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8 Homophobia as a Tool of Statecraft Iran and Its Queers katarzyna korycki and abouzar nasirzadeh Observers tend to see homophobia, as it relates to the politics of the Middle East, as a legitimate response, indeed the only one available to region’s governments faced with the concerted “incitement to discourse” of Western human-rights groups (Massad 2002 and 2007); or as a result of the dissemination of homophobic norms from antigay networks in the West (Kaoma, this volume); or as a function of religion, Islam in particular.1 As probable as the first two explanatory factors may be, they overestimate the power of human-rights and homophobic networks, and underestimate the reach and agency of Middle Eastern states. We, therefore, want to “bring the state back in” (Skocpol 1979). To do this, we treat antigay rhetoric as an analytical category and examine the content, the productive force, and the work it does for the deploying power. As such, we see religious anti-homosexual prejudice as a convenient frame to be used by states when it suits their purposes , not as a causally independent factor. Tracing the story of the last two hundred years in Iran, we demonstrate that, far from being the pawn of Western machinations, the Iranian state has varied its stance toward homosexuality in pursuit of its objectives—namely modernization, consolidation, and most recently, deliberalization. In doing so, it has refashioned family and gender relations, positioned itself vis-à-vis the imperial appetites of the West, and centralized and expanded its power. To achieve these objectives, it first borrowed an anti-homosexual stance from the West, only to later claim homosexuality itself was a Western import. To trace how this remarkable twist happened, we anchor our story around three moments in which anti-homosexual rhetoric and practice have been deployed. First is the modernization moment lasting from the early nine- homophobia as a tool of statecraft · 175 teenth century to the onset of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Second is the Islamic nation-state consolidation moment following the revolution. Third is the conservative backlash following the attempted liberalization of 1997 and persisting until today. Throughout this chapter we do not use the term gay until Iranian homosexuals use it themselves at the turn of this century. In doing so we are guided by sensitivity to the historical meanings attached to the term gay: we wish to avoid sneaking in meanings and understandings that did not hold when our story takes place (see Blasius; Zeidan, both this volume). This is not to say that we uncritically agree with the Foucauldian act/identity distinction. In Foucault’s account, when self-identified gays appear in modern Europe, they are produced by medical and criminal systems of classification and control (1990, 43). We want to offer a more historically attentive account—one that recognizes the different and more fluid categories of division and identification operating in premodern Iran, and why and how they were transformed by deliberate elite manipulation. We do not use the term homophobia, either, until we reach more recent times. The concept is ideationally and semantically attached to the modern term gay. In the bulk of the paper we therefore use more descriptive terms, like anti-same-sex, or anti-male-love, when referring to concepts, policies, or law that appear homophobic to modern readers. In exploring homosexual desire and practices in Iran, we deal with male desire only. Female homosexuality deserves its own exploration, beyond the scope of this work, especially given its complexity in Iranian history. Furthermore, although we are cognizant that both “Western” and “Iranian” or “Oriental” categories are mutually constitutive (Said 1979), and that the Iranian state instantiates itself in the context of the international structures and discourses, we bracket these categories in order to analytically map the space of autonomous state action. Finally, we are cognizant of the intersections between gender and sexuality, and signal them throughout the text. However, given our focus, we privilege state and sexuality in our analysis. Religion as Explanation The most pervasive view locates homophobic sentiment in Islam itself. We claim instead that all three Abrahamic religions display an ambivalent stance toward homosexuality. On one hand, their holy texts and laws contain strong formal prohibitions against same-sex desire or practice; on the other hand, enforcement of said prohibition has been historically uneven. Indeed, there are more similarities among the religions, in both their formal stance and [3.142.197.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 12:35 GMT...

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