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Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 363 pages.
Reviewer: Parastou Saberi
Independent Scholar, Toronto
Afsaneh Najmabadi's book is a historiography of the work of gender in the making of Iranian modernist and nationalist discourses. Employing a Foucauldian approach to the sexualities of "other places and other times," along with a rich array of visual and textual material from 19th-century Iran, the book challenges Iranian modernity's heteronormalization of all gen- der and sexual categories to the male-female binary. It examines the consequences of these re-articulations on notions of beauty, love, sexuality, marriage, the veil, education, national emblem, nation, homeland and citizenship. The volume ends with a critique of Iranian feminism for its screening away the sexuality of modernity.
Najmabadi's main argument is that Iranian modernity's gender and sexual anxieties were expressions of male anxiety. They were concerned much more with masculinity than femininity. The initiation of modern thought in Iran had been interrelated with the displacement of the "sex troubles" of premodern homosocial-homoerotic Iranian-Islamic cultures. In premodern Iran, gender differences were not read through a template of sexuality, evident in the presence of the amrad (a beautiful, adolescent, beardless, male beloved) and the amradnuma (an adult man who made himself look like an amrad, displaying a wish to remain the object of desire of adult men), besides the feminine woman and the masculine man (with a full beard as his iconic feature). The visibility of male-male homosocial-homosexual practices in the heterosocial-heterosexual eye of European modernity resulted in perceiving premodern Iranian culture as abnormal and backward. Since the mid-19th century, Iranian modernity embraced this normative assumption, closeted the amrad into the premodern and blamed homosexual desire on the social practice of women's seclusion and gender segregation. Accordingly, heteronormalization of eros and sex became a condition of "achieving modernity." A project, thus, that called for the heterosocialization of Iranian society aimed for the denial, abjection and feminization of the amrad(numa). For Najmabadi, this historical screening of the male beloved from modern Iranian memory, not only became one of Iranian feminism's burdens of birth, it also crafted modern manhood in part by reconfiguring the amrad(numa)'s sexual difference as cultural difference.
The book's provocative...