In December of 2009 Majid Tavakoli, a prominent student activist in Iran, was arrested after giving a speech at Amirkabir University in Tehran. Later, government-sponsored media published photographs of Tavakoli in a châdor along with testimony from officers claiming Tavakoli willingly put on a châdor in an attempt to escape arrest. Members of Iran’s “Green Movement” (both in Iran and in diaspora) were outraged and declared that Tavakoli was forced to wear the châdor by officers determined to humiliate him. In a show of solidarity, Iranian men throughout the diaspora began photographing themselves in hejâb and/or châdor (garments normally worn by women in Iran) and posting them on the internet. Hamid Dabashi’s “Week in Green” website even featured a video entitled “We are all Majid Tavakoli” which presented hundreds of images of men donning hejâb in support of Tavakoli. Though these photographs are often cited as proof of the Green Movement’s feminist leanings and their refusal to associate feminization with shame, this paper explores how they actually point to a hyper-patriarchal response from diasporic men intending to recover what they perceive as a damaged masculinity. With the aid of Sara Ahmed’s theories of affect as presented in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explore how these images become “sticky” objects through their constant circulation, and how the emotions “stuck” to them (such as a sense of pride, feminist politics, etc.) become harder to disassociate the more they are circulated. Focusing on ten specific images, I will use the works of Kathleen Stewart, Jonathan Flatley and Ahmed in affect theory in conjunction with the visual studies work of Roland Barthes and Gillian Rose to apply a feminist framework to analyzing the affective meaning and usage of these images of diasporic Iranian men in hejâb or châdor. I will also consider what an alternative response could have looked like, probing what a queering of Tavakoli’s image in châdor might look like and what that could have provided Iranian men in diaspora.

This paper explores the intersections of gender, nation, and historical time in Iraqi nationalist imaginations after the revolution of July 14, 1958. Its focal point is a famous public monument in Baghdad built by Iraqi artist Jawad Salim: Nasb al-Hurriyya or the Monument to Freedom, which was commissioned by the new regime shortly after the revolution. On one level, the work’s construction of a visual narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the revolution it produced is a remarkably literal illustration of the homogenous linear-historical time that Benedict Anderson tells us is a prerequisite for any national becoming. But on other levels, the monument points toward heterogeneous and non-linear temporal conceptions and experiences that may also be seen as constitutive of Iraqi nationhood. For example, sequences of masculine-linear time are interwoven with those of feminine-cyclical time to propel the ineluctable forward march of the nation’s pre-revolutionary history and, ultimately, the explosive and transcendent time of its revolution, which ruptures linearity and tears the (nationalist) past from the (developed) future. The paper draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of postcolonial heterotemporality to explore multiple ways of reading the monument’s representations of time, which I argue are more heterogeneous and ambivalent than previous scholars of the work have recognized. It also engages with Partha Chatterjee’s framework of “inner” and “outer” domains in anticolonial nationalism to look at some of the normative as well as creative aspects of Iraqi nationalist imaginings of femininity, masculinity, and childhood.

With the rise of contemporary Arab and Iranian art’s recognition in Western art markets, women photographers such as Shadi Ghadirian and Newsha Tavakolian are redefining the way Arab and Persian women are being represented and understood. While Ghadirian’s work tends towards the artistic, Tavakolian’s photography serves a more documentary purpose while retaining a distinct aesthetic. Both photographers blur the lines between artistry and documentary, challenging and probing the role of photography in their works. Ghadirian and Tavakolian's active construction and representation of women can be read as feminism, as these photographers and artists advocate varied and nuanced positions that resist normalizing and homogenizing reductions of women from the Muslim world. Viewers are confronted with scenes that profoundly disjoint expectations, including scenes that appear atemporal, juxtaposing the modern and the historical, unveiled women, and transgendered individuals. Photographs of veiled women are done in a provocative manner, wherein the women retain rather than lose power through the veil. These works also question the social constructions of gender roles, thus provoking shifts in the way audiences construe masculinity as well. In fact, Ghadirian’s portraits of her female subjects invokes elements of contemporary masculinity, while Tavakolian's complicates easy ideas of gender and Islam. Here, Fred Myers’ work on the discourses and role of acrylic paintings in the Australian context also provide helpful frameworks for analyses as these photographers’ work achieves more prominence and wider audiences in the art markets of New York, Paris and London. While studying these images and trying to extricate readings from them, this paper questions what advocacy is possible with photographs, that are composed or witnessed snapshots of one moment in time and viewed in another? This paper analyzes the ability of these photographers and their images to confront and provoke social issues, and the discourses created by the varying audiences of these works.

This paper examines how Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi’s photographs challenge traditional images of North African women in nineteenth-century Orientalist art and twentieth-century colonial photography. By re-defining and configuring the images of North African women in contemporary art, Essaydi debunks stereotypical images of Maghreb women while also creating a visual space and identity for artists such as herself who live and operate outside traditional North African societal and gender roles. Focusing on two of Essaydi’s photographic series, “Converging Territories” and “Les Femmes du Maroc,” I use these series to demonstrate how Essaydi’s photographs interrogate traditional depictions of North African women in visual culture. The fantasy-like stereotypes of Orientalist paintings exposed by Linda Nochlin in “The Imaginary Orient” are reconfigured “Les Femmes du Maroc,” as Essaydi clothes Ingres’ Grand Odalisque and the subjects of other famous Orientalist paintings in her re-casting of famous Western visions of exotic North African women. Likewise, in “Converging Territories,” Essaydi’s photographs of women in traditional scenes appear to re-imagine and dignify the women featured in twentieth-century Algerian colonial postcards while also questioning the traditional space and place of women in the harem problematized by Fatima Mernissi in 'Dreams of Trespass.' These confrontations and corrections are dramatized by Essaydi’s signature technique of covering her models and sets with layers of Arabic calligraphy executed in henna, employing traditional art and decorative forms to redefining traditional stereotypes. This subverted use of calligraphy is one of many ways Essaydi creates a space to reconsider the place and space of North African women in visual art. By giving the women words written across their clothing and faces they are nonetheless able to express themselves by “speaking” through the words written in henna. The calligraphy, which is Essaydi’s original poetry and prose, allows the artist an outlet for her own multi-faceted identity as a woman artist living and working outside the traditional spaces and places of women in North African society.