Revolutionary Bodies: Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran

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Gender and sexuality in modern Iran is frequently examined through the prism of nationalist symbols and religious discourse from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book, Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi takes a different approach, by interrogating how normative ideas of womens bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed as immodest and taboo. Through a diverse blend of sources a popular cultural women's journal, a red-light district, cases studies of temporary marriages, iconic public statues, and an HIV-AIDS advocacy organization in Tehran - this work argues that conceptions of gender and sexuality have been mediated in public discourse and experienced and modified by women themselves over the past thirty years of the Islamic Republic. Expanding upon existing philosophical theory, technological research and scholarship on gender and sexuality in Iran, this book focuses much needed attention on under-studied, marginalized communities, such as widows living with HIV. This work interrogates how bodily technologies are constructed discursively and socially in Iran and the values and perspectives which are incorporated in them.

Reviews

This is a well-written book on a very important topic, which readers will find interesting and perhaps surprising. * CHOICE *
Batmanghelichi provides a fascinating analysis of how the regulation of sexuality has evolved in Iran. The book takes us on an illuminating journey from reforming the visual arts, to regulating prostitution in red-light parks before the 1979 revolution and relying on temporary marriage after the revolution, to refashioning modest statues post-revolution, and finally to contradictory government approaches to dealing with HIV/AIDs. This is a must read if you want to understand sexuality before and after the Islamic revolution. * Melanie Heath, Associate Professor of Sociology, McMaster University, Canada *
In this perceptive, well documented and illustrated study, Batmanghelichi depicts the scope, determination as well as failures of Irans policy of moral cleansing targeting womens sexuality. Combining historical analysis and ethnographic research, this is a welcome addition to the literature on the resilience of womens sexuality to the power of moral engineering grounded in religion. * Marnia Lazreg, Professor of Sociology, Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA *
Drawing on an innovating combination of archival, historical material; social policies including sexual health policies; art, womens magazines, and the rearrangement of public spaces in Iran over the last 100 years under two very different states, the author skillfully counters current understandings of the Islamic regimes treatment of women, their bodies, their dress and as a rupture from the Pahlavi era treatment of women. This book convincing argues that the policies of both regimes, and their perspectives on women, a part of a a continuum that views women and their public representation as central to national ideology as imagined by the state, regardless of each regimes particular political perspective. Readers are taken on an intriguing tour of a century of social and oral history and exploration of policy directives. This tour highlights the failures of these successive regimes to understand the diversity of Iranian women, to successfully manipulate womens bodies as a collective vehicle for state ideology, or to entrench their desired ideological hegemony. An unparalleled account of the role and the centrality of female citizens in the political imaginations of both the current Iranian regime and the Pahlavi monarchy it unseated, this is a work of original and interestingly sourced scholarship, and of thoughtful analysis. * Homa Hoodfar, Professor of Anthropology, Emerita, Concordia University, Canada *

Author Bio

K. S. Batmanghelichi is Associate Professor for the Study of Modern Iran in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, Norway.