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4 - Colonized Bodies in Al-e Ahmad’s “Jashn-e Farkhondeh”

from Part II - Representation of Sigheh/Sex Work in the Literature of the Pahlavi Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2020

Claudia Yaghoobi
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Summary

Chapter 4 analyzes Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s “Jashn-e Farkhondeh” ("The Auspicious Celebration"), set in the 1930s, drawing on the 1936 police-enforced unveiling decree of Reza Shah. The narrator’s father, a cleric, has been invited to Reza Shah’s organized event for the Emancipation of Women where he will have to take his wife unveiled. To avoid this, he decides to contract a sigheh for two hours with a friend’s more modern daughter, so he can attend without violating the royal command, but able to disobey the state’s unveiling decree by not attending it with his formal wife. Al-e Ahmad shows how female sexuality is regulated and the female body is exploited under a religious façade to the benefit of the sociocultural, religious, and political institutions during the early years of the Pahlavi regime. Al-e Ahmad addresses the issue of modernization, how it intersects with anxieties over losing or sacrificing indigenous culture, and the role of women within this new nation-state, which is heading toward a Western model of modernization. In so doing, “Jashn-e Farkhondeh” depicts how modern Iranian womanhood came to be defined through the struggle between religion and politics, as well as the interaction between modernity and tradition, among other factors.

Type
Chapter
Information
Temporary Marriage in Iran
Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Film and Literature
, pp. 134 - 155
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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