After the 1958 Iraqi revolution, state officials increasingly invoked the threat of counter-revolution and the necessity of rapid economic development to construct a range of local practices such as homosocial leisure activities (home visiting for women, sitting in coffee shops for men) and the Shi`i institution of mut`a marriage as backwards “traditions” on a historical plane of temporality and as “wasted time” on a quotidian plane. One thing such “traditions” had in common was that they were neither productive nor reproductive: by distracting Iraqis from work and family, they purportedly threatened the entire revolution and, with it, all hopes for development and a national future. State officials launched a public campaign against “the tradition of ladies who hold at-home parties for other women” for this very reason. The paper focuses especially on such constructions of female homosociality, connecting them to a pre-revolutionary debate in Iraq over whether female-only life-worlds were signs of a decadent social system leading to tragically wasted lives and to a prevalence of homosexuality in Iraq. After 1958, officials elaborated on this discourse by constructing female homosociality as not only decadent and tragic but also as an obstacle to the revolutionary state’s economic development plans and its campaign to depoliticize the Iraqi public sphere. The paper shows how attention to conceptions of time and temporality can contribute to histories of gender and interpersonal formations in a so-called “developing” country. It examines the usefulness and limitations in an Iraqi context of queer theorist Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” as the modern political imaginary that is “no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than [it is] able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child.” In looking at the interchangeability of “wasted time” with “tradition” in official Iraqi statements, it also makes use of Talal Asad’s observation that the word “traditional” in modern secular discourse often simply means “existing.” This is of course ironic, given the association of “traditions” with past activities or institutions when in fact the term (in both English and Arabic) often points precisely to present ones. In revolutionary Iraq, I argue, what caused existing interpersonal practices such as homosocial gatherings and mut`a marriages to be demeaned as “traditional” was not their attachment to the past but their attachment to the present -- i.e., their non-child-centeredness and their failure to contribute to the national-developmental future.

When the new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi held an initial exhibition of Picasso in 2008, organizers elected to schedule regular viewings restricted to women. The press statement noted that this is a "regional custom to allow women to socialize - and that its inclusion in the retrospective's schedule was meant as a peace offering to the community." My paper explores the creation of homosocial spaces and their intersection with art, museums, and global politics. I examine the ways in which certain works of art are perceived to be problematic or sexual when viewed in mixed gender settings, and what this solution says about constructions and elicitations of desire. Same-sex settings are seen as neutralizing potentially inflammatory works - does this mean that works are perceived as dangerous not for their inherent content but in their moment and space of their witnessing? Thus, I explore the varying and shifting legibilities of works when they are framed and viewed in different spaces and constructs. I argue this event demonstrates an attempt by the exhibition organizers, who have links to the Emirati government, to embed museum-going and art viewing behaviors within what Bourdieu would consider the habitus, customs perceived to be established and comfortable for local women. Interviews with Gulf female art visitors and examining other women-only activities for socializing helps to more fully contextualize this practice. This research explores this instance of female homosocial space in relation to similar phenomena in other communities, such as the Aboriginal Australian community, that restrict and divide viewings of art works by gender, drawing on the work of Fred Myers; it also explores the ways that art has previously created homosocial spaces and opened the topic of same-sex desire in Qajar art.

Tying the diminishment of female homosocial space in Tehran to the strengthening of (predominately) U.S.-based LGBT rescue narratives, I will reveal how the relegation of historically rich and sexually ambiguous forms of female-female desire to the (homo)sexual sphere serves to reinforce both Orientalist interpretations of "Eastern"sexuality as well as U.S. discourse of "natural" links between sexual acts and identity. Additionally, an examination of the recent media hysteria over the "Green Movement" after Iran's now notorious 2009 presidential election will demonstrate how the construction and constant recirculation of the "Green Movement" interpellates Iranian citizens as liberal Westernized subjects. Through the use of Jasbir Puar's formulation of "queer exceptionalism" in _Terrorist Assemblages_, I will demonstrate how the construction of "LGBT" Iranians is necessary for U.S. neoliberal understandings of self through positioning the U.S. as tolerant and progressive vis-à-vis a barbaric and abhorrently sexually repressed imagining of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Incitement to this and "Green Movement" discourses demands recognition of the self as a liberal subject deserving of civil rights, regardless of sexual “identity” which is constructed through LGBT discourses to begin with. Through the use of Puar, Joseph Massad's _Desiring Arabs_, and Kathryn Babayan's work on female homosociality in Iran, I demonstrate how both discourses ultimately aid in the diminishment of different kinds of female desire and demand an Iranian understanding of the self that can be weaved into the specifically neoliberal multicultural fabric of the United States, or face being left in the backward and primitive Orient.

In contemporary Cairo, some women who have intimate and sexual relationships with other women identify as “lesbians,” even if they do not speak English. Others, who are often multilingual, use the Arabic word “mythlia,” (from the root “sameness”) which they translate as “lesbian.” And still, a number of women do not translate their intimate same-sex relations into any label, identity or politics. Through an engagement with the life history narratives of eleven women who are intimately and sexually involved with other women in contemporary Cairo, my paper attempts to capture the complex lives of these women as they embody and construct their gender and sexuality in their everyday lives. In addition to paying close attention to the forms of homosocial spaces that these women create amongst each other, I also explore how embodiments and performances of sexuality shift as these women move in and outside of homosocial spaces. This paper is based primarily upon ethnographic research that I conducted in the summer of 2010 in Cairo, Egypt. I also draw on the work of Saba Mahmood who, in her study of a women’s mosque movement in Cairo, has argued against the “universality of the desire…to be free from relations of subordination” and the “naturalization of freedom as a social ideal” (2005:10). Thus, rather than equate agency with resistance to social norms, with coming and speaking out against the normative demands of heterosexuality, I seek to explore the variety of agentive modalities (including but not limited to resistance) that help fashion and constitute the experiences and subjectivities of women who have intimate relations with other women in Cairo. In this paper I attempt to parochialize normative constructions of homosexuality that view identifying as a “lesbian” and being “out” as universally desirable and liberating and are based upon a teleological conception of progress and what Martin Manalansan (2003) calls “gay modernity.”