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University of California Press

Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards

Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity

by Afsaneh Najmabadi (Author)
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Apr 2005
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 377
ISBN: 9780520931381

About the Book

Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.

About the Author

Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, is author of The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (1998), among other books.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Beauty, Love, and Sexuality
1. Early Qajar
2. Nineteenth-Century Transformations
Part II. Cultural Labor of Sexuality and Gender
3. The Eclipse of the (Fe)Male Sun
4. Vatan, the Beloved; Vatan, the Mother
5. Women's Veil and Unveil
6. The Tragedy of Romantic Marriage
7. Crafting an Educated Wife and Mother
8. Women or Wives of the Nation?
Epilogue: Feminism and Its Burden of Birth
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Credits
Index

Reviews

“Breaks new ground in both perspective and subject matter.”
International Journal of Middle East Studies
“An amazing book, this product of years of research and thinking takes analysis of gender, nation, and modernity to new levels. Afsaneh Najmabadi courageously incorporates examination of sexuality, sexual preferences, and concepts of sexual attractiveness into her textual study of the project of Iranian modernization through heteronormalization."
American Historical Review
"Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity is a courageous historiography of gender and homoerotic desires as the foci of modernity in Iran from the eighteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century. \"
Journal of the History of Sexuality
"In her study of Iranian modernity, Afsaneh Najmabadi queers Islamic history in the best sense of the term."
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
" By incorporating a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, becomes an endeavor to understand modern Iranian culture and to show that 19th century Iran was shaped by the transformation of gender and sexuality."
Middle East Journal
"This book is groundbreaking, at once highly original, courageous, and moving. It is sure to have a tremendous impact in Iranian studies, modern Middle East history, and the history of gender and sexuality."—Beth Baron, author of Egypt as a Woman

"This is an extraordinary book. It rereads the story of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality in ways that no other scholars have done."—Joan W. Scott, author of Gender and the Politics of History

Awards

  • 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize 2006, American Historical Association