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Professing Selves PROFESSING SELVES transsexuality and same-sex desire in contemporary iran Afsaneh Najmabadi PROFESSING SELVES PROFESSING SELVES TranssexualiTy and same-­Sex desire in ConTemporary iran Afsaneh Najmabadi Duke University Press Durham and London 2014 © 2014 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾. Cover design by Amy Ruth Buchanan. Book interior design by Courtney Leigh Baker. Typeset in Scala by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Professing selves : transsexuality and same- sex desire in contemporary Iran / Afsaneh Najmabadi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5543- 4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5557- 1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Transsexualism—Iran. 2. Sex change—Iran. 3. Gender identity—Iran. i. Title. hq77.95.i7n35 2013 306.76′80955—dc23 2013025248 For Farshideh ConTenTs Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 01 Entering the Scene 15 02 “Before” Transsexuality 38 03 Murderous Passions, Deviant Insanities 75 04 “Around” 1979: Gay Tehran? 120 05 Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith 163 06 Changing the Terms: Playing “Snakes and Ladders” with the State 202 07 Living Patterns, Narrative Styles 231 08 Professing Selves: Sexual/Gender Proficiencies 275 Glossary of Persian Terms and Acronyms 303 Notes 305 Works Cited 373 Index 389 aCknowledgmenTs This book owes an existential debt to Farshideh Mirbaghdadabadi, a dear friend for many decades who warmly embraced me into her household as I began to spend long periods of time in Tehran, my base for this research. When I re- turned to Tehran in 2005, I had not been there for twenty-five years. The Teh- ran of 2005 was a vastly different city from the Tehran of 1980. Farshideh’s affectionate generosity made that return possible and delightful. She enabled me to build new connections, find friendships, and become re- embedded in the networks of a city where I had been born and lived the first two decades of my life. As important, her intellectual engagement with my research was invaluable: She listened patiently, on a regular basis, to my daily accounts of what I had observed, what had distressed, angered, and surprised me. Our conversations over tea, sangak bread, cheese, and walnuts allowed me to pro- cess my thinking and write more articulate “field notes.” Her multiple social networks—she seemed to know anybody and everybody I would mention as a potential research lead—put me at the center of complicated webs of social actors to whom I needed to connect. How does one say thank you? No less existential is the debt of this book to the trans persons, gays, and lesbians in several cities in Iran during 2006–7 who accepted me into their confidence, circles of socialization, and domains of living. This research and my understanding of practices of daily life in this realm were enabled by their generosity and trust. Several persons with whom I worked closely allowed their names to be used; many more did not. At the end, given the tight circles of so- cialization within which all circulated, I opted to name none and instead to use made- up names throughout this work. Should they read this book, I suspect, despite the many changes of minor specifics, they would recognize themselves and each other from the stories narrated. It is hard to find the right words to express the depth of my debt and gratitude to you all. I also would like to thank numerous journalists and filmmakers and the medical, psychiatric, health, legal, and jurisprudential professionals who gave generously of their time and attention, in particular Dr. Arash Alaei, Dr. Yahya Behjatnia, Dr. Mehrdad Eftekhar, Mitra Farahani, Hamid Farzadi, Nazila Fathi, Hujjat al- Islam Muhammad Mahdi Karimi- nia, Negin Kianfar, Dr. Faridun Mehrabi, Dr. Bahram Mirjalali, Dr. Mohammad Reza Moham- madi, Ms. Mohseni- nia, Nahaleh Moshtagh, Dr. Behnam Ohadi, Ms. Pahla- vani, Dr. Mahdi Saberi, Dr. Mehrzad Seraji, Mr. Taghizadeh, Dr. Usku’i, and Mr. Zamani. Special mention is owed Ramyar Rossoukh. In my initial ventures into anthropological fieldwork and reflection, especially when I first arrived in -Teh ran, I benefited enormously from conversations with him. Other friends in Tehran who made my life pleasurable during the work of this book include Kaveh Najmabadi, Iraj Nobahari, Susan Parvar, Shahla Sherkat, and Mahdieh Zohdi. Thank you all. The book also owes a formative debt to numerous conversations with col- leagues, friends, students, and discussants who commented on various pre- sentations of ideas related to this book: Kathryn Babayan, Claudia Castañeda, Steve Caton, Kathy Coll, Ken Cuno, Alireza Doostdar, Brad Epps, Kouross Es- maeli, Michael Fischer, Behrooz Ghamari- Tabrizi, David Halperin, Jennifer Hamilton, Valerie Hoffman, Ana Huang, Abbas Jaffer, Rebecca Jordan- Young, Natalie Kampen, Deniz Kandiyoti, Dina al- Kassim, Katherine Lemons, Heather Love, Jared McCormick, Asha Nadkarni, Mark Overmyer- Vélazquez, Jyoti Puri, Leyla Rouhi, Sahar Sadjadi, Sylvia Schafer, Cyrus Schayegh, Svati Shah, Sima Shakhsari, Pat Simons, Aisha Sobh, Mary Strunk, Susan Stryker, Banu Subramaniam, Judith Surkis, and Dror Ze’evi. Special thanks to my other colleagues and friends at Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, working with whom makes difficult days pleasurable—Robin Bern- stein, Alice Jardine, Caroline Light, Christianna Morgan, Amy Parker, Sarah Richardson, and Linda Schlossberg—and to Cory Paulsen and Janet Hatch from the history department, who were always there to help me figure out many ins and outs of the university. Seminars at which I presented talks and papers based on various parts of x aCknowledgmenTs this research and writing provided me with numerous occasions that helped me to clarify and articulate my arguments, and I am deeply thankful to those who extended these invitations and engaged me in the ensuing conversations: Barnard College, Columbia Law School Feminist Theory workshop, Dalhousie University, several campuses affiliated with the Greater Philadelphia Women’s Studies Consortium, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University (Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Humanities Center’s Gender and Sexuality Seminar), Princeton University, Simon Fraser University, the Social Research conference, Stanford University, Tehran University, the University of Arizona, the University of California (Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, and Los Ange- les), the University of Connecticut, the University of Delaware, the University of Illinois, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Michi- gan, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Washington, Wellesley Col- lege, Williams College, and Yale University. My deepest gratitude to Reza Salami for his unfailing research assistance, providing me with much of the archival material without which I could not have done this work. Likewise, I have been fortunate to have had several com- petent and reliable research assistants in these years: Elizabeth Angowski, Mahzad Eliasi, Mary Farag, Amirali Ghiassi, Anoushe Modarresi, Rebecca Stengel, Ali Akbar Vatandoost, and Kirsten Wesselhoeft. I am grateful also to the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction for permis- sion to use their archives, to Farid Ghassemlou at the Library of Iran’s Academy of Medical Sciences, and to members of the staff at the periodical section of the National Library of Iran. Claudia Castañeda was enormously helpful with readings of early drafts, numerous conversations, and editorial suggestions. The final version of this book benefited enormously from the editorial work of Hope Steele. I would like to thank them as well as my editors at Duke University Press, Courtney Berger and Christine Choi. I could not have asked for better readers of my manuscript than the two selected by the Press. I received incredibly insightful and helpful commentary. Thank you. My deepest appreciation goes to Maryam Momeni for her invaluable assistance with proofreading. I wish to thank the Harvard Historical Series for granting me a publication subvention, and Dean Michael Smith of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University for research support. And now for the proverbial last but truly not least. In the years of working on this book I was facing life in the shadow of the loss of several loved ones, especially my mother, Farkhoneh Khanum Sohrabi, and my close friend, Par- aCknowledgmenTs xi vin Paidar. Without the supportive affective net provided by my beloved friends and family, I would have lost my bearings in life: Naghmeh Sohrabi, Bushra Makiya, Naseem Makiya, and Kanan Makiya—thank you. A note on transliteration: I have used the Library of Congress system as modified by International Journal of Middle East Studies, without diacritics ex- cept for ‘ (‘ayn) and ’ (hamzah). All translations and transliterations are mine, except when the choice of the proper name transliteration of persons could be ascertained. xii aCknowledgmenTs inTroduCTion Something happened in 2003–4: Transsexuals and transsexuality in Iran be- came a hot media topic, both in Iran and internationally. The biomedical practice of sex change by means of surgery and hormonal treatment in Iran dates at least to the early 1970s; for nearly four decades the topic received occasional coverage in the Iranian press. But Iranian press cover- age of the “trans” phenomenon increased sharply in early 2003, and it con- tinued to
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