Revolutionary Bodies

Technologies of Gender, Sex, and Self in Contemporary Iran

K. S. Batmanghelichi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350195387
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350050044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Gender and sexuality in modern Iran is frequently examined through the prism of nationalist symbols and religious discourse from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book, Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi takes a different approach, by interrogating how normative ideas of women's bodies in state, religious, and public health discourses have resulted in the female body being deemed as immodest and taboo.

Through a diverse blend of sources -a popular cultural women's journal, a red-light district, cases studies of temporary marriages, iconic public statues, and an HIV-AIDS advocacy organization in Tehran - this work argues that conceptions of gender and sexuality have been mediated in public discourse and experienced and modified by women themselves over the past thirty years of the Islamic Republic.

Expanding upon existing philosophical theory, technological research and scholarship on gender and sexuality in Iran, this book focuses much needed attention on under-studied, marginalized communities, such as widows living with HIV. This work interrogates how bodily technologies are constructed discursively and socially in Iran and the values and perspectives which are incorporated in them.

Chapter 1

Reform

An Art of Visual Persuasion

Did the 1979 Revolution mark a cessation or continuation of regulating women using certain bodily technologies for the purposes of reform and discipline? How women’s sexuality and femininity came to be regulated and desired in the policies and visual imagery of the Islamic Republic bore striking similarities to how they came to be reformed, disciplined, and conceptualized during the Pahlavi years. Identifying both unique and similar modes of regulation to corroborate this “un-transformative trajectory,” so to speak, is this chapter’s purpose. In emphasizing this continuous process, I discuss the state enterprise of transforming women and their bodies into malleable, consuming objects that require radical change—whether by a “Westernized” public culture during the Pahlavi regime or by Islamist ideology in the Islamic Republic. In this chapter, I document how this leitmotif formed well before 1979 as part of a routine reshaping of women’s desires, lifestyles, and femininity during the 1960s.

Hamid Dabashi and Peter Chelkowski examined the rich iconography of the Iranian Revolution in Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sorting through revolutionary slogans, banknotes, banners, posters, and other graphic material, they studied the integration of Shi’a beliefs in mobilizing massive protest politics, culminating in the end of the Pahlavi dynasty. Their project ignited a similar direction for this work, albeit one exhumed from a compelling single source: Zan-e Rouz, a popular Iranian women’s journal whose publication continued despite changing government regimes and editorial boards. Since its first issue in 1965, Zan-e Rouz’s history has spanned more than five decades. When the two manifestations of the journal (prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary) are analyzed as one archive, their evolution in content, visual presentation, and readership are read as a historic cache comprised of popular, typical, and illuminating images of continuous and not disparate periods of regulation.

The selection of photographs and articles from this journal shares informational, propagandist, comedic, consumerist, and pop-cultural characteristics. As a collection, they provide contrapuntal evidence to the idea that the Iranian woman underwent such a transformative overhauling in 1979. For, it is commonly held that this year marks the moment she comes into a revolutionary consciousness, abandoning her consumerist, sexualized ways for the persona of a pious, overtly sexless yet maternal woman of IRI. The evidence rouses other possibilities: studying photographs and articles in this influential magazine from 1965 to 1986 suggests that the transformations and subtle shifts in the concept of “Iranian women” were more unitary in presentation and message. In fact, throughout both regimes, women were presented as abstract, sexualized, consumerist, and desirous. More so, their reform was necessarily dependent on a vast enterprise of producing identifiable personality types consistent with the ideological agendas of each period. In many instances, women were encouraged to accept the novel reshaping of their bodies and the overhauling of their interests and identities as prerequisites for their entrance into a “better life.” This undertaking was initiated, defined, and refined through collaborative efforts of state institutions, with varied assistance from editorial boards of major magazines, to communicate to and convince a broad audience the necessity of modern progress, reform, and ideology.

Reviewing Zan-e Rouz in History

Ronald Inglehart and Wayne Baker note, “Well into the twentieth century, modernization was widely viewed as a uniquely Western process that non-Western societies could follow only in so far as they abandoned their traditional cultures and assimilated technologically and morally ‘superior’ Western ways.”¹ The Pahlavi regime “promoted a pseudo-modernist orientation that equated Westernization with modernization, and which increased technological, economic, political and cultural dependence upon the West.”² According to the modernization paradigm in which the Pahlavi-era project of reform operated, women had to become Westernized in order to be more socially desirable and acceptable. The process would necessitate their bodies’ submission to particular codes of conduct and styles of dress as an expression of the ideal and modern Iranian women.

The year 1965 marked Zan-e Rouz’s inaugural year of publication, when the weekly entered the panoply of print publications targeting female audiences and showcasing Iran’s modern course.³ The brainchild of journalist and editor in chief Majid Davami, its founding was closely tied to the auspicious growth of Kayhan (The Universe), an evening paper, which later became an institution and Davami a publishing magnate within a span of thirty years.⁴ Both Kayhan and Zan-e Rouz were financed by academic and newspaper publisher Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, a Sorbonne-trained jurisprudence scholar and former senator under Muhammad Reza Shah.⁵ Mesbahzadeh dreamed of turning Iran into a news-making, journalistic tour de force. He sought to cultivate an Iranian newspaper milieu in which Iranian publishers and journalists were no longer under pressure from pro-British and Soviet forces, which at the time were subsidizing the distribution and publication of many of Iran’s dailies.⁶ Kayhan distinctly reported on events important to Iran’s ruling constitutional monarchy, which simultaneously led to favorable advertisement for the Pahlavi regime.⁷ Through its domestic expansion, it evolved into a semiautonomous publishing company, known as the Kayhan Institute, which launched a range of magazines that targeted different generations and genders of audiences, in Iran and abroad.⁸ The English-language newspaper Kayhan International, created and based in London, was followed by Kayhan Varzeshi (Sport), Kayhan Farhangi (Cultural), and Kayhan Bacheha (Children).⁹ Zan-e Rouz was the last to be launched, focusing on a seemingly underrepresented audience within the general readership of Kayhan: Iranian women.¹⁰ As the authoritative older brother-figure to its lesser-known sister Zan-e Rouz, Kayhan Institute offered a ripe gestational space in which the women’s magazine would generate itself and find purpose. This business venture into female-targeted magazines proved fruitful. By 1979, the average circulation of Zan-e Rouz had reached 250,000 while newspaper Kayhan was reported at one million.¹¹

State-funded radio, television, and publishing¹² were key to this process of constructing desires for modern and upper-class lifestyles. The Pahlavi state seemed to be in “the mood of a consumption-oriented environment.”¹³ With the aid of advertising images, print, and broadcast media, the regime sought to emphasize raising Iranians’ “social knowledge” to enhance the public’s reception of its modernization policies.¹⁴ To do so would involve an overt collaboration among government, consumerist, and corporate interests.¹⁵ Investing in the publishing industry, for example, meant that the government would not only become a substantial source of revenue for magazines, but it would also dictate the limit and scope of their editorial content—likely an important factor for editors in the decision-making process about featured content at magazines like Zan-e Rouz.¹⁶ Underlining this union of forces was the threat of financial doom, which bore consequences for news editors and influenced magazine content and editorial direction. Haleh Esfandiari recalled this very tension in her memoir. Reflecting on her tenure as a journalist at Kayhan, she wrote, “The government was a source of advertising revenue, and it set policies that could affect everything from Kayhan’s ability to purchase newsprint abroad to Mesbahzadeh’s considerable land holdings. Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter.”¹⁷

As a popular magazine under the direct guidance and sponsorship of the royal family, Zan-e Rouz operated in part as a state ideological outlet to construct a consumer society, meaning that a highly stylized femininity and sexuality went hand in hand with Pahlavi Iran’s paradigm of modernity. Although first identifying itself as a journalistic space dedicated to improving Iranian women’s social and political status, Zan-e Rouz’s editorial board soon clarified its ultimate purpose and direction: Several issues after its launch, the magazine’s content began to highlight more fashion and popular culture; their advertisements featured household commodities and beauty regimens. This about-face was deliberate in the context of a reform-minded Pahlavi leadership. The intention was to quickly develop Iran into a modern, capitalist society, moving away from its agrarian roots and promoting education, literacy, development, and economic restructuring via a fourteen-year reform program the Shah called the Enqelab-e Safid (White Revolution). Images of gleaming kitchen appliances, perfumes, makeup, and fashionable European clothes were described as basic commodities meant to achieve a modern Iran. This aspect of commodity culture helped construct cultural ideas about modern lifestyle, self-improvement, glamour, and how things should be.¹⁸ Zan-e Rouz positioned itself within the glitz and glamour of an advertising, celebrity cosmos.¹⁹ Beauty advertisements selling products from Germany and America were plentiful, supplementing articles on self-improvement and the rising stardoms of actresses Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor. There were feature articles on hairstyle trends, from the beehive to the bouffant styles, offering advice to readers on the most appropriate occasions to wear them.²⁰ Women were similarly advised on how to better maintain their skin, via the application of requisite vitamins and creams, to ensure a dewy, youthful appearance.²¹ A woman’s public image and body image awareness were consistent themes in Zan-e Rouz’s prerevolutionary days.²² In the late 1970s, there appeared to be even more articles on beauty maintenance, body language, and etiquette.

This enterprise of modernization necessarily entailed reforming men’s and women’s desires and interests. Hence in order to cultivate the concept of a “modern Iranian woman,” magazine content, including advertisements and feature articles, were central to reorienting women’s manner and style of dress, or their social habits. However, to humanize this message for female audiences, enter Her Royal Highness, Shahbanu.

Emancipating Women through Shahbanu’s Image

Since the Constitutional Revolution (in Persian Enqelab-e Mashruteh, 1905–11), a new formation of the model Iranian citizen was being constructed and subsequently promoted among the country’s diverse population of Azeris, Baluchs, Persians, Kurds, and many others.²³ Under the realm of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the father of Muhammad Reza, the authorities amplified their communications to Iranians the characteristics of a modern lifestyle, calling attention to Western fashions, motherhood roles, and household responsibilities. This articulation of modern life was wrapped in women’s citizenship duties to the nation-state. In a modernized Iran, tribal and spousal affiliations were secondary and tertiary identity markers; instead, women owed their progress and allegiance to a larger institution, the Iranian state.

By the mid-1960s the Pahlavi family with Muhammad Reza at the helm had initiated both extensive reforms and a countrywide campaign promoting their imperial heritage as successors to dynastic conquerors of Asia Minor from the sixth century BCE.²⁴ The Shah and his third childbearing wife Farah Pahlavi—Shahbanu (meaning “Empress,” a Sassanid title), as she was called by the moniker-loving Iranian press—co-opted the majestic narrative of Cyrus the Great—acclaimed hero of the Achaemenid Empire—to promote this royal lineage to the Iranian public.²⁵ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Reform: An Art of Visual Persuasion
• Chapter 2 Red-Lights in Parks: A Social History of Park-E Razi
• Chapter 3 Safety Valves and Postrevolutionary “Prostitution”
• Chapter 4 Naked Modesty and the Reformation of Statues
• Chapter 5 When HIV/AIDS Meets Government Morality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright