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• W1063399335 abstract "In 1985 Faridun (later Maryam) Mulkara’s effective lobbying of the religious-political establishment in Iran culminated in a fatwa by none other than Ayatollah Khomeini sanctioning sex reassignment surgery. Transsexuality, which had been a topic of curiosity and fascination approached through notions of natural occurrences, insanity, or deviance, now entered the legal and medical discourse. Merging Islamic jurisprudence with sexology and psychiatry, Khomeini’s edict had important repercussions on the history and production of modern subjectivity in Iran, on the role of Islam as an epistemological discipline, and on the relation between the law and social perceptions. Equally important in this event was the activism of Mulkara, who brazenly met Khomeini to make her case.What appears as a top-down ruling by Iran’s supreme leader was in fact the outcome of a network of forces with a long and intricate history involving acts of translation, jurisprudential opinion, social prejudice, transsexual activism, media sensationalism, and scientific theories that Afsaneh Najmabadi expounds on in her fascinating and groundbreaking study Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Najmabadi sets out to explain and understand how transsexuality is produced through diagnostic mechanisms adopted by the state but also through personal narratives of transsexual persons. She examines the way state-sanctioned transsexuality, which continues to be stigmatized in Iranian society, intersects with forms of identification, including gay and lesbian. To examine case studies and medical discourses, Najmabadi went to Iran to meet transsexual persons, activists, religious scholars, and psychiatrists and psychologists. Bringing her own subject position into the research, Najmabadi listened, observed, confronted, and challenged opinions, arguments, and rulings. Her multifaceted engagement, which ended up repositioning her research questions, presents the topic in all its complexity. The feat of this book is precisely this openness to recognizing that just as these models of subjectivity are produced at the intersection of multiple social and political forces, so is the academic research that draws on its interpretative power yet confronts and criticizes its own limitation. Najmabadi’s analytic voice and her physical presence in the text, journeying from the United States to Tehran to Qum and from transsexual support group meetings to psychiatric clinics, systematically shape the book’s argument and rework its frame. The end result is a brilliant work that opens the field of gender and sexuality studies in the Middle East to hitherto unexplored methodological and intellectual dimensions.Najmabadi traces the Iranian modern medical discourse on inter-, homo-, and transsexuality from the beginning of the twentieth century, reading it at the intersection of scientific development and popular fascination. Najmabadi argues that, though deemed unethical by the Iranian psychiatric establishment in 1976, sex reassignment operations were conducted in Iran well before Khomeini’s fatwa. This aligns the social and legal issues involved in sex reassignment, for instance, marriage and service in the army, and anchors contemporary debates in ongoing concerns that continue to shape, accept, and push against the rule of the medicolegal establishment. While Michel Foucault fixes forms of discursive production through sexual disciplining and medicalization in the context of a homogeneous institution involving hospitals, courts, and scientific communities, Najmabadi examines the history of sexuality in Iran by assuming that the institution is not one with itself, rigid, or oblivious to critique, lobbying, and negotiation. It is by unfixing the institution that a more complex picture emerges, allowing us to understand the relation between Islamic jurisprudence and psychiatric and medical discourse, scientific and medical theories, and localized scientific and pseudoscientific practices. Her reading systematically undoes the binary of the modern and the traditional, or the view that somehow state-sanctioned sex reassignment surgery is merely an attempt to eliminate and purify society from deviance and homosexuality.Providing a queer history of modern Iran and engaging its mutations and transformations in recent times, Najmabadi focuses on the filtering processes adopted by the psychiatric clinics working under the jurisdiction of the state that seek to determine whether sex reassignment operations are necessary. In the process “trans” and “homosexual” are produced in part through interviews and committee evaluations that confer the legitimacy required by the law. Najmabadi highlights as well the importance of transsexual self-cognition attributed to personal choice and social and family situation. The way transsexual identity emerges tells us more about the complex and asymmetrical power relations that tie together the state (religious, medical, and legal apparatuses) and the individual. Getting the sex reassignment operation earns the individual legal status but not social acceptability. This important difference between legality and acceptability and the importance of agency, choice, and class considerations all come into play to complicate the interpretative model that comes to us from discourse analysis.Expecting to encounter the Foucauldian panoptical state, Najmabadi identifies a multiplicity of psychological and psychiatric approaches practiced at different centers and clinics. She also presents differing religious opinions that seek to justify the legalization of sex reassignment surgery. For instance, in chapter 5 Najmabadi recounts her fascinating discussion with Ayatollah Kariminia, one of the main jurisprudential authorities on transsexuality at Qum. She met him on several occasions and engaged him about the potentials and limits of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) in interpreting questions related to sex and gender. Najmabadi shows that despite the lack of agreement in the religious community about transsexuality, the justifications and incorporation of its legalization following Khomeini’s fatwa open the door to another important question, homosexuality in Islam. Since transsexuality, though “unnatural,” has become legal (and thus naturalized in Foucault’s sense) and since transsexuality and homosexuality have been conjoined discursively and in practice throughout Iran’s modern history, then would homosexuality be naturalized as well? In other words, what are the implications of legalizing sex reassignment surgery on the very idea of nature, disorder, deviance, ethics, and political authority? In this sense the examination of the trans/homo debate and history is a way not only to understand their difference or commonality but to see how religious, scientific, and social perceptions and practices mesh and collide.The stakes of Najmabadi’s research go to the heart of the formation of modern subjectivity in a cultural and historical setting that does not fit neatly into the way modernity has been understood and theorized. Professing Selves is not merely a study of the discursive production of subjectivity through modernity’s challenge to and displacement of tradition. Instead, subjectivity is shown to arise from complex and hard-to-categorize social and political interactions involving modes of performativity and daily practices—phenomena that require the scholar to be there, engage, argue, and err to capture them. The ethnographic encounter, dismissed by postcolonial and poststructuralist critics as reenacting the disavowal of the Orientalist gaze through a metaphysics of presence, returns in Najmabadi’s work—through her return to Iran after twenty years—as a mature, critical, engaged, discerning (tashkhis), and humanizing process. This intersubjective engagement with the other in all its materiality, complexity, and contradictions is brought to light in a fascinating and sensitive read. Professing Selves is required reading for those working on gender and sexuality studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic contexts but also for those working on queer and feminist theory and history, psychology and psychiatry, medical and cultural anthropology, Islamic jurisprudence, and Middle Eastern studies." @default.
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• W1063399335 title "Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iranby Afsaneh Najmabadi" @default.
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