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.
Women in Iran | Iran, Islam, and the Last Great Revolution Fall 2018
I find your comment that feminists have “indirectly worked to create the tools of their own oppression” to be particularly poignant. An assumption upon which many forms of feminism is predicated is that there is a dichotomy between women and men; a dichotomy that has led to a history of inequality for women. This assumption, however, fails to take into account that there can be understandings of gender that stretch beyond traditional European conceptions of what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine.” Najimbadi would hold that in fighting for women’s rights, feminists are tacitly supporting the belief that gender has to be divided along male-female lines (a belief which has been the tool of oppression), rather than existing in the more fluid sphere than it did in 1850’s Iran. Perhaps, Najimbadi would suggest, feminists are tackling problematic paradigms within a system, rather than the very nature of that system.