This paper explores the question of how the Saudi state is utilizing gendered initiatives and representations to fulfill its political agendas and reinforce the political and social power of male rulers. I engage with the scholarship of Madawi Al-Rasheed (2013) and Amelie Le Renard (2014), particularly their understandings of the relationship between the Saudi state and its national female population. I apply Al-Rasheed’s (2013) framing of Saudi Arabia as a “masculine state” and its representation of women as “symbols of modernity” to my analysis of the state’s recent reforms, demonstrating in particular how the state is simultaneously representing its gender reforms to an international audience as a marker of “modernity” and reinforcing patriarchal power relations at the state and societal levels. My research contributes to current scholarship in its analysis of the Saudi state’s recent gender reforms and the ways they exemplify the relationship between the Saudi state and Saudi women, as well as my examination of state discourses propagated by the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. I argue that the gendered discourses and initiatives of the Saudi state are founded upon representations of women and their advancement in society as symbols of modernity and reform. However, I contend that while the state’s reforms claim to advance women’s status in society, they are developed to fulfill the agendas of a masculine state and implemented in a manner that reinforces patriarchal power structures and obscures the voices of Saudi women themselves. In order to demonstrate how the state is simultaneously representing women as symbols of modernity and reinforcing patriarchal power structures, I analyze the state’s recent gender reforms as well as the state’s regulation of women through the guardianship system. Specifically, I analyze the gender reforms initiated under the leadership of Mohammed Bin Salman and the discourses embodied in a number of the prince’s interviews with Western media outlets. In addition, I outline some of the demands of Saudi women activists that challenge the state’s conceptualizations of women’s advancement in society.

Before Iran’s 1979 revolution, he was mostly known for producing and hosting successful radio and television shows where he would squeeze in global issues like the Vietnam war in between entertainment. In exile, he became an outspoken activist against Iran’s Islamic regime which allegedly led to his murder in 1992. Throughout his charismatic life and thereafter, he has continued to be associated with non-heteronormative sexuality. Today, an internet search, in part produces results that are reflective of the iconic Fereydoun Farrokhzad being excavated for multiple reasons. This paper analyzes a selection of online posts related to Farrokhzad including videos, articles, and photos. The posts are either Farrokhzad’s political activism chosen for its nationalist fervor, narrations of his unique place in Iranian culture which often include rejections or dismissals of the “rumors of his gayness” or those who claim his non-heteronormative sexuality as part of Iranian queerness. I draw upon the scholarship of nationalism and homonationalization to argue that by themselves the “pro-nationalist” posts and those dismissive of Farrokhzad's sexuality reproduce an insistence on heteronormativity of nationalism that positions non-heteronormative sexuality as a “deviant” “other.” The posts claiming Farrokhzad’s queerness in isolation reproduce the assumption that Iranian queerness/es are separate from the rest of Iranian history, indirectly contributing to the reproduction of exclusivist patriarchal nationalism which has been sustained at the expense and erasure of queer Iranian-ness. Analyzed together, the posts are also reflective of how Iranian nationalism continues to be reinforced by straight and queer actors. Scholarship has demonstrated that Iran as a nation-state and its discourse of nationalism were constructed and maintained through reproductions of heteronormativity. It has also established that hegemonic masculinity goes hand in hand with hegemonic nationalism and militarism. Few scholars have examined the intersections of non-homonormative sexuality and nationalism in the context of Iran or the impact of iconic figures such as Fereydoun Farrokhzad to both discourses of nationalism and queer studies. Given the repeated deployments and erasures of sexualities in projects of nationalism, militarism and now securitization, If we are serious about moving toward a more inclusive democratic discourse, it is crucial to examine the seemingly unrelated spaces to locate queer sexualities within the context of Iranian culture and to be alert of any spaces that may inadvertently reproduce frameworks such as nationalism that continue to be couched in exclusionary politics including the erasure of queerness.

This paper focuses on the articulation of nationalism and masculinity in the post-Oslo Palestinian narrative. While the hegemonic masculinist Palestinian national narrative posits the fida’i, the freedom fighter, as the embodiment of both manliness and Palestinianness, it is not static or uncontested. Literature is certainly one important site where this narrative is reproduced, but it is also a space where it is challenged. In this paper I will examine several literary texts by Palestinian authors to shed light on how this masculine narrative has been reproduced and reworked in post-Oslo literature. The four authors I discuss articulate nationalism and masculinity in their works from three different geopolitical locations: Ibrahim Nasrallah as a Palestinian refugee living in Jordan; Raja Shehadeh as a Palestinian subject of the Palestinian Authority and Israeli military rule in the West Bank; Atef Abu Saif as a Palestininan living in a Gaza under siege and bombardment, and Raji Bathish as a Palestinian in Israel, a member of an Arab minority in a self-identified Jewish state. Writing from these disparate locations, and making different aesthetic choices, these Palestinian authors have one crucial thing in common: they engage questions of national identity via narratives of masculinity. While Nasrallah does so by embracing a nostalgic heroic masculinity, as in his historical novel The Time of White Horses, Shehadeh in his memoir Palestinian Walks, Abu Saif in his war diary The Drone Eats with Me, and Bathish in his short story “Nakba-lite” question and ultimately reject such views of heroism in favor of a new kind of masculinity that allows for marginalized men to speak as national subjects.

By now Saba Mahmood’s claims in 'The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject' (Princeton University Press, 2005) have become a permanent fixture of the way women subjects are understood in Middle Eastern studies across disciplines, including not only Mahmood’s original field of anthropology but also in sociology and literary studies. As the reader will recall, among Mahmood’s primary theoretical projects is to disentangle agency from resistance, working against dominant Western feminism, so that practicing docility is interpreted as an expression of agency; docility in turn is restored to its Aristotelian definition to signify preparing the self for teaching (see especially 29). Recent feminist scholarship inside and outside Middle Eastern studies has critiqued the idea of agency altogether. Sadia Abbas has shown in “The Echo Chamber of Freedom: The Muslim Woman and the Pretext of Agency” (boundary 2: 2013), later adapted into a book chapter, how discourses of agency serve to erase real Muslim women’s suffering, occluding their imbrications in networks of power. Similarly, Anne Anlin Cheng, both in her celebrated book 'Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface' (Oxford University Press, 2011) and in her recent theorization of “Ornamentalism” (in an eponymous article in Critical Inquiry and book from Oxford UP, both 2018), alternately locates agency in violence (SS 20-1), opposes it to spectacle (SS 38-9), and ultimately unseats subjectivity from agency (“O” 429-30). One is left to ask: Whence the feminist preoccupation with agency? Is agency a precondition of subjecthood? Moreover, given that gendering is a fundamental process of subject formation, is agency gendered? To approach such inquiries, I engage three works of contemporary Persian literature: Mahshid Amirshahi’s 1971 short story, “N?m… shuhrat… shum?rih shin?sn?mih…” (Name, Surname, Birth Certificate Number…); Goli Taraghi’s 1991-2 short story, “Du?st-i ku?chak” (The Little Friend); and Mahsa Mohebali’s 2008 novel, Negar?n nab?sh (Don’t Worry). I suggest that agency is masculinized in modern Iranian feminisms (categorizing Taraghi’s work as such despite the author) but that masculinity is simultaneously disaggregated from the male body. Thus the subject, and in particular, the female feminist subject, comes into being partly through masculinity, or precisely that which she antagonizes (and which antagonizes her). The study ultimately opens up to a crucial question: simply put, is agency power? Alternatively, is power agency?