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THE POLITICS OF RECOGNIZABILITY: GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF IRANIAN GAY MEN’S LIVES UNDER REPRESSIVE CONDITIONS OF SEXUALITY GOVERNANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2018

Wayne Martino  and
Jón Ingvar Kjaran
Wayne Martino
Affiliation:
Wayne Martino is a Professor in the Faculty of Education and an affiliate member of the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research, University of Western Ontario, Ontario, Canada; e-mail: wmartino@uwo.ca
Jón Ingvar Kjaran
Affiliation:
Jón Ingvar Kjaran is an Associate Professor in the School of Education and at the United Nations University for Gender Equality Studies and Training (UNU-GEST), University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland; e-mail: jik@hi.is
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Abstract

In this article we examine accounts of self-identifying Iranian gay men. We draw on a range of evidentiary sources—interpretive, historical, online, and empirical—to generate critical and nuanced insights into the politics of recognition and representation that inform narrative accounts of the lived experiences of self-identified gay Iranian men, and the constitution of same-sex desire for these men under specific conditions of Iranian modernity. In response to critiques of existing gay internationalist and liberationist accounts of the Iranian gay male subject as a persecuted victim of the Islamic Republic of Iran's barbarism, we address interpretive questions of sexuality governance in transnational contexts. Specifically, we attend to human rights frameworks in weighing social justice and political claims made by and on behalf of sexual and gender minorities in such Global South contexts. In this sense, our article represents a critical engagement with the relevant literature on sexuality governance and the politics of same-sex desire for Iranian gay men that is informed by empirical analysis.

Keywords

criminalization of homosexualityIranian gay menIslamic Republic of Iransame-sex desiresexuality governancetranssexuality
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 21 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

Authors’ note: We would like to thank Arash, Jón´s main informant, for his help and hospitality during his fieldwork in Tehran. We would also like to express our gratitude to all of the participants in our research, who told Jón their stories and gave us insight into their lives as gay men in Iran.

1 The identity category “gay” is italicized throughout because it refers to how the participants in the second author's study actually identified. It also signifies our own queerly informed understanding of any identity category as indeterminate.

2 We use the term “same-sex desire” because it is consistent with our engagement with queer theoretical perspectives informed by Foucauldian and Butlerian insights into the problematic of identity categories and their regulatory constraints, which reduce the expression of same-sex desire to a specific identity category. Moreover, we use “homosexuality” deliberately and in the Foucauldian-informed sense of a particular category of person.

3 Afary, Janet, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Korycki, Katarzyn and Abouzar, Nasirzadeh, “Desire Recast: The Production of Gay Identity in Iran,” Journal of Gender Studies 25 (2014): 50–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jafari, Mehri, “Islamic Jurisprudence-Inspired Legal Approaches towards Male Homosexuals,” in Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender Rights in Iran: Analysis from Religious, Social, Legal and Cultural Perspectives (New York: International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, 2015)Google Scholar, accessed 20 June 2017, http://iran.outrightinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/LGBTRightsInIran_EN.pdf, 19–25; Mir-Hosseini, Ziba and Hamzic, Vanja, Control and Sexuality: The Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Contexts (London: Women Living under Muslim Laws, 2010)Google Scholar; Najmabadi, Afsaneh, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

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8 Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” 23.

9 Ibid., 132.

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11 Sune E. Rasmussen, “Living Dangerously: What It's Like to Be Gay in Iran,” Vocativ, 23 December 2017, accessed 20 June 2017, http://www.vocativ.com/culture/lgbt/iran-gay-laws/; Yara Elmjouie, “Iran's Morality Police: Patrolling the Streets by Stealth,” The Guardian, 19 June 2014, accessed 15 May 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2014/jun/19/iran-morality-police-patrol; Watch, Human Rights, We Are a Buried Generation: Discrimination and Violence against Sexual Minorities in Iran (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2010)Google Scholar.

12 Fieldwork was conducted in Tehran by the second author, who went there four times between 2014 and 2015. It involved seventeen semistructured interviews. The participants were selected purposively, being born shortly before or after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Most of them came from middle-class families, and lived in the northern part of Tehran.

13 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities.”

14 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Desire Recast.”

15 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities”; Fraser, Scales of Justice.

16 Fraser, Scales of Justice, 41.

17 Grewal, Inderpal and Kaplan, Caren, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7 (2001): 663–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Povinelli, Elizabeth A. and Chauncey, George, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: Introduction,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5 (1999): 439–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Fraser, Scales of Justice.

19 Rastegar, “Emotional Attachments and Secular Imaginings”; Shakhsari, Sima, “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 8 (2012): 14–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Basaran, Oyman, “‘You Are like a Virus’: Dangerous Bodies and Military Medical Authority in Turkey,” Gender and Society 28 (2014): 562–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merabet, Sofian, Queer Beirut (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Whitaker, Brian, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East (London: Saqi Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

21 Waites, Matthew, “Analysing Sexualities in the Shadow of War: Islam in Iran, the West and the Work of Reimagining Human Rights,” Sexualities 11 (2008): 64–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Rastegar, “Emotional Attachments and Secular Imaginings,” 22.

23 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities,” 22.

24 Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire”; Shakhsari, “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora”; Zeidan, “Navigating International Rights and Local Politics.”

25 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities”; Butler, Gender Trouble; Fraser, Scales of Justice.

26 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Homophobia as a Tool of Statecraft,” 190.

27 Ibid., 174.

28 Ibid., 180.

29 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities,” 219.

30 Westoxification refers to the toxic Western influences on traditional Iranian cultural practices and identity; Omid, Homa, “Theocracy or Democracy? The Critics of ‘Westoxification’ and the Politics of Fundamentalism in Iran,” Third World Quarterly 13 (1992): 675–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities,” 219.

32 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Homophobia as a Tool of Statecraft.”

33 Butler, Gender Trouble, 30.

34 Zeidan, “Navigating International Rights and Local Politics.”

35 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities,” 220.

36 Long, Scott, “Unbearable Witness: How Western Activists (Mis)recognize Sexuality in Iran,” Contemporary Politics 15 (2009): 119–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 48.

38 Ibid., 59.

39 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of (Homo)sexualities,” 224.

40 Fraser, Scales of Justice.

41 Ibid., 17.

42 Ibid., 17–18.

43 Jafari, “Islamic Jurisprudence-Inspired Legal Approaches.”

44 Bucar, Elizabeth M. and Shirazi, Faegheh, “The ‘Invention’ of Lesbian Acts in Iran: Interpretive Moves, Hidden Assumptions, and Emerging Categories of Sexuality,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16 (2012): 416–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

45 Najmabadi, Professing Selves.

46 Fraser, Scales of Justice, 23.

47 Shakhsari, “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora.”

48 Ibid, 24.

49 Ibid, 21.

50 Ibid, 26–27.

51 Fraser, Scales of Justice, 31.

52 Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire.”

53 Rastegar, “Emotional Attachments and Secular Imaginings.”

54 Long, “Unbearable Witness.”

55 Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 149.

56 Fraser, Scales of Justice, 40.

57 Ibid., 41.

58 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Desire Recast”; Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards.

59 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Desire Recast,” 8–9.

60 Ibid., 9.

61 Jafari, “Islamic Jurisprudence-Inspired Legal Approaches.”

62 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Desire Recast,” 9.

63 Najmabadi, Professing Selves.

64 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Desire Recast,” 11.

65 Ibid., 11.

66 Ibid., 2.

67 Najmabadi, Professing Selves.

68 This term is informed by a Foucauldian understanding of the homosexual as a specific species or criminalized category of person; see Foucault, Michel, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990)Google Scholar.

69 Korycki and Nasirzadeh, “Desire Recast,” 2.

70 Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 4.

71 Ibid., 5.

72 Ibid.,166.

73 Ibid., 180.

74 Ibid., 7.

75 Ibid., 187.

76 Morteza, interview with second author, Tehran, August 2015.

77 Basaran, “You Are Like a Virus.”

78 Butler, Gender Trouble.

79 Our participants were mainly middle class, nonreligious, and educated, living in Tehran. We are aware of the limits of the sample and do not see it as representative of all gay Iranian men. However, the empirical aspect is nevertheless important given the dearth of empirical investigation that includes the perspectives of gay men inside Iran.

80 Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” 36–37.

81 “Growing Up Gay in Iran,” The Guardian, 13 January 2013, accessed 20 March 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2013/jan/13/growing-gay-iran-tehranbureau.

82 Arman, interview with second author, Tehran, Iran, August 2015.

83 Farhod, interview with second author, Tehran, February 2015.

84 Najmabadi, Professing Selves.

85 Jafari, “Islamic Jurisprudence-Inspired Legal Approaches towards Male Homosexuals.”

86 Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 51.

87 Ibid., 23.

88 Ibid., 24.

89 Najmabadi, Professing Selves.

90 “Growing Up Gay in Iran.”

91 Jón Ingvar Kjaran and Wayne Martino, “In Search of Queer Spaces in Tehran: Heterotopias, Power Geometries and Bodily Orientations in Queer Iranian Men's Lives,” Sexualities (2017): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717713383

92 Foucault, Michel and Miskowiec, Jay, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 “Growing Up Gay in Iran.”

94 Foucault and Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” 4.

95 Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 54–55.

96 Shakhsari, “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora,” 21.

97 Whitaker, Unspeakable Love, 137.

98 Rasmussen, “Living dangerously.”

99 Human Rights Watch, We Are a Buried Generation.

100 Ardalan, interview with second author, Tehran, February 2015.

101 Rasmussen, “Living Dangerously.”

102 Ibid.

103 Human Rights Watch, We Are a Buried Generation.

104 Ibid., 5.

105 Mir-Hosseini and Hamzić, Control and Sexuality.

106 Elmjouie, “Iran's Morality Police.”

107 Ibid.

108 Rastegar, “Emotional Attachments and Secular Imaginings.”

109 Fraser, Scales of Justice, 40–44.

110 Ibid., 43.

111 Zeidan, “Navigating International Rights and Local Politics,” 198.

112 Blasius, “Theorizing the Politics of {Homo)sexualities,” 232.

113 Ibid., 239.

114 Fraser, Scales of Justice, 41.