Today Westerners often perceive Iran as a socially backwards society, one in which women are “forced” to wear the veil, prevented from enjoying many basic freedoms (for example, studying certain subjects in university, having the right to work, or move outside of the country without their husband’s freedom). This aligns with the traditional Western view of Islam as a backwards and static religion which has refused to embrace change through the 1300 years of its existence and is diametrically opposed to equal rights for men and women.

The Najimbadi book, however, turns these perceptions on their head. An argument can be made that 19th century Iran was more sexually liberated and gender-fluid than any Western country at the time. Indeed, the same sexual freedom that Western countries celebrate today (and shame Iran for not having) was present in Islamic Iran over a century before it entered European and American discourse. Whereas there were clearly delineated differences between women and men in European countries, with any type of homosexual relations, or situations that could be interpreted as involving homosexual relations, being strictly taboo, Iran saw a peaceful coexistence of definitively homosocial spaces and a tacit acceptance of homosexual relations. The idea of men experiencing periods of time both as an object of sexual desire and a pursuer of sexual “objects” was not only revolutionary for the time in Europe, it was abhorrent. Even in the mid-1900’s, when the sissy became a popular and accepted role in Hollywood film, thus to some extent normalizing men as “sexual objects,” this figure was taken by audiences as a joke. (In Iran, in contrast, the pursuit of young more “feminine” males by older males was tacitly accepted as natural).

Modern Iranian perceptions of gender then stem not from some archaic Islamic tradition, but instead from the impetus for a heteronormative society and strict gender definitions that was put upon them by the Europeans themselves! This is an excellent example of what Mirsepassi would call the “violence of modernity;” the desire of Europeans to enforce their norms as the only accepted modernity for the rest of the world. In the 1800’s, gender fluidity was seen as abhorrent to Europe; thus Iran was perceived as backwards for embracing it. Today, gender fluidity is the norm in many parts of Europe; thus Iran is perceived as backwards for its strict delineation of men and women.

The Western attempt to impose a strict dichotomy on gender is a perfect example of a phenomenon James C. Scott describes in his work, Seeing Like a State. Scott explains that through looking to classify and render the world intelligible, the state attempts exercise control and domination. Similarly, by internalizing Western conceptions of a gender binary, Iranians implicitly submit to Western cultural control while also exercising domination over their own population. As women are now classified in direct opposition to men, so too are they rights and standing in Iran. Women are rendered second class citizens to be controlled and dominated, a phenomenon that came about in its present form with the advent of the attempts to modernize Iran.

Rather provocatively, Najmabadi argues that the feminist project has actively worked to erase the history of this gender-fluid past. Najmabadi argues that this project has worked towards the “disavowal, denial, and eradication of male homoeroticism” (235). In that way, feminists in Iran have indirectly worked to create the tools of their own oppression. Najmabai’s account of this history serves as a reminder to not reify social constructs, particularly the place of women in Iranian society.

How does Najmabadi’s account of gender fluidity in premodern Islamic Iran help us to understand the ongoing debate and attention to the status of women in postrevolutionary Iran?

Historically, “modern” nations have placed a great deal of importance on the status of women in the measurement of “modernness.” Especially in Iran, the state of how modern it was becoming could at least partially be seen by the status of women in Iran.

In premodern Iran, women faced the issue of being seen as “unredeemable,” as Najmabadi put it. Women, in men’s eyes, were generally seen as being on the same level of attractiveness as young boys with the beginnings of a mustache. They were also seen as intellectually and physically inferior to men, and thus women were merely a footnote for much of Iran’s history. Having neither incomparable beauty to young men nor intellectual or physical strength in the eyes of men, women generally felt a feeling of resentment and opposition towards the amrad, which, paradoxically, caused much of the large-scale homophobia which became widespread during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Along with this later-problem-causing notion of the relative attractive equality of women and young men, there existed in premodern Iran the lack of a sharp Western distinction between women and men as we see today in Iran. It is very possible that the widespread removal of the veil during the 1960s and 1970s in Iran was caused by women feeling a lack of dignity on account of this lack of distinction. To simplify, what I mean is that since women felt the need to passively “compete” with the relatively fluid amrad for bearded men’s attention in the premodern era in Iran, perhaps the removal of the veil was a rejection of this “competition” and a statement of attractiveness despite men’s opinions otherwise. The rejection of the veil may well have been a bold but subtle reclamation of beauty for Iranian women.

I made a similar connection to Will when I read Najmabadi, thinking of the creation of the gender binary of having similarities to the ideals presented in Scott’s work. Creating the binary made the world (specifically people’s bodies) more easily legible, as the possibilities of what/ who they could be, at least “proper” possibilities, were much more limited and less ambiguous. When Scott talks about the abstraction and simplification of maps, he presents it as something that both labels what is already there (responds to the present conditions) and influences what it becomes, as the way the area is regarded changes after its simplification of the map, and this influences the people living there and the way others interact with it. Similarly, the changing understanding of gender and homoerotic attraction affected both the way people perceived gender in Iran and the way gender was acted out. The issue of women’s veiling. There is so much ambiguity surrounding the topic, as the physical covering of the veil also renders its wearer more visible. While the veil is sometimes viewed as a mark of un-modernized views on women’s roles and positions in society, it could also sometimes be viewed as making the female body ‘acceptable’ to appear in a wider social, public contexts.

Najmabadi’s account of gender in premodern Islamic Iran helps to show that beliefs binary sexuality/ gender labels were not deeply ingrained in sensibilities that are either essentially Islamic or Iranian, and that the current status of women could not be a natural outworking or such beliefs. Rather they are extremely historically and situationally contingent, as these beliefs emerged after contact with the ‘modern,’ more ‘advanced’ Europeans.

Najmabadi’s account of gender fluidity in Qajar Iran provides an interesting contextual background to contemporary discourses around Itranian women, a background which is rarely talked about or accounted for. While reading Najmabadi I was reminded of Scott’s account of Le Corbusier and his obsession with straight lines. Two quotes particularly stuck out to me: “Reason…is an unbroken straight line” (Scott, 107) and “I insist on right-angled intersections” (Scott, 108). In many ways, the hetero-normalization of gender and sexuality which Najmabadi discusses reflects a similar desire for straight lines and right angles. According to Najmabadi, the erasure of the amrad from the sexual landscape reduced its complexity to one line; “the screening of the ghilman by the hur now made both positions feminized” (Najmabadi, 41).

The straightening of the streets of Iranian sexual mores may have made them legible to western eyes, but they also obscured nuances of Iranian gender politics. Many westerners did not understand the dynamic of homosocialization, which had characterized Iranian culture. To western eyes, homosocialization was seen as a desire to avoid temptation, thus the need for the veil. However, this does not encompass the whole story, because the amrads did not cover their heads and men would therefore be tempted regardless. It is only in light of the reduction in gender fluidity that homosocial spaces can be seen as regressive and anti-modern. The western narrative on women and their position in Iran sees them as objects of desire and temptation. However, knowing the history of Iranian gender fluidity, this simplified account must be rethought. The female figure has not had a monopoly on eroticism and therefore there were other forces at play in the homosocial spaces of Iran.

Women’s roles in premodern Iran are very different from how the west might perceive them. While we in the west tend to view gender in all cultures through the same lense as our own, gender in the binary is often very uniquely western. Thus, women’s roles and struggles in societies around the world differ drastically from those of women in premodern western countries. For example, Najmabadi’s book highlights an issue that women of Iran faced that would not have occurred in many western societies. In her book, the struggles of women to pry the attentions of their husbands away from their young male lovers is a key issue. For the women of this society, femininity was the not the ultimate goal to achieve maximum attractiveness. Rather, these women would often draw mustaches on their faces so as to appear more like the young men they competed with. Thus, they were not viewed only as objects as sexual desire to lusted after by men, but as only one the options presented to a very specific population of men.

These problems are so unlike those of the women of the west, that to analyze the struggles of modern women through a western lense would be to completely disregard this complex history. The choice or lack thereof to veil is one that many western societies would label as a global feminist issue, demonizing the veil as an inherently misogynistic tool of the patriarchy, yet to many Iranian women, even those who may not necessarily wish to veil, this is not the case. Rather, the rigid binary systems that led to these conditions are an introduction from the west. They are a form of ongoing imperialism rather than one of patriarchal dominance. They oppress all Iranians, not just women. This strict definition of gender and the roles belonging to each sex is a concept that was introduced by Europeans, and in a way, forced onto the Iranian public, so that their histories of gender fluidity might be erased in favour of a more western view of the age old practice of the necessity of women to act only as objects of desire for the men in their lives.

“When a man pinches a woman’s bottom or grabs her breast on the street, modernity’s heterosocial promise has become a nightmare.  Woman’s voluntary reveiling in the 1970s in many urban centers of Islamic countries acquires a somewhat different meaning in this trajectory.  But that is a story for another time.”  Pg. 155

“From the late nineteenth century, a great deal of cultural criticism has been expended on the farangi’ma’ab.  In fact, through [the] mid-twentieth century, the prime figure of modernity’s excess was not female; the so-called Westoxicated woman did not become the main demon of gharbzadegi (Westoxication) until the 1960s and 1970s.”  Pg. 138

“The issue of women’s veil and unveil, compulsory or consensual, in Islamicate societies and communities has taken center stage in discussions of ‘the status of women’ in these societies on an international scale.  The veil, in its hypervisibility, has come to serve as a sign for more than gender; it has come to be read for ‘the state of modernity.’  This hypervisibility has compounded the erasure of that other excess figure of Iranian modernity by continuing the prior work of making woman stand as a privileged mark of modernity.”  Pg. 242

How does Najmabadi’s account of gender fluidity in premodern Islamic Iran help us to understand the ongoing debate and attention to the status of women in postrevolutionary Iran?

While watching “The Cow” I began seriously pondering to what extent we can assign any intangible qualities to modernity. If the cow is indeed a metaphor for Iran’s oil, and the storyline intended to mirror the crisis Iran experienced under Shah Pahlavi in the 1970’s, then the films seems to carry a message of continuity rather than one of disjointed eras or irreconcilable contrasts. Modernity is, after all, not a scientific construct; rather it is whatever society construes it to be at any given flashpoint. As historians and sociologists were first grappling with the concept of modernity, they would have doubtless viewed oil as a definitively modern resource; the “black gold” made valuable by the legacy of the Industrial Revolution and used to power most of the world’s most “advanced” technologies. The cow, meanwhile, would have been seen as a rather archaic economic resource, intrinsically linked to the sustenance farming that Rostow saw as defining the “traditional society” which was lowest on his five-staged pyramid of development. However, it can be said that the cow was viewed and treated by its owner in the exact same fashion as Pahlavi and his cronies viewed and treated their resource of oil . Both became a singular obsession; both led their owners into inhabiting a distorted reality that led to their ultimate downfall.
Thus to me “The Cow” illustrates an argument by which the concept of modernity works best and most cohesively when applied solely to the material realm. It is easy to say the cow is a “pre-modern” resource and oil is a “modern” resource; that said, it is much more difficult to find differences in the human flaws that governed the management of both the cow and oil. The allegory of the cow points to characteristics such as greed, pride, and tunnel vision that have transcended eras and cultures to define the human condition.

The plot focuses on a childless peasant who lives with his wife and their cow. For the desperately impoverished hamlet in which they live, the cow is a primary source of sustenance. Accordingly, the man dotes on the cow, adoring his as cow as if it were his child, taking the cow to graze in the open fields and carefully washing it. His connection to this cow is so strong that when the animal dies under mysterious circumstances while the man leaves to go to the capital, the villagers conspire to lie to him about the fate of his cow, fearing that the truth would break him. Despite these efforts to obscure the truth, the man does not believe the others, eventually turning insane and believing himself to be a cow before coming to an untimely end.

Given the ambiguities surrounding many of the plot points, like what exactly happened to the cow, much of the film itself is left to the interpretation of the viewer. One interpretation of the movie that is very much in keeping with the themes of our class is that the cow can be seen as symbolizing the oil of Iran. The cow is so central to the functioning of the village that its demise leads to a major disruption in the village. Indeed many of the villagers are dependent on this singular cow. Similarly, around this time oil was itself central to the functioning of Iran, to the extent that a threat to its supply constituted a threat to national stability.

Another possible interpretation of the film that would speak to the themes of the course are to consider the village and centrality of the cow to its way of life as representing the inertia of a traditional, culturally authentic lifestyle. As this lifestyle is rudely and abruptly disrupted by the death of the cow, rather than rapidly adapt to changing realities, i.e. quickly adapt Western attitudes and technologies, the erstwhile cow owner chooses to live in a state of denial. This eventuates in the man’s death, while can be read as the filmmaker’s caution to Iran against a refusal to adapt to changing realities.

This anxiety about change and the struggle to reconcile change to traditional culture and ways of life are unique to the Iranian experience of the period. Rather than attempting to whitewash the difficult transition Iran underwent at the time, the film allegorically presents a complete image of the challenges of culturally authentic modernization.