Unveiling Men: Modern Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Iran

By Wendy DeSouza

For years, Iranian academics, writers, and scholars have equated national development and progress with the reform of men’s sexual behavior. Modern intellectuals repudiated native sexuality in Iran, just as their European counterparts in France and Germany did, arguing that transforming male identity was essential to the recovery of the nation.

DeSouza offers an alternate narrative of modern Iranian masculinity as an attempt to redraw social hierarchies among men. Moving beyond rigid portrayals of Islamic patriarchy and female oppression, she analyzes debates about manhood and maleness in early twentieth-century Iran, particularly around questions of race and sexuality. DeSouza presents the larger implications of Pahlavi hegemonic masculinity in creating racialized male subjects and "productive" sexualities. In addition, she explores a cross-pollination with Europe, identifying how the "East" shaped visions of European male identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780815654490

Book preview

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Copyright © 2019 by Syracuse University Press

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First Edition 2019

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3592-5 (hardcover)     978-0-8156-3603-8 (paperback)     978-0-8156-5449-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number 2018051310

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dedicated to

Daisaku Ikeda

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

PART ONE. Iranian Transformations

1. Photography and the Erotics of Power: A Tale of Two Kings

2. Unveiling Men: Gendering Male Citizens through United Appearance

3. Sayyid Hasan Taqizadah and the Making of Bourgeois Morality

PART TWO. Transnational Masculinities and Sexualities

4. Who Is the Lover? Mysticism and Desire in the Writings of Louis Massignon (1883–1962)

5. Love without Lovers: The Monastic Trend in European Translations of Mystical Poetry

Epilogue: Queering Iranian Masculinities

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Photo taken of royal concubines by Nasir al-Din Shah

2. Women in masculine clothing

3. Man with hunting trophy (cheetah)

4. Factory workers in Abadan

5. Ad featuring the New Pahlavi Man in Ittila’at

6. The Kavah journal masthead

Acknowledgments

EVERY LINE OF THIS BOOK was dependent on the seen and unseen efforts of others. I would first like to thank Professor Omnia El Shakry, who provided essential feedback and critical insight in the early stages of this book. At UCLA, I would also like to acknowledge the late Professor Hossein Ziai, whose untimely death saddened his many loyal students. In all my years at UCLA, I took more courses with Professor Ziai than anyone else. I fondly remember during my first quarter at UCLA his stern insistence that I study the Samanids more seriously, and his patient guidance through difficult philosophical texts in Persian. He had the perfect balance of calm intimidation and warm compassion to motivate his students when we needed it most. The Americanist Professor Ellen Dubois was the inspiration behind my transnational approach to Iranian history. She taught me through her own example how to involve every student in a seminar, listen to them and value their contributions. She was a much needed feminist presence in my graduate life. Finally, with mixed emotions I acknowledge the intellectual influence and support of Professor Gabriel Piterberg, who agreed to leave UCLA following a university investigation into allegations of unwelcome sexual advances. While I stand with all victims of sexual harassment and assault, my work benefited from his teaching and guidance.

Several chapters were reviewed by my dear friend and colleague Professor Peter Park. Dr. Roland Lardinois and Dr. Amir Moezzi in Paris also made very helpful suggestions during my research fellowship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (ÉHESS) in 2006. The late Iraj Afshar, one of the most prolific editors of modern Iranian historical sources, pointed me to many useful primary sources on the interwar period during my time in Tehran. A number of booksellers, librarians at the University of Tehran, and staff at private research institutes, also offered me alternatives to the difficult labyrinth of obtaining permission to access public facilities as a foreign researcher.

My dedication to Iranian history was sparked by a chance meeting with Maryam Ghaemmaghami, whom I befriended during an English literature class at De Anza College in Cupertino in 1991. After the 1979 revolution, teachers were heavily monitored by government officials and were expected to indoctrinate students with Islamist principles. In this climate, the precocious young Maryam couldn’t suppress her natural curiosity to ask challenging questions, and her parents decided to move from Iran to San Jose. It was Maryam who first introduced me to Persian language and culture, which became the starting point for a quest of nearly three decades.

I would also like to thank all of my Persian language instructors who prepared me to do research, especially during times when I could not obtain a visa or it was not safe to visit Iran. The distinguished list of teachers includes Mrs. Behjat Dehqan at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, Professors John Perry, Heshmat Moayyad, and Lily Ayman at the University of Chicago, my language instructors at the Dehkhoda Language Institute in Tehran, the San Diego State University team of Persian language instructors, Professor Hossein Ziai and Firoozeh Papan-Matin at UCLA, and my Advanced Persian Language and Tajik instructors in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my Iranian friends who taught me to speak Persian—Ray, Max, Narges, Marcel, Shawn, and many others. I thank my mother and father-in-law, Gila and Ehsan Anooshahr, who have also helped me acquire a better command of spoken Persian by providing a language laboratory in my own living room. Finally, I am grateful to my Iranian host family, the Alavis, who welcomed me in their home in 1998 and gave me the most meaningful immersion and cultural experience.

During the end of this project I had the pleasure of teaching many capable students at the University of California, Davis, especially those who took my seminar on Gender and Sexuality in Modern Iran. Several of my queer-identified students have raised my awareness about the importance of learning from new generational perspectives. In addition, I would like to thank Professors Suad Joseph and Baki Tezcan for giving me opportunities to present my work and develop my teaching in the Middle East/South Asia program.

In the last phases of this book during my time at UCD, my right eye was damaged in a sports incident, making it harder to read for long periods of time, since I was born legally blind in my left eye. I would like to thank Syracuse University Press for allowing me to take breaks and extend my timetable, especially editor-in-chief Suzanne Guiod and all the members of her staff. In addition, in the final phases of the manuscript my anonymous review editors pushed me to engage more scholarly criticism and develop my argument much further. Without their feedback this project would not have developed to this point. Any shortcomings in this book are mine alone.

Throughout this book, I cite individuals whose work helped me to think beyond the field of Iranian studies and employ gender and sexuality as categories of analysis to address transnational questions. Their brilliant findings and theoretical approaches guided my journey, which started as a project on European translation of mystical Persian poetry, and later developed to include the problem of nationalism and gender oppression. I owe everything to their revolutionary research. In addition, I would like to extend my heartfelt appreciation to Ghassem Tirafkan, the brother of the late Sadegh Tirafkan, who granted me permission to use the cover image, as well as Andrea Fitzpatrick, who made this connection possible. The world lost a great artist in Sadegh Tirafkan, a person whose work subverts masculinity through empathy and compassion, and I am humbled to honor him in this way.

On a personal level, I would not have made it this far in life without the loving support of my family, my father, and especially my aunt Roberta Templeman. My mother, Rita DeSouza, was my first professor of gender and sexuality. I watched her live as an openly gay mother in the 1970s, at a time when there were extreme forms of violence and gay bashings against the LGBTIQ community in the Bay Area, through the AIDS crisis, when most of our friends did not survive the disease. She raised my sister and I as a single mother on a very limited budget, and somehow managed to help defray some of my graduate school expenses. I am deeply indebted to her for such loving dedication.

My Soka Gakkai Buddhist family instilled the belief in me that despite the hurdles of being a first-generation college student I could live out my full potential. In particular, SGI-USA General Director Danny Nagashima told me, Apply to Berkeley and Stanford!, which I would not have done but for his unwavering confidence.

Ali Anooshahr has reviewed many parts of this manuscript and provided essential translation and research support. He encouraged me throughout the research and writing phases, from LA to Tajikistan, Iran, France, and Northern California. He is a treasured father, partner, colleague, and friend.

This book is dedicated to Daisaku Ikeda, the greatest peace activist and humanitarian I have ever met. He taught me that cultivating a true love for humanity not only requires fighting for justice but enacting an ongoing battle against negativity within ourselves, a human revolution that is unceasing. I also dedicate this ten-year project to those individuals who experienced harassment in any form in the UCLA History Department, and I stand in solidarity with those who refused to accept such conditions and who brought the issues to light. I also stand with those who have not come forward yet or whose stories we do not know. And last, to my daughter, Taji. I promise to keep fighting for a society that is just.

Note on Transliteration

MY RESEARCH IN PERSIAN is mainly based on modern sources. I use a modified form of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) transliteration system. With some notable exceptions on proper Persian nouns I opted for the common spelling—for example, Tehran versus Tihran, or sheikh rather than shaykh, though elsewhere I have tried to remain as consistent and faithful as possible to IJMES.

Introduction

DESPITE THE ENORMOUS PRESSURES OF WAR and semicolonialism in Iran between the two world wars, queer lives and desires persisted. The Iranian-European encounter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century signifies a moment when male identity was in transition—what I refer to as the men’s question—and yet many have assumed that modern Iranian masculinity was molded mostly after a European standard.

Like many others before me I have grappled with legacies of colonialism and Orientalism, in which we were taught that world history was the product of European cultural diffusion, which brought bourgeois sexuality and toxic colonial masculinity to Iran. The myth of distinct nations with distinct histories was predicated on cultural essentialism and a binary East/West divide.

A number of prominent scholars have challenged Eurocentric epistemology through the study of gender and sexuality, by researching what Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi referred to as the interplay of looks between Iranians and Europeans. Forgoing the tendency to frame this encounter as a linear, cause-and-effect chain of events with Europe at the center and Iran at the periphery, more recently scholars have questioned the parochial and gender-blind presentation of Iranian nationalism. Moreover, by queering Iranian masculinity they have generated new revelations about the discursive effects of twentieth-century public writings. From the time I started this project until the final preparations of this manuscript, I have been greatly inspired by the number of people that have contributed to a newly emergent field of Islamicate masculinities and sexualities, without whom I would have had no compass.¹

While gender and sexuality approaches have enriched the field of Iranian studies to a significant degree, many have urged us to take these insights back to Europe—what Afsaneh Najmabadi described as the impact of ‘the East’ on ‘the West’ as an issue of denial of agency for Europe.² Recently, Hamid Dabashi catalogued the consequences of the European fascination with things Persian or Persians themselves in Persophilia.³ These scholars have urged us to read European history as a dynamic effect of world history, constituting a radical reconsideration of the premise that European history is viable or meaningful without the world.

There is no question that Europe, among a number of factors, inspired Iranian thinkers to rethink maleness and masculinity during the Riza Shah period. They were forced to contend with its contradictions, however, out of which they created their own Europe, in tandem with how many Europeans invented the idea of the East in the making of European identity.⁴ The exotic Other was critical to identity-thinking, not in terms of influence but, rather, inspiration.

The quest of nationalist intellectuals around the globe to regenerate their national cultures, according to Partha Chatterjee, was a deeply contradictory endeavor.⁵ In his study of John Plamenatz’s contention that [nationalism] is both imitative and hostile to the models it imitates, Chatterjee further noted:

[Nationalism] is imitative in that it accepts the value of the standards set by the alien culture. But it also involves a rejection: in fact, two rejections, both of them ambivalent: rejection of the alien intruder and dominator who is nevertheless to be imitated and surpassed by his own standards, and rejection of ancestral ways which are seen as obstacles of progress and yet also cherished as marks of identity. This contradictory process is therefore deeply disturbing as well.⁶

As Chatterjee shows through this double-bind, Iranian nationalism was deeply marred by the incompatibility of the colonial model and the contradictions of the Enlightenment, which restricted the ability of male citizens to choose how to adapt and live in the modern world. The Enlightenment model was exclusionary and hierarchical because it privileged European white male citizenship in the metropole, then Persians or Aryans at home. As a result, it displaced all ethnic others within the nation-state; moreover, it extolled the rights of women and then sought to control feminist discourses; and it naturalized fears of population decline and miscegenation by marginalizing certain sexual behaviors. As Hamid Dabashi maintained, the encounter between Europe and the colonial world produced a paradox of accommodation and resistance: It was the creative formation of a bourgeois public space that paradoxically both extended its European prototype in form and content and forcefully contradicted it, thus revealing its own paradoxical disposition.⁷ It is no small wonder, then, that for many Iranian writers, male identity was in crisis.

Writing this book provoked a larger set of questions about masculinity and nationalism in world history: Why was gender and sexual conformity a bedrock of national progress throughout continental Europe and Iran? Why were male citizens required to be cisgendered and declare their exclusive love for women? How do regimes of oppression affect people differently in terms of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality? In my research I discovered that the unique trajectory of modern Iranian manhood under Riza Shah was tethered to a local and transnational story; dependent on the legacy of Orientalism in Iran, and Iranian contributions to Oriental studies and Islamology in Europe; and on Iranian images of European normative sexuality explicated by Tavakoli-Targhi, and the European image of Iranian exotic sexuality. In sum, to focus on the nation-state is inadequate, no matter how difficult it is to reconcile these multiple narratives.

Not only are connected and transnational histories important to the study of Iranian masculinities; feminist historians have made a convincing case for why integrating the history of sexuality and gender overall challenges our assumptions about key social and political transformations.⁸ As I argue in this book, it is not possible to apprehend fully the Riza Shah period without studying the construction of Pahlavi manhood. There is significant evidence pointing to how the men’s question in Iran was informed by the rise of fascism and authoritarianism under Riza Shah. A revisionist approach to the patriarchal backlash of the modern era reconsiders anxieties about modern masculinity along a state-society axis, rather than between patriarchy and women, or a pro-feminist and secular government versus a reactionary Islamic populace. Using the theory of hegemonic masculinity to expose the social hierarchies among men, we can learn how the state was at war with men. The army, police, parliament, and growing bureaucracy promoted hegemonic masculinity: a socially enforced gender standard that emphasize[s] toughness, stoicism, acquisitiveness and self-reliance through violence.⁹ State policies created deeper divisions and social inequalities by forcing men to live up to a certain image of secular Aryan nationalism, rewarding some and punishing others. Adapting to some degree Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony—how the ruling class of a society establish and maintain domination—historians of men and masculinity have theorized how governments, institutions, and capitalist enterprises work not only to maintain the global dominance of men over women and the subordination of women but also a hierarchy among men.¹⁰ Hegemonic masculinity was also disseminated through what Adorno coined as the culture industry, which commodified the body by making urban, secular Persian nationalism appear natural or normal.¹¹

While the theory of hegemonic masculinity sheds light on the problem of toxic masculinities, it has led others to question how such conceptualizations tend to undermine women’s agency. Hélène Bowen Raddeker described hegemonic masculinity as something like the Wizard of Oz, a tenuous, vulnerable figure hiding out behind a screen of smoke and mirrors. Raddeker called for the rejection of what she referred to as victim feminism, where too much emphasis on women’s ‘oppression’ through the systemic constraints found in ‘patriarchy’ rendered invisible their resistance.¹² In addition, Raddeker’s work highlighted the destabilizing and vulnerable nature of patriarchy itself by drawing attention to queer sites of resistance.

The purpose of this book is to examine subordinated masculinities, not simply to explain the rise of hegemonic masculinity. Some of the stories featured highlight how we have underestimated the extent to which men were subjects of gender reform, as well as how norms and practices diverged. Queering these texts ultimately allows us to reframe masculinity as an unresolved yet urgent and multifaceted question of the early to mid-twentieth century, even as it raises many questions beyond the scope of this book—for example, the factors that led to the rise of homophobia and sexual policy in Iran after World War II.

Fixing our gaze on Iranian masculinity as a main subject of inquiry—not taking patriarchy and maleness for granted—is a vital feminist project.