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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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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 … Continue reading