Can the Memoirist Speak? Representing Iranian Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Recent Popular and Scholarly Publications

Can the Memoirist Speak? Representing Iranian Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Recent Popular and Scholarly Publications Roshanak Kheshti Books Discussed in This Article Between WarriorBrotherand Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patri archy in Iran. By Minoo Moallem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Rethinking Global Sisterhood: WesternFeminism and Iran. By Nima Naghibi. Minneap olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Displaced Allegories:Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. By Negar Mottahedeh. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Women withMustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties ofIranian Moder nity.By Afsaneh Najmabadi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. hlamicate Sexualities: Translationsacross Temporal Geographies of Desire. Edited by Kath ryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. By Janet Afary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Passionate Uprisings:Iran's Sexual Revolution. By Pardis Mahdavi. Palo Alto, CA: Stan ford University Press, 2008. Feminist Studies38, no. 1 (Spring 2012). (c) 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 50 Roshanak Kheshti 5i An understanding of the contemporary relations of power and of the West ern intellectual's role within them, requires an examination of the inter section of a theory of representation and the political economy of global capitalism... The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with "woman" as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish. -Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak" in Marxism and the Interpretationof Culture What is the "circumscribed task" of the female Iranian intellectual? Haunted by the echoes of Orientalism, contemporary forms of Islamopho bia, and a complex of overlapping patriarchies, she is dealt a heavy burden of representation. In particular, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, the intellec tual must undertake a necessary engagement with global capitalism, since "Western intellectual production is, in many ways, complicit with Western international economic interests." 1 This observation holds true even in the context of diasporic, Third World feminist intellectual production if it is just as easily instrumentalized in the contemporary multicultural land scape. Spivak's words ring especially true in the context of recent publi cations by Iranian feminist scholars working on cjuestions of gender and sexuality in Iran. Iran occupies a mystified place in the Western cultural imagination, constructed as an object of fascination and contempt, desire and disgust. This mystification has simultaneously driven scores of audiences to art house cinemas in search of authentic depictions of the state oppression of contemporary Iranians, while it has also inspired economic sanctions and threats of war against the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Liber als and academics alike-from Sean Penn to Michel Foucault-have been allured by this mystification, drawn like many to the nation's 1979 revo lution and its most recent so-called "Green Movement" as paradigmatic events claimed as universally relevant exceptions to hegemonic political formations (the former), or as emblematic struggles for democracy (the latter). 52 Roshanak Kheshti This mystification is in part due to a long Orientalist and Middle Eastern area studies legacy, which laid the groundwork for the means by which Iran is represented in the media and understood within the Western political imagination today. As several of the authors whose work I review here point out, a concern for "women" emerged early on among West ern women travelers who produced travelogues or missionaries who were eager to document women's social roles.2 And, as Minoo Moallem points out, this was continued through the postwar growth of Middle Eastern studies, which aided in "the upholding of masculinist and Orientalist traditions of knowledge formation in the field" (19). The books I examine here generally agree on one thing: at the heart of Iran's mystique lies an anxiety regarding gender and sexuality. This anxiety emerges organically from this Orientalist legacy through which the region it occupies and the majority religion that dominates the region - Islam - have been constructed. But in combination with Iran's recent polit ical history-which includes an early-twentieth-century constitutional revolution, a mid-century British and American sponsored coup d'etat that overthrew a democratically elected prime minister, and the late twentieth-century

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