This paper presentation focuses on the digital circulation of a series of nineteenth-century photographs of an Iranian Qajar princess, Esmat-o-Doleh (Qajar dynasty from 1848 to1896). I am currently working on these photos as a case study for my doctoral dissertation. I look at the aesthetics of their circulation and temporal representation. I study the digitization of these images in relationship to specific historical moments that matter to transnational Iranian communities and their identity formation. I argue that the reanimation of history through digital archiving is a way for Iranian transnational subjects to deal with difficult heritage and negotiate their cultural identity and social memory. I study these photographs “as performance[s]” (Schechner 32) that challenge the constructed-ness of Shahzadeh/princess in a cross-cultural imagination, and consequently entail feminist scrutiny of the production and reproduction of their subject. I employ a hybrid methodological framework combining performance as an epistemic lens alongside archival research, historiography, and cyber ethnography to firstly explore the fascinations of the nineteenth-century court with the innovation of photography, and secondly to trace the transformation of this fascination in the viral circulations of the images on social media. My presentation aims to unpack the contemporary (trans)national interest in these photos in relationship to the seemingly non-binary gender qualities of their subject: a heavy-set and -statured royal princess with a mustache and thick eyebrows. For instance, one of these fabricated viral images lays a head-shot of Esmat on the cover of a playboy magazine. I look at how juxtapositions like this entails a performance that transgresses recuperative tendencies of ‘archival consciousness’ and highlights archive as a site embracing its inclination toward its own fiction effects. I study the playful techniques using the fiction effects of archival records in tandem with Anjali Arondekar’s methodological propositions in For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Arondekar argues for a reading of the archival record that productively juxtaposes archive’s fiction effects with its truth effects. In this presentation, I consider archive as both a system of representation and source material with serious consequences in studying these digitized images. This paper further contends that these images, appearing in popular culture and media, produce a telos of knowledge production. Citations: Arondekar, Anjali R. “Introduction Without a Trace.” For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Duke University Press, 2009. 1-27. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.

One of the primary aims of this study is to discuss whether fainting, depression, different kinds of physical illness, and attempts of suicide that occur intensively in the nineteenth century Turkish novels in Arabic script are symptoms and outcomes of hysteria. It also claims that hysteria occurs in male characters and writers of the novels, and this argument is opposed to the general belief all Ottoman writers also hold that hysteria can occur only in women. In addition, I also argue that socio-political changes and the modernization process of the Ottoman Empire and different approaches to novel writing have had influence on the occurrence of male hysteria. Illness and suicide are read as symptoms of hysteria that are frequently observed in male characters in these novels. I read these hysterical symptoms as resulting from a failure to cope with psychological, cultural and social problems men are confronted with in the emerging modern world. Finally, in order to discuss the topic from a wider perspective, I scrutinize Turkish novels in Armenian script, to see if hysterical male figures also appear in the same form in these novels. In this category, either the form of hysteria has changed, strengthened, or it has completely disappeared. In this respect, even though there is a time difference between Armeno-Turkish and Arabic Script-Turkish novels, the common traits of the nineteenth century novels will be considered and a comparative research will be conducted. Nam?k Kemal’s Intibah (Rebirth) (1876) and Hagop Vartanian’s Akabi Hikâyesi (The Story of Akabi) (1851) will be the primary literature of this study.

This paper focuses on the official and alternative histories of Turkish modernity performed in vernacular photographs with an emphasis on the interplay between photography and gender. I investigate the modern femininities and masculinities that Turkish citizens produced and negotiated during the formative years of the Republic by studying representations of urban middle-class and upper middle-class women and men. Through a series of studio portraits and snapshots from the 1920s and the 1930s, the paper explores ways in which photography was used as a tool to generate shared memories, and the role visual self-representations played in forming social identities for the newly minted citizens of a modern nation state in the context of a society undergoing rapid secularization and Westernization. By decrypting visual and textual information in the photographic material, I analyze its social, economic, cultural, and geographical origins and the relationships present therein. Research material is sourced from a collection of 17,000 vernacular photographs from Turkey, which I have built over the years for the Akkasah Photography Archive at the New York University Abu Dhabi. By exploring the gender roles that urban middle and upper middle-class women and men adopted and performed in and outside the studio setting, I explore to what degree such performances accord with the modernizing reforms and discourses of the Kemalist era.

The construction of masculinity and femininity in Israel has been an active ideological process, constructed through the linkages of eroticism and violence as a means of gendered nation-building. In the 1950s and 60s, erotic fiction about the Holocaust, called Stalags, was widely distributed in Israel, which engaged with competing Israeli notions of desire, masculinity, and revenge. These books were officially banned by police during the Eichmann trials, when national discourse changed from desire to security because of a Stalag publication which centered on a female protagonist. These tensions remerged in the late 00s, where a panic about protecting Jewish women’s bodies from Arabs focused on reports of a high number of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from surrounding Arab countries logging on to Israeli porn sites. In the 2010s, bills about limiting access to pornography have repeatedly come before the Israeli legislature, even one to be debated after elections this April, while at the same time gay pornographic studios engage in pinkwashing to advertise Israel as a progressive site for male homosexuality in the region. Tracing these threads, I use discourse analysis to examine current debates about these pornography bills and studios which support and advertise Israeli eroticism, examining the ways in which they argue for protective—at time homoerotic—masculinity. I also trace historical interventions around imagined and idealized bodies and the military. In these instances, societal security (Buzan et al. 1998, Hansen 2011) becomes observable, and this securitization engages with pornography (Williams 2004) that centers on vulnerable female bodies needing to be protected. In this paper, I argue that pornography and the eroticism of violence has been used to reconstruct Israeli masculinity since the Holocaust, constantly struggling with a fragile masculinity being affected by the Other. The historical thread of the New Jew in large-scale wars and regular military training reconstitutes this masculinity, while the male gaze of brown bodies incites insecurity. I also assert that the promotion of Israeli militarized masculine bodies desired worldwide becomes an idealized phenomenon, while Israeli feminine bodies are able to be consumed only in relation to nation-building and reproduction.