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.