Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage by Ida Meftahi (review)

Ida Meftahi's Gender and Dance in Modern Iran is the first book-length study of dance in Iran, analyzing nationalist, leftist, and Islamic constructions of staged dancing bodies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Blending discourse and movement analysis with rigorous historiography, Meftahi demonstrates how dance and particularly female dancers have consistently been sites for contending discourses within the Iranian nation-state in the Pahlavi era (1925–79) and the post-1979 Islamic Republic. Meftahi employs the Foucauldian framework of biopolitics to analyze how dancers on national stages embody moral, aesthetic, and gendered corporeal norms. The production of the national dancer, Meftahi argues, has necessarily involved othering performers and genres deemed antithetical to the dominant ideologies of particular historical junctures.

Chapter 1 introduces the key movement traditions of Iran and surveys the performance forms, bodies, and spaces addressed in the book: pre-twentieth-century minstrel performers (mutribs) and their gender-ambiguous boy dancers (bachcheh raqqas or zan push); dance in elite nationalist-modernist performing-arts communities during the early twentieth-century; Tehran's professionalized dance scene beginning in the 1940s; and the urban sites of leisure from which women cabaret dancers emerged. The chapter also summarizes the ironic effects of dance prohibitions after 1979: "within the three decades after the revolution, the dance scene has grown enormously" to include salsa, break dancing, and contemporary dance (10–11). However, because of strict scrutiny and instances of penalty, much dance remains underground. A significant exception is the "rhythmic movements" form (harakat-i mawzun), which employs "religious, 'revolutionary' (inqilabi), or mystical themes" and is typically granted official permission to be performed in public theatrical spaces (10).

Starting with nationalist plays between the 1920s and the 1940s and ending with state-promoted theatrical dances between the 1940s and the 1970s, chapter 2 analyzes how the state sought to "advance and educate the nation" through the female national dancer (9). Specifically, the intelligentsia and the Pahlavi monarchy aimed to cultivate a European-style heteronormative society, shedding traditions deemed backward and hyper-sexual, including those of pre-twentieth-century boy dancers and twentieth-century women cabaret dancers. Through these figures the word dancer came to signify degeneracy and hypersexuality. Between the 1920s and 1979 Iranian elites perceived Western ballet and national dance as examples of modern "civilized" gendered corporeality. Iranian national dance—an invented tradition that showcases the "narratives of the nation"—integrated ballet with pre-Islamic symbolism, miniature paintings, and classical Persian poetry (18).

Chapter 3 examines how early twentieth-century leftists constructed minstrel performers as illiterate, degenerate (mubtazal), and counter to the leftist ideals of "committed," "modern," and progressive art. Meftahi argues that these early leftist and nationalist discourses shaped subsequent views on cabaret dancers and influenced Iranians' "cultural categorization" and "aesthetic taste" (49). Meftahi also discusses the Lalehzar Street district, the "golden age" theater center in the 1940s, and the perception that the district's "decline" began when political art makers departed and café/cabaret culture increased.

Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the figure of the female cabaret dancer, first in Tehran's urban cafés and cabarets and then in the prerevolutionary commercial cinema genre (film farsi). These cafés and cabarets became marked as "immoral" and the cabaret dancer a "contentious commodity" associated with prostitution (70–71). Meftahi closely analyzes how prerevolutionary films construct the cabaret dancer as "out of control" and her audiences as "degenerate" (82, 121). Iranian national committed arts thus were able to define themselves as elite, modern, and virtuous "high art" in contrast (42).

Chapter 6 compares the Pahlavi-era Islamic press with contemporaneous leftist and nationalist dance discourses. Islamic "anti-obscenity discourse" began in the 1930s in response to an increasingly heterosocial public sphere and women's unveiling. While prerevolutionary Islamic discourse shared some similarities with leftist and nationalist art discourses, the Islamic press considered the woman's dancing body to be "evil inciting." The cabaret dancer occupied a pivotal place in revolutionary rhetoric...