Minoo Moallem, "Passing, Politics and Religion"
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Passing and the Disorder of Things

Marmoulak is not the only movie where passing is used to interrogate the notion of visual performance and its epistemological assurance. A number of Iranian films use passing to provide space for the suspension of an ethical judgment based on a dualistic moral framework. Several recent Iranian movies have used categorical transitions to interrogate social borders and boundaries. These movies create tension and conflict through miscategorization, displacement, mimicry, and duplicity, revealing social scripts and cultural meanings that shape identity. Elsewhere, I have extensively discussed a number of films, including Under the Moonlight (directed by Reza Mirkarimi), which depicts Hassan, a young religious student who, in order to become a clergy member, passes as the brother of a prostitute and a friend to a thief and an entertainer; Daughters of the Sun (Maryam Shahriari), tells the story of Amangol, a village girl whose parents decide to cross-dress her so she can live and work in a carpet-weaving workshop; Adam Barfi (Davoud Mirbagheri), centers on a displaced Iranian man who cross-dresses to obtain a visa to migrate to the West[14]; and finally, Leili Is with Me (Kamal Tabrizi) is about Iran-Iraq war movies where passing is used to display and deconstruct the dichotomy of civilian and warrior by highlighting its ideological, political, and cultural constructions[15].

There are also a number of more recent movies that continue to employ passing to discuss issues of citizenship.[16] The most recent examples include Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006), about a group of Iranian girls who disguise themselves as boys so they can enter Tehran's Azadi Stadium to watch a big football match; Baran (Majid Majidi, 2001), another movie that focuses on the story of a female Afghani refugee who passes as a male worker called Rahamat to work in a construction site; and finally Maxx (Saman Moghadam, 2005), a comedy about an exiled Iranian pop singer who mistakenly passes for an Iranian diasporic classical musician and gets invited to go back to Iran to give a performance. While both Offside and Baran focus on gender passing, Maxx transgresses the boundaries of boroun marzi (outside the border) and daroun marzi (within the border) cultural productions and brings the abjectified culture of prerevolutionary popular urban music or kooche va bazaar (street and bazaar)—banned by the Islamic Republic—into the Islamic nation-state, opening up space for audiences to take pleasure in vulgar, sexually playful, and witty kooche va bazaar music in the public venue of the concert hall.[17] In all these movies, passing intervenes in the settled moments of national unity, where identity is performed through techniques of appearing, and opens up space for an interrogation of what is absent from view or what is made invisible.

All these films depict subject positions that are incomplete, disintegrated, or divided between criminality and religiosity, masculinity and femininity, warrior citizen and civilian citizen, popular and elite, and secular and religious. The narrative of these films disrupts the political order by binding audiences to stories that are open not only to interpretation, but also to political and cultural negotiations. Indeed, the application of passing enables these films to show that both gender and national identities are deeply embedded in cultural and ideological constructs and are manipulated by social subjects.

In the Iranian films, comedy as a genre has allowed a place for the visual and textual depiction of forbidden issues. Humor and satire are popular ways of speaking about prohibited or taboo issues, from the cultural and the social to the political in the Iranian culture. People use mimicry to tell ethnic and sexual jokes by imitating different accents and by transcoding sexual and political taboos. Satire continues to be—formally or informally—an important part of Iranian political and cultural life, in forms of poetry, films, jokes, and idiomatic expressions. This comedic form also plays an important role in challenging the social order by creating space for social tolerance vis-à-vis what is different, perverse, or prohibited. Jokes with political and sexual content are constantly made and circulated. With the expansion of the new media technologies, cellular phones have facilitated the circulation of jokes, especially political humor. Comedy as a genre in theatre and film continues to be important regardless of political censorship. While tragedy as a genre, both in Iranian epic or Shia narrative of Karbala parable[18], has been central to the construction of an Islamic national identity since the Iranian revolution of 1979, comedy remains a rather flexible and fluid genre that brings to the surface everyday forms of stereotyping and misunderstandings, and also counters and transgresses normative values and acts. While tragedy as a genre gained more purchase in the Iranian political life after the revolution of 1979, comedy has continued to be an important venue for film and TV sitcoms to scrutinize everyday life and to reach out to various audiences especially those who are located in small towns and rural areas.[19]

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