In Dariush Mehrjui’s 1990 cult classic Hamoun, a psychiatrist tells the wife of the titular character, “It’s common for all Iranian men to tyrannize.” Later in the film Hamoun’s mother in law adds to the charge, “you are like all men, egotistic and abusive.” This project considers the questions of abuse, tyranny, and egoism that run throughout a number of Iranian films in the post-war period in order to examine the relationship between masculinity, marriage, and childbearing. Divorce and male vulnerability are not uncommon themes in Iranian cinema, in order to examine the specific case of childbearing, this paper will first consider depictions of divorce and male fragility in Dariush Mehrjui’s Hamoun and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. In looking to these two films, of different generations and political viewpoints, this paper will to first examine representations of female disobedience and its impact on masculinity in Iranian film. It will then move to an analysis of Rasoul Molla-Ghollipour’s M is for Mother, a film in which the wife is exalted for her service to the country during the Iran-Iraq war and her determination to raise a disabled child. Specifically, this project asks, what impact does the birth of a disabled child have on the father’s conception of his own masculinity? Furthermore, is this crisis of masculinity predicated on the wife’s disobedience, the child’s existence, or simply the father’s egoism? This paper argues that no matter the cause, disability, especially of a son, appears to weaken the stature of the father in society. Further, Molla-Ghollipour’s film offers a moralistic critique of male selfishness and egoism as the cause of personal and social breakdown while deifying a certain type of self-sacrificing femininity as the salvation of nation and society.

In the middle of the 20th century, while recovering from WWII and the 1953 Coup, Iranian society was gripped in a stranglehold of occupation and semi-colonialism. During this extended upheaval, influential clerics, leftist organizations and the State worked to reconfigure hegemonic masculinity in relation to the State’s modernization project, the "Persio-Islamic" identity’s relationship to the “West”, and leftist discourse. Each front presented its version as the only legitimate form of masculinity and femininity. For each, the goal was neither to dismantle the existing patriarchy, nor to create gender equality, but to acquire or maintain power. Drawing upon Gramsci’s hegemonic framework, Connell’s masculinities studies and feminist studies, this paper illustrates how Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s irreverently detailed stories, autobiographical sketches and letters, expose the ruptures of gender hegemony. By narrating the vulnerability and violence of hegemonic masculinity as well as the complicated agency in the context of emphasized femininity, Al-e Ahmad’s writings reveal the struggles inherent in the re-negotiations of Iranian-Islamic Selves and the inconsistencies of the gender hegemony produced by leftist, religious, and state discourses. In 'The School Principal,' Al-e Ahmad recounts his year as principal, where he encounters a diverse group of struggling male teachers and, in the end, resigns after publicly beating up a student “accused” of homosexual acts. In 'Samanu-Cooking,' Al-Ahmad shares a memory, most likely from his childhood, where women gathered for a Samanu-cooking ceremony lament over their complicated lives and the devious acts of survival. Scholarship has established the deployment of gender and sexuality as tools of Iranian state building or resistance. Given Al-e Ahmad’s role as an organic intellectual, his writings– especially Gharbzadegi/Westoxification (1962)– have also been analyzed regarding their influence on the 1979 Revolution and the Islamic Republic’s efforts to push gender and sexuality back into private spheres. However, few scholars have analyzed the impact of Al-e Ahmad’s uninhibited narrations and personal letters on Pahlavi era hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. The false binary of Western/Eastern masculinity and femininity continue to persist despite the dangerous consequences of such divisions. It behooves us to re-examine the writings of Jalal Al-Ahmad who continues to be both lionized and condemned for his influence on “Eastern/Islamic” identity. By mapping out such ruptures, this paper takes another step toward dispelling the static presentation of masculinity/femininity.

Traditional urban tough guys in contemporary Iran, known as lats and lutis, constitute a part of the Iranian urban culture that presented an alternative understanding of Sharia Law. In their everyday life, these tough guys demonstrated a seemingly contradictory behavior as Muslims. They drank heavily, had extramarital relationships, and gambled frequently. Whereas all of these deeds are explicitly against Sharia Law, the tough guys still considered themselves religious. To address this apparent contradiction, I have conducted 20 in-depth interviews with Tehrani tough guys and informants about their pre-revolutionary lifestyle. Thereupon I argue that this stratum had developed a characteristic articulation of Islam essentially different from that of the clerics. For the tough guys, Islam is tantamount to a few particular Shia rituals, especially the Muharram mourning, and a deep respect for Shiite Imams, Imam Hussein and Imam Ali in particular. That is to say, praying and fasting that are the two main Islamic obligations for orthodox Muslims become peripheral for the tough guys’ religiosity. What is central to them, instead, is observing norms relevant to particular rituals. Whereas they tolerate someone missing a daily prayer or a day of fasting, they confront someone disrespecting the mourning ceremony by laughing or wearing flashy colors during Muharram. The same differential interpretation is observable in their treatment of haram (religiously forbidden) deeds. For instance, drinking Iranian traditional liquor (araq) by a Muslim tough guy is tolerable, while drinking French wine in a wine glass is not. To be more specific, a haram deed is not harmful to the tough guy religiosity necessarily. What makes it irreligious is its carrying a western ambience—an ambiance that does not fit the traditional tough guy culture. This study shows that producing alternative understandings of Islam is not only the task of intellectuals. Through a gradual historical process, laymen produce their own perception of religion in a way that it accommodates to the cultural nuances of their lives.

In one of his aphoristic contemplations on photography, Walter Benjamin stated that, “The illiteracy of the future,’ someone has said, will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.” The images of female-to-male corssdressing in Qajar photography may be said to perfectly exemplify Benjamin’s dictum. Upon looking at these often mesmerizing photographs some important questions emerge: what is the logic operative behind these photographs? Why did the women in these photographs dress in men’s clothing? What were the commercial circulation of these photographs, if any? And for whose gaze were such photographs staged? And perhaps most importantly, what are the gender and sexual dynamics operative in these photographs? In this article, some tentative answers will be provided to these questions, with the overarching argument that these photographs largely represent the preference for male homoeroticism in the Qajar sexual imaginary, typified by such terms as amrad (young adolescent male), ghilman (youth) and wildan (boys). Though the images of women crossdressing as young boys or youth represent them as the object of desire for adult males (mukhannas), and stages the notions of beauty intimately linked to the culture of male homoeroticism prevalent in Qajar society, yet in some of the photographs it can also gesture towards female masculinity and lesbianism in which women crossdress in male attire, both to be desired by women and as desiring subjects. The photographic images that will be analyzed here are drawn from the rich digital archive collection at Harvard, “Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran,” and still others from Persian textual sources. Many of the photographic images of female-to-male crossdressing fall within the sphere of male entertainment, such as prostitutes (rusbi) and musicians (motribs). There are photographs of women prostitutes corressdressing as boys/youth as well as musicians who are entertainers; they represent figures that entertain the male elite of Qajar society and the Qajar court. Among the anomalies and exceptions to this rule in the photographs is the figure of a young crossdressing female Babi warrior-commander in Qajar Iran, Zaynab, who did not crossdress in any of the above two senses, but rather as a figure who crossdressed as a man in order to fight the Qajar troops alongside her male co-religionists in Iran. Finally, what ties all the photographic images together is the marginalized status of these women in Qajar society.