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Masculinity in Crisis?: Making Sense of the Majid Tavakoli Case
Abstract
In December of 2009 Majid Tavakoli, a prominent student activist in Iran, was arrested after giving a speech at Amirkabir University in Tehran. Later, government-sponsored media published photographs of Tavakoli in a châdor along with testimony from officers claiming Tavakoli willingly put on a châdor in an attempt to escape arrest. Members of Iran’s “Green Movement” (both in Iran and in diaspora) were outraged and declared that Tavakoli was forced to wear the châdor by officers determined to humiliate him. In a show of solidarity, Iranian men throughout the diaspora began photographing themselves in hejâb and/or châdor (garments normally worn by women in Iran) and posting them on the internet. Hamid Dabashi’s “Week in Green” website even featured a video entitled “We are all Majid Tavakoli” which presented hundreds of images of men donning hejâb in support of Tavakoli. Though these photographs are often cited as proof of the Green Movement’s feminist leanings and their refusal to associate feminization with shame, this paper explores how they actually point to a hyper-patriarchal response from diasporic men intending to recover what they perceive as a damaged masculinity. With the aid of Sara Ahmed’s theories of affect as presented in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explore how these images become “sticky” objects through their constant circulation, and how the emotions “stuck” to them (such as a sense of pride, feminist politics, etc.) become harder to disassociate the more they are circulated. Focusing on ten specific images, I will use the works of Kathleen Stewart, Jonathan Flatley and Ahmed in affect theory in conjunction with the visual studies work of Roland Barthes and Gillian Rose to apply a feminist framework to analyzing the affective meaning and usage of these images of diasporic Iranian men in hejâb or châdor. I will also consider what an alternative response could have looked like, probing what a queering of Tavakoli’s image in châdor might look like and what that could have provided Iranian men in diaspora.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None