualities, noting that this “scholarly tradition” has “too often situated Islam beyond temporality and geography, thus producing an effect of atemporal uniformity.”¹ In turn, scholars of transgender studies and sexuality studies have looked to engage the global as more of an anticolonial enterprise. Their critiques show how the presumed direction of the flow of categories and terminologies across borders privileges an Anglocentric and Anglophone definitional framework that, as the historians Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura put it, “marginalizes a more heterogeneous class of phenomena.”²

The participants in this book forum each highlight one or more aspects of these ventures in their responses to and review of Najmabadi’s work. And each takes on—from their particular subject position—the distinct arguments and revisions suggested by Najmabadi. Most participants agree that among Najmabadi’s major revisions is her interruption of Western suppositions and claims that state-sanctioned sex reassignment surgery (SRS) in Iran developed only as a means to “fix” homosexuality and create these new members of the body politic as “semi-normative citizens.” Najmabadi diagrams the complex interplay among Muslim clerics, titular civic authorities, juridicomedical professionals, and trans Iranians by tracing the path by which transsexuality moved from a disease, to a psychological disorder, to a glandular congenital disorder for which SRS was deemed and accepted by Iranian state agents as an effective and reasonable treatment. This path was not straightforward or simple and the respondents in this forum all acknowledge the importance of Najmabadi’s rich narrative of trans Iranians’ resistance to, accommodation of, and participation in creating this path as the “heart” of the history she traces. In Najmabadi’s study, the activisms of trans Iranians created a “liveable” space for themselves and, somewhat paradoxically, for gay men and lesbians to “exist” as well, according to Elizabeth Reis, Susan Stryker, and Sahar Sadjadi.

Najmabadi’s reading of the Iranian state’s shifting perspective on non-normative sexualities and genders through transsexuality, not homosexuality, is also noted by several respondents who applaud her “unconventional” focus on trans as the site of, and standpoint through, which to view these shifts as making a more expansive range of “queer diversities” visible. This type of “reading through” is only possible because of the broad range of substantive interviews with trans activists and Muslim clerics as well as other state officials that Najmabadi conducted for this ethnographic history. As the anthropologist Gaytari Reddy points out, it is these interviews and ethnographic methodologies that enable Najmabadi to complicate and dramatically revise previous one-dimensional understandings of the making of the Islamic and secular Iranian state.

As her title Professing Selves suggests...