This article discusses the documentary Be Like Others (2008) and the feature film Facing Mirrors (2011)—each film the first of its type that focuses on trans people in contemporary Iran—in order to examine the relation between gender norms on the one hand and transgender and transsexual issues on the other in current Iranian society and culture. Through troubling clear-cut definitions of gender, trans people pose a constant threat to a heteronormative gender order. As depicted in both films, despite the legalization of sex reassignment surgery in current Iranian society, the trans people within Iran—whether pre- or post-operation—continue to become subject to various forms of violence, social control, and exclusionary practices. Central to such issues encountered by trans persons, I argue, is a gheirat-based hegemonic masculinity that deems as unintelligible and intolerable the trans people’s embodied violations of the heteronormative gender binary system. To demonstrate this argument, I show how Be Like Others addresses trans people’s major struggles within a patriarchal gender order while Facing Mirrors foregrounds the roles played by hegemonic masculine ideals in sustaining or otherwise challenging such an unequal and oppressive order.

This paper examines the double phenomenon of state-sponsored transgender surgeries and neoliberal economic policies in the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran. In recent years, Iran gender and sexuality scholarship has engaged the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of state support for transgender surgeries along with criminalization of same-sex sexualities (Najmabadi, 2014; Shakerifar, 2011; Javaheri, 2010). Other approaches have utilized a human-rights perspective (Human Rights Watch, 2010), or more rarely, a critical medical approach (Sadjadi, 2013). But there has been little acknowledgement of the parallels between the state’s uneasy encouragement of limited “choice” in terms of gender and its concurrent efforts to dismantle the traditional model of centralized economic planning while maintaining less formal structures of market control. The neoliberal turn in Iran’s economic policy mirrors a similar strategy in its approach to sexuality: an effort to appease political and social claims for greater freedom and autonomy by channeling popular discontent away from productive action and into the narrow provisions consumer identity. My paper attempts to bring these parallel developments into relation, and is based on research into both Iranian transgender policy and the dynamics of local consumer behaviors. Compared to inevitably contentious localized relations of production (whether of material goods or personal identities), the commodity as a consumer good is extracted from the ambiguities of its origins and presented as a cleansed and finished entity. In Iran, the physiology of gender has been branded as cleanly “male” or “female,” leading to social expectations, encouraged by the state, that gender is a kind of individual modern consumer good that can be extracted from its social relations of production. As with the desire for transcendent satisfaction proffered by any branded commodity, the fantasy is rarely fulfilled. Yet gender dissonance, or resistance to the available categories of masculine and feminine (and the newly medicalized choice between them) is rejected as unproductive and costly. As the Iranian state takes steps to re-integrate with the global market, and Iranian society relinquishes its post-revolutionary utopian ideals, will the neoliberal project of individualized responsibility as a substitute for collective social bargains (patriarchal or otherwise) further entrench, or will alternative productions of resistance emerge?

The contentious issue of women’s religious authority is Islam has engaged religious scholars, women and the state in dynamic debates. In Iran, female religious authorities have resorted to various strands of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) in order to interpret religious doctrines. In this research I argue that women’s participation in the production of Islamic knowledge must be assessed within the context of the jurisprudential tradition they propagate. There are currently two predominant kinds of jurisprudential tradition advocated by female religious authorities. The first type, which I refer to as “traditional jurisprudence” (fiqh-e taqlīdi), continues to advocate conventional precepts, enjoys majority support. The second type of jurisprudential tradition, or the “renaissance” approach (fiqh-e tajdīdī), is traditional in nature but attempts to revive the legal pluralism of the tradition. Through interviews and textual analysis, I highlight several factors that distinguish female reformist religious authorities from their traditionalist counterparts. In the works of female religious leaders who adhere to the fiqh-e tajdīdī tradition, one observes a major hermeneutical shift in Shiʿi legal theory. The female reformists who adhere to fiqh-e tajdīdi represent the vibrant community of religious authorities advocating an indigenous reformation within the Shiʿi tradition. This drive for reform, as well as the promise of greater adoption of the egalitarian principles of Islam, is at the center of this reformist religious authority. Despite their differences, it is important to note that these two strands of religious authorities are not static categories entirely separate from each other; rather one witnesses a continuing dialogue among their advocates.