Sigheh or Mut’a marriage (temporary marriage), which is a pre-Islamic custom practiced by the Iranian Twelver Shi’is, is an alliance that was common at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and is believed to have been sanctioned in the Qur’an. However, there are numerous debates about the practice of temporary marriages as Sunni schools condemn it and believe that the prophet and later the second Caliph banned it; whereas, the Shi’i Muslims still practice it to this day. Although compared to permanent marriage (Nikah), temporary marriage gives a degree of sexual freedom to women, the gender roles – female/passive and male/active – are still dominant and women who enter a temporary marriage are “otherized” and situated at the margins of the society. In this paper, I explore the way Ebrahim Golestan in his 1967 short story “‘Esmat’s journey” (Safar-i ‘Esmat”) sketches the transformation of a “repentant whore” from prostitution to temporary marriage with the help of a young sayyid. During these temporary contracts, ‘Esmat is expected to serve the sexual needs of her customers –largely clerics and religious sects in the shrine – under the sanctity of religion; not much different from what she did before repentance. I argue that since liminal experiences shape our social and cultural boundaries, the self (the sayyid) and the Other (‘Esmat as a prostitute), the center and the periphery depend on each other. And since the self and the Other are interdependent, and the Other is both socially despised and desired, the self/Other dyad is an integral part of the dominant culture’s social imaginary. Thus, the Other – in this case ‘Esmat – is simultaneously in the periphery and center of society as she is both despised and desired, both at the margins and the center. By looking at the socio-cultural and political changes of the 1960s in terms of Iranian women’s emancipation and sexual liberation, I also address the question whether religious sanctioning of temporary marriage helps diminish the stigma and creates a more egalitarian perspective, or whether it perpetuates the victimization of women under the facade of religious regulation.

In this paper, I propose to examine the internationally celebrated visual art and films of Shirin Neshat, with a particular focus on how the Iranian-American filmmaker’s first feature film Women Without Men (2009) constructs representations of Middle Eastern masculinity. An award-winning film that premiered at the Venice Film festival, Women Without Men is an adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel of the same name, which was banned by the Iranian government in the mid-1990s. The film was shot in Morocco, with Casablanca as Tehran in 1953 when a British and American-backed coup d’état removed the democratically-elected government. The plot revolves around four female protagonists, who seem to find themselves “without men,” as illustrated by the title of the film. Most of the film’s narrative takes place in an allegorical garden where the four women gather to escape from their oppressive circumstances. Whereas the absence of men is a unique characteristic of the film, masculinity is in the backdrop, occupying a central place, as the passage of men in each one of the women’s lives has left indelible traces. In this analysis, I examine the absent presence of masculinity as it appears in the film and identify the various representations deployed to visually rewrite a page of history. Drawing from postcolonial theory, I examine the film’s construction of Muslim and Middle Eastern masculinity. I additionally incorporate comments and observations derived from an interview I conducted with the artist, as needed. I argue that the film re-centres gender dynamics and deploys several discursive tactics in order to forge an aesthetic of contestation. It is produced in the unique style of magic realism, which enables divergent messages to break through and become available. The main creative energy of Women Without Men is located in its visual appeal, thereby providing access for the circulation of alternative messages.

As a child, I witnessed firsthand the Iranian 1979 revolution, the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, and the conflicts between Islamic government and its opponents on the streets in 1981-1982 with tragic consequences for the participants in these events and their families. As a teenager, I experienced a noticeable shrinking of the power of my parents, especially of my father’s, and a greater influence of the social and political factors in the life of my family. Despite my parents’ will, I participated in political activities against the Islamic government through which I, in fact, rebelled against parental control, although in the end was defeated and obliged to return to my parents’ home. My experience of family crisis was not an exception; it was a shared experience among a large number of Iranians. I argue that these family crises were undesirable consequences of the contradictions between the quest for modernity, freedom, political power, as well as family structure in post-revolutionary Iran. My project draws on my premise that our revolutionary resistance against our parents’ authorities, against family norms, and against the religious and political control which dominated our everyday lives could be considered as a part of our struggle for achieving modernity. This revolutionary situation led most Iranian fiction writers to attempt to represent the complexity of Iranians’ struggle for modernity through family crises in their works. In this paper, I explore literary representations of family contradictions in post-revolutionary Persian fiction and memoirs with keen eyes on Iranians’ lives, cultural values, social transformations, and the political struggles of the community. Regarding the methodology of this research, I offer a discourse analysis based on the shared indications of family crises in selected fictions and memoirs. I first explore shared indicators in selected Persian novels such as Colonel by Mahmoud Dawlatabadi, Edrisis’ House by Ghazaleh Alizadeh, Courage of Love by Shariar Mandanipour, and Memories of the Jail by Shahrnush Parsipour. I deconstruct the indicators into manageable categories based on social and political events, fictional devices, and the texts’ protagonists’ individual actions. Second, I reconstruct the texts and identify the characteristics of the family crises based on Iran’s post-revolutionary history. Third, I return to the main subject of this research and analyze the relationship between family crisis and Iranians’ struggles for modernity as it is represented in post-revolutionary Persian fiction.