Rarely do Middle Eastern cinema historiographies engage with the question of audiences’ affective relationship with films. Considering the emotional attachment of fans to certain cult films through the passage of time, this paper explores the intertextual elements, the historical context of production, and the thirty-year reception trajectory of D?r?y?sh Mihrj??’s H?m?n (1989) in Iran. Applying cult film theories and analyzing the fan-produced texts, I argue that H?m?n’s realistic outlook on the failed and confused norms of Iranian masculinity has contributed to its persistent relevance to post-revolutionary middle-class intelligentsia. Inspired by a variety of Eastern and Western sources, including Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), Sadiq Hid?yat’s B?f-i k?r (The Blind Owl, 1936), and Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964), H?m?n is about a middle-aged man on the verge of losing his wife, properties, and faith. Despite its success in the national competition of Fajr Film Festival, H?m?n neither found a place on the domestic top-ten box-office list nor became an internationally appreciated phenomenon. Its tone was too gloomy for a people in need of normalcy restoration by the end of the war with Iraq and the shifts in the leadership and presidency. Furthermore, the global glorification of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinematic masterpiece, Close-Up, overshadowed all the other aspects of Iranian cinema in that year. The critical reception and fans’ responses to H?m?n, though, soon positioned it beyond its merely filmic boundaries. On a national level, H?m?n became a metaphor for Iranian intellectuals’ disillusionment with the revolution, echoing historically recurrent frustrations. On a broader, regional level, it was deemed a symbolic representation of the Middle Eastern man’s struggles amidst the forces of traditional values and modernity. And yet, on a more globally-inclusive level, it has been celebrated by its fans as a trope for taking pleasure in existentialist sadness, mystic love, and transcendental experience of failure. H?m?n’s exceptional cult status has generated myriad references and homages in Iranian popular culture. A documentary made by M?n? ?aq?q? in 2007 and a drama staged by Muhammad Ra?m?n?y?n in 2015, both titled H?m?nb?z-h? (H?m?ners), along with several other H?m?n-inspired films, short stories, novels, poems, and songs, provide revealing insights into the fans’ perception and practices of an ultimately Middle Eastern cult film. Investigating the subcultural sensibilities and historical dynamism of these lived experiences advances the scholarship on Iranian cinema beyond the current models of aesthetic evaluation and academically fashionable content analyses.

In recent years, an increasing number of historians have studied the construction of masculinity in various Middle Eastern contexts. Yet, the focus has generally been on the modern middle-class. Departing from the dominant trend, this paper explores the intersection between masculinity, class formation, and technology by examining the construction of working-class masculinity in Iran during the early Pahlavi period, with a particular focus on workers of the transport sector. Transport infrastructure developed tremendously during the second quarter of the twentieth century. In addition to a highway network, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf via Tehran. Coterminous with this development was the increase of intercity bus services and trucks that transported people and goods. Particularly during WWII, the occupying Allied forces relied heavily on Iran’s transport infrastructure to carry lend-lease materials from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet Union. This development created an acute need for the railway crew, truck drivers, and various other workers of the transport sector, many of whom were employed directly or indirectly by state institutions or the Allies. This paper asks: How did this largest workforce in Iran outside the oil industry develop a distinct type of working-class masculinity in the context of modern state formation under Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-41), the Allied occupation during the war, and its immediate aftermath in the late 1940s? How was their masculinity constructed in relation to competing ideals of masculinity? What role did technology play in the process? Using archival documents of the American Persian Gulf Command and publications of the Iranian Ministry of Roads and the Iranian Railway Organization, this paper argues that the masculinity of transport workers was based on their technological ability to operate and fix the automobiles and locomotives, their financial ability to feed their nuclear families, and their willingness to sacrifice themselves to operate the transport system in order to end the war. These qualities separated them from modern middle-class men, the “ignorant masses,” women, and even other working-class men. The end of the war and the subsequent waves of layoffs exacerbated their crisis of masculinity by the eve of the oil nationalization movement that began in 1951 under the leadership of Mohammad Mosaddeq.

This paper will draw from and contribute to scholarly discourses on the representation and study of women living under Muslim laws; particularly, it seeks to contribute to the idea of how Islamist patriarchal norms are challenged in globally accessible, virtual civil society via sites for civil discourses in cyberspace. I will explore civil discourse around and by women in the case of Iran through the media and discursive analysis of videos shared through a state sanctioned video-sharing site, Aparat, to examine what forms of civil discourse around gender norms and male guardianship over women can remain in the virtual public sphere without the risk of participants or vlogging entities being targeted by the authoritarian, Islamist state. What I find is that discourses on the need for women’s independence from male guardianship [qiwama in Islamic jurisprudence] rest primarily on the grounds of women’s equality to men in exercising public reasoning on matters explicitly unaddressed by any sacred Islamic texts; these challenges to patriarchal norms complement the arguments against unitary or hegemonic exegesis of Islamic principles, posed by censored figures involved in Iran’s religious intellectual movement, including Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar. The findings of this paper corroborate Asef Bayat’s theory of post-Islamist civil society emerging in contexts where Islamists have managed to institutionalize and seize control of the state, a theory wherein he also theorizes that the women’s rights movement acts as one of the primary drivers of post-Islamist thought. The results of this paper will allow me to form the grounds for a case comparison to another Muslim majority societies with a somewhat less institutionalized Islamist movement and active civil discourse on a state-sanctioned video-sharing or vlogging platform.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the working poor and the lower-class youth as passive subjects of ideology were foot soldiers of the Islamic Republic of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, I argue that a great deal of the working-class men and youths using different tactics were looking for ways to survive during the wartime. This essay illustrates a paradoxical situation in which the working-class youth and migrant workers, marginalized in big cities, were struggling to meet two different gender expressions and expectations in wartime Iran in the 1980s. On the one side, excluding other forms of masculinities, the ideological state apparatuses imposed hegemonic masculinity upon men to unify them around the Revolution’s ideals and mobilize men and the youth for the war. On the other side, the banal reality of everyday life and the dire economic situation, particularly among working-class families, demanded men to play their crucial role as father and breadwinner. My aim is to offer a retrospective consideration of how a set of elements crystallized into a vision of masculinity as dominant hegemonic masculinity and how men found ways to meet both hegemonic gender expectations and mundane gender expectations. First, analyzing cultural products such as textbooks, booklets, posters, songs, and video footages, I will illustrate how the ideological state apparatuses represented a specific image of the ideal man and masculinized public space. The long Iran-Iraq war, which broke out soon after the 1979 Revolution, gave rise to a more ideological climate in which the revolutionary state gained monopoly control of public images and signs. In the absence of other forms of images, the state produced its own cultural products, as articulations of ideological discourse, by which it constructed a hegemonic form of masculinity to identify the indicators of ideal men devoted their lives to the Revolution and ready for self-sacrifice. The significant aspects of these products were gender- and class-oriented that subjected young men from working-class families. Second, listening to men from working-class families, I will argue that, despite the domination of hegemonic masculinity, a great deal of the working-class men and youths used different tactics in everyday life to survive and fulfill their gender roles as father and breadwinner.