Among the many things the Egyptian Revolution (2011-...) unleashed is a state discourse that fixes normality within the realm of the state. Spaces of political dissent, therefore, become produced as “outside” the state (even if in reality they fail to evade the state structure and gaze). Within a statist discourse, this “outside” is produced as “abnormal.” A model citizen is produced, the docile subject whose normality is codified within the realm of the state, and with it its antithesis, the “licentious” revolutionary subject is produced and maligned. This paper studies the production of the revolutionary space and subject as “licentious,” prior to and during the revolution. The study traces this production of revolutionary licentiousness through mainstream films, television interviews with pro-regime figures,  pro-regime facebook groups, newspaper articles, and governmental and military communiques. The paper also traces the discursive effects of this licentiousnes, including its alleged effect on the national economy, therefore establishing a connection between the counterrevolutionary discourse on “the wheel of production” and that on personal behavior. To understand certain traits of this discourse (like paternity, invested in the leader, filiality, invested in docile national subjects, masculinity as a grid for order and normality, etc.) , this paper makes use of a Freudian-Lacanian framework that understands the superego as “the Law of the Father,” also invested in the state and used to stabilize its law and normalize its subjects. The psyche, as well as the law of the father, is therefore understood as an apparatus (both in the Althusserian and Foucauldian senses) of interpellation and subjectivation. Making use of and responding to Judith Butler’s work on subjectivity and psyche,  the case at hand poses questions about the “nature” of the oedipal psyche (and the superego as one of its main traits/products) as a vehicle of power. As this vehicle becomes available for the state and its supporters, the revolutionary moment becomes a chance to scrutinize and critique this vehicle, its working, and its “normality,” if not a chance to imagine alternative configurations. This paper, therefore, acknowledges the intellectual and epistemic weight of revolutionary moments as moments that expose the otherwise normalized working of power, and therefore also moments of potentiality in which older subjectivities are cast in doubt, thus creating prospects for alternative subjectivities and discourses.

Sexuality in the context of Iran, similar to many other post- (semi)colonial societies, is either used as a discourse to indicate progress and potentiality of Iranian society to fully assimilate into Euro-North American cultures, or to demonstrate backwardness and deviation from normalcy of Eurocentric universality. In this paper, I will discuss the effects of the universalization of the discourses of sexuality utilized by the state apparatus for the formation of a system of normativities that attempts to heterosexualize queerness and queer spaces in Iran. Transsexuality as a discourse of normalizing (heterosexualizing) gender queer subjects in Iran has opened a space in religio-political sphere where a state appointed cleric is responsible for the legal and religious aspects of transexuality. The cleric quotes Ayatollah Khomeini to approve the legitimacy, legality, and religiosity of the SRS (Sex Reassignment Surgery) while using identity-based terms of sexuality discourse, such as transsexuality, transvestism and homosexuality, to discuss the issues. The Euro-American medico-academic terms related to gender and sexuality are dominant even as Khomeini’s fatwa and the absence of any Quranic interdiction on SRS are being invoked. I will discuss in my paper that the notion of the modern identity-based sexual dissidence has enacted an erasure on other forms of life and configurations in different places of post- (semi)colonial world such as Iran. Subsequently, the Iranian homosexual subject has been demarcated as the abjected beings by the official speakers of transsexuality in order for them to construct the notion of the good legitimate Islamic queer (heterosexualizable) in contrast with the bad illegal anti-Islamic queer (un-heterosexualizable). I will consider discourses of citizenship, citizen making projects, nation-states’ rights-based movementism, and dichotomies of the exclusion versus inclusion and private versus public in order to understand the state homonormativity-based regulations of gender and sexuality in Iran. I will also discuss the affective and creative forms of subjectivity and persistence of Iranian queer subjects, both in spatial and temporal sense, on resisting the heterosexualization and homonormativization of queerness from within the state sanctioned sites and spaces.

In the wake of Operation Cast Lead (28 Dec. 2008 – 18 Jan. 2009) numerous IDF soldiers testified to the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days later, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published pictures of T-shirts created and worn by IDF soldiers, depicting figures seen through the crosshairs of a gun: a young Palestinian “militant” with the slogan “the smaller, the harder”; a pregnant niqab-clad Palestinian woman whose caption reads “one shot, two kills”; the image of a Palestinian mother mourning her dead child on a condom wrapper with the slogan “Better use Durex”. Using the T-shirt images, news articles, interviews with soldiers, and literature on Zionist ethnonationalism, I locate the content, production and circulation of these images within the Zionist nationalist discourse of demographic management. This nationalist narrative predicates the continuation of the Jewish state on the increased reproduction of Jewish bodies and attempts to morally justify the confinement, disciplining, and killing of Palestinians by positing them as terrorist bodies posing a threat to this demographic balance. Informed by a Hegelian framework of recognition and subjectivity and Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which uses as its starting point Hegel’s notion of becoming a subject in the fact of death, I argue that these images are sites upon which the Israeli soldier is created as a moral subject through recognition of the Palestinian as a terrorist subject and the annihilation of this enemy Other. This destruction is posited as a moral imperative, creating subjects through the dialects of recognition and granting the soldier the right to ensure the primacy of Jewishness. This desire for the death of the Other can be further understood within the context of what Mbembe terms necropower, or the management by the sovereign of life and death through the creation of death-worlds, imposing conditions on the targeted population, thus limiting the possibilities for life and creating them as the ‘living dead.’ Given that the exercise of the right to kill is, for Mbembe, the utmost expression of sovereignty, I suggest that the T-shirt images produced and circulated by soldiers create a space in which the fantasy of state-sanctioned killing as a practice of demographic management can be expressed unconditionally. Furthermore, I argue that these T-shirts are not anomalies, but demonstrate the extent to which Zionist nationalist ideology and military culture are inextricably tied to life, and are reproduced, embedded in, and normalized by social artifacts.

Taking as its case study Amir Baradaran's variegated performance piece, Marry Me to the End of Love (Cite Internationale des Artes, Paris, France, 23-30 June 2012; curated by Feri Daftari), this paper employs a Rancierean approach to investigating the role of aesthetics in altering, rather than (re)presenting, power relations that govern desire and subjectivity in the late modern regime of sexuality. In opposing the representative domain of art, with it premise in Aristotelian mimesis, I interrogate performance ideals consolidated by the rigid boundaries of actor/spectator and aesthetics/politics for the purpose of reconfiguring the content of marriage, the possibilities of pleasure it allows, and the relationship between Islam and Muslim practice. I argue that, as it inserts itself into current debates surrounding the politics of marriage and Islam in relation to the challenges of Western modernity, the performance allows us to consider art not merely in its capacity to engage political debate, but also in its capacity to reconfigure the very terms on which such debate is premised. Consisting of Baradaran entering multiple short-term marriages with as many willing participants as possible, the performance re-articulates the Shi'a practice of Mut’ah, or terminal marriage premised exclusively on the derivation of pleasure. As it outlines the forms of attachment, belonging, and desire the performance makes possible, the paper explores the way in which social and legal recognition might be extended to those not accommodated by, or those suffering at the expense of, traditional marriage configurations. Such an exploration will be considered in its imbrication with homo-nationalist discourse, the heteronormative inheritances of monogamy and non-terminality, and the dominant distributions of pleasure across the body consolidated by a late modern regime of sexuality. Noting that Baradaran's performance critiques contemporary social and legal orders in Muslim and non-Muslim contexts while deriving its critique from within Shi'ism, the paper opens up a site from which to critique social and legal orders outside of dominant Islamophobic, racist, or economically strategic frameworks, ending with a series of reflections on the viability of extending such a site of critique to other social and legal orders.