Afsaneh Najmabadi

Un)Veiling Feminism

about (un)veiling as a contemporary practice in Islamicate1 societies— about which there is now a very lively and enormous literature. It is about how feminism itself may have worked as a veil, about the veiling work of feminism as a boundary marker for secularism of Iranian modernity. My hope in rethinking the history of feminism is to seek out possibilities for the present moment of Iranian politics. I mean to be provocative but not accusatory, seeking to unpack the implications of feminism’s imbrication in secularism of modernity. By unfolding the veiling work of Iranian feminism in its past history, I hope to envisage possibilities for “building working alliances” in contemporary Iranian gender politics.2 Let me emphasize at the outset my refusal to generalize the ideas of this essay to all Islamicate societies. One of the problems with current discussions of Islam and feminism is ahistorical generalizations. These generalizations screen away vast historical and contemporary differences among countries as diverse as Algeria, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, to name just a few. My argument assumes historical specificity; it assumes that to understand what is going on in Iran today, we need to look at the specific contingent configurations of the politics of modernity in that country. What may or may not be generalizable cannot be known from what is assumed to be Islamic, modern, feminist, or secular by any prior definition of these terms. For instance, the configurations of Islam, feminism, nationalism, and secularism that are now unfolding in Iran have very much to do with the fact that an Islamic republic has been in power for the past twenty-one years, one that came out of a mass popular revolution. As a very hybridized phenomenon, these developments go beyond previously dominant and accepted political paradigms. We have an unshaped and fluid muddle with women as key producers of it! Two concepts, feminism and civil society, move through this complex reconfiguration and acquire new meanings, while crafting a discursive space more marked by opacity than transparency, thereby challenging our previous certainty about what divides Islam from un-Islam, secular from religious. Consider this: The editors of Iran’s two most prominent feminist women’s periodicals, Zanan [Women] and Huquq-i zanan [Women’s rights], had previously been editors of Zan-i ruz [Today’s woman], a women’s weekly Afsaneh Najmabadi (Un)Veiling Feminism

Genus of Sex, or The Sexing of Jins

In recent decades, Iran has witnessed radical transformations concerning the conceptualization of and procedural standards for changing sex. Psychologists, medical and legal practitioners, law enforcement officials, and scholars of fiqh have debated the advisability (in debates among health and legal professionals) or the permissibility (among scholars of fiqh) of sex-change. This article asks what historical transformations of the concept of jins /genus have informed the debates and enabled the contemporary dominant concepts and practices that shape them. How has jins come to mean sex and how does this matter? The article first maps out the historical genealogy of these reconfigurations. What were some of the 19th- and pre-19th-century concepts that could be considered disparate precedents to this cluster around sex/ jins ? It then reviews some of the late-19th- and 20th-century reshaping of biomedical knowledge and marital practices that have contributed to the contemporary meanings of jins .

THE MORNING AFTER : TRAVAIL OF SEXUALITY AND LOVE IN MODERN IRAN

For the past seven years, Iran has been in the grip of a literary event. A novel, Bamdad-i khumar (The Morning After), written by a hitherto unknown woman, Fattanah Hajj Sayyidjavadi, (b. 1945), became an overnight best-seller and has so remained. From the start, the book has generated heated debates over its literary and socio-cultural merits. Most critics and readers have very strong opinions about the novel. One reader, another first-time writer, was so deeply angered by what she considered to be the novels exaggerated female-centeredness and its unfairness to men that she decided to rewrite the novel through the voice of its male anti-hero.

Interview with Gayatri Spivak

Afsaneh Najmabadi: Let me start by posing two issues that I have heard raised by some students from the Subcontinent. The first: Prior to the publication of The Satanic Verses, these intellectuals had related to Rushdies previous novels, Shame and Midnights Children, as something that belonged to their culture, that they could identify with, be proud of. They could relate to the kinds of issues and criticisms that were expressed in these novels. But with The Satanic Verses they felt betrayed. What in The Satanic Verses could have engendered this sensation of betrayal? My immediate reaction is that its the critique of religious sensibilities embedded in this book. So what I want to investigate is this: Why was it that when he was criticizing all kinds of other issues, such as male-female relations, political structures, even the partition and the anti-colonial struggle, all that did not feel like betrayal, but when he touched religion, it felt like betrayal?

Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran Digital Archive and Website: A Report

Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (WWQI) is a digital archive of nineteenth-century Iranian culture that focuses on the lives of women and issues of gender. The initial inspiration for the project arose more than a decade ago from a coming together of intellectual frustration and technological possibility. The 1970s through the 1990s witnessed an explosion of women’s history and the gendering of historical research and writing, but this development had a highly uneven global scope. The unevenness was not only geographic. While certain subfields of history proved more open to revisionary explorations, their broader integration into “doing history” remained marginal. InMiddle Eastern historiography, for instance, gendering histories of the nation has produced important works on Egypt, Syria, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, andmodern Turkey, but these works often remain at the margins of the field. Histories of Iran’s Qajar dynasty (1796–1925) continue to be produced in the dominant mode of political history. Social and cultural history in general and histories inclusive of women and gender analysis more particularly remain all but nonexistent. The exclusion of women from histories of the Qajar period was all the more troubling because many Qajar women lived culturally rich and active lives, including as writers and poets, calligraphers and painters, religious leaders, and, in the final decades, as social critics and activists. Yet gendered analysis in historiographies of the period remained sparse. The main reason historians of Qajar Iran offered for this situation was that sources for doing Qajar history differently did not exist. It is true that historians of Qajar Iran do not have institutional records and state archives comparable to those of historians of the neighboring Ottoman Empire or South

Living Patterns, Narrative Styles

I am the lost child of a century not yet born I was born, with a body named woman Why can I not love the body of another woman? Within minutes of our first conversation, Mahnaz, an attractive woman in her early thirties, burst into reciting her poetry. This was a long ode of desire, desire to be left alone, to love as she desired: I do not want that ordinary spring that others desire Let me be, let me be I want to hear love in a fresh blade of grass No leaf will last on a tree No flower will last at the bottom of a wall And no wall can tell you what is in the yard I do not desire modesty I do not want grace I shall not knock on any door, nor on any walls. .. I do not want that ordinary spring that others desire Let me be, let me be I want to cling onto love. . .