Minoo Moallem, "Passing, Politics and Religion"
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Citizenship as the Combination of Opposites

Since the Iranian Revolution, the media has continued to function as a major site of both state and civil society investments. Visual media and communication technologies in the life of Iranians, both in Iran and in various diasporic locations, have expanded notions of citizenship, both political and cultural. Also, because of the political restrictions in public spaces in Iran, the media has functioned as a major site of social negotiations, cultural discussions, and political interventions. Journals, newspapers, visual media, and popular magazines, more than academic or political publications, have been effective in intervening in the political sphere. Moreover, media and information technologies have been crucial in the emergence of a transnational nationalism among Iranians, helping to create unified notions of Iranian or Persian identity regardless of differences in location.

Information technologies, in this case the medium of film, function as a disciplinary force in "narrating the nation," yet the possibility of making successive shots with contrasting and contradicting narrative effects and the practice of duplicity and passing serve to unsettle Islamic nationalist and normative discourses. Here I use the word passing in reference to a criminal who dresses up as a clergyman and gains access to the mosque and to religious sermons. In this case, vision opens up space for temporary ruptures of religious and secular nationalist notions, as well as gendered and class-based meanings and tropes. These ruptures also take the idea of modern and imperial notions of identity as dichotomous to its limits.

The implication of passing in Iranian political discourse is significant because the current discourse both in Iran and in the diaspora have produced citizen-subjects that are seen, or self-perceived, as belonging to one side or the other of certain impenetrable binaries. This problem has significantly impacted the cultural and political spheres of representation. For example, while the modernist and secularist bias in the sphere of cultural representation keeps referring to the Iranian clergy as the 'other' of the secular and the modern, in reality and on the ground, what distinguishes various groups of people, both men and women, is not their religious or secular appearances, especially when it comes to the dress code, but rather their conservative or reformist political agenda.[40] Indeed, I argue that the dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/religious, and respectable/outlaw, which are based on modern regimes of visibility and corporeality, have been crucial in influencing the Iranian political sphere. Constructing religion as equivalent to conservatism and the opposite of secularism has been detrimental to the formation of secular practices within the framework of Islamic political and cultural discourses and practices.

The performance of citizenship through gender and religion has enabled the strategic use of disciplinary practices, creating space for identity to be used strategically rather than out of belief or conviction. While my discussion is limited to passing in the context of movies, practices of passing are also a significant part of Iranian everyday life, from runaway girls who disguise themselves as boys, to men who cross-dress as women or vice versa, and to those who use identity strategically to go undetected where rigid categorization determines one's inclusion or exclusion in the nation-state.

In linking passing, politics, and filmic intervention, I conclude that the queering of citizenship under the Islamic Republic and the cinematic display of bodies that are ambiguous with respect to gender, nation, and religion, transgress representational practices by opening up the possibility of strategic shifts of identity and the failure of scopic governmentality in the regulation and self-regulation of citizens-subjects. This challenge goes far beyond passing and the transgression of the boundaries of identity, and requires critical and deconstructive spaces beyond the realm of modernist political discourses. This necessitates an urgent deconstruction of visual and visible tropes that have been employed in the project of modern nation-state building in Iran throughout its modern history. As both Islamic and secular nationalists, in Iran or in the diaspora, invest in essentialized notions of Iranian or Persian identity, it is crucial to challenge dichotomous notions of gender, religion, culture, and modernity in order to interrogate and deconstruct the conditions under which political and cultural citizenship constitute and are constituted by citizen-subjects.

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Endnotes

1. A draft of this paper was presented in a conference on Sexuality and Religion, at CUNY in 2007. I wish to thank Janet Jakobsen and Dominic Wetzel for inviting me to be part of this conference. [Return to text]

2. Kamal Tabrizi, Marmoulak (The Lizard). Farsi with English Subtitles, Atlantis Enterprises, 2004. [Return to text]

3. Talal Asad, 2001, 145. [Return to text]

4. Michel Foucault, 1979, 180. [Return to text]

5. Lahiri, 2003, 411. [Return to text]

6. Mosse (1985, 23). [Return to text]

7. In Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister, I extensively elaborate on the formation of an Islamic gendered subject during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath. [Return to text]

8. I agree with Connell when he argues that hegemonic masculinity is always constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities, as well as in relation to women (1987, 183). [Return to text]

9. I agree with Amy Robinson that "the social practice of passing must always be understood in relation to the 'problem' of identity, a problem to which passing owes the very possibility of its practice" (1994, 735). [Return to text]

10. Foucault, 28. [Return to text]

11. For an insightful analysis of nationalism and respectability see George L. Mosse, 1985. [Return to text]

12. See Moallem, 2005, 24-25. I agree with Elizabeth Castelli that religion is a "troubled" category because it is inherently unstable (2001, 4). I am also with Jakobsen and Pellegrini that "religion is not a static undertaking in relation to which secularism moves forward through time proposition" (2008, 21). [Return to text]

13. I refer to Butler's definition of performance as "a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning" (Butler, 1990, 130). In my view, body politics are central to Islamist politics both in the context of the Islamic states and Islamic diasporic communities. [Return to text]

14. Moallem, 2005, 125-49. [Return to text]

15. Moallem, 2008. [Return to text]

16. Gender passing continues to be present in the Iranian public sphere. To humiliate and ridicule the reformist green movement that emerged within the context of the 2009 contested presidential election, a group of men disguised themselves in fashionable women's clothing and marched on the streets mimicking and mocking women's supporters of the Green movement. By turning to femininity and enjoying it as fun and fashionable, I believe these demonstrators displayed more pleasure than humiliation in imitating femininity. Also, to contest the publication of a picture of an Iranian male student activist Majid Tavakoli as he was trying to avoid being arrested by wearing a veil by the Iranian authorities, some of diasporic Iranian men started a rather controversial and problematic cyber campaign by taking up the veil as a form of political protest. In addition to its complicity with gendered constructions of femininity through veiling as unified and homogenous in the Islamic Republic, the subversive aspect of men's voluntary display "self-veiling" in this campaign was way too compliant with the construction of femininity as the inferior other of masculinity. [Return to text]

17. As Anthony Shay argues, after the banning of mardomi music, Persian popular music found a new home in Los Angeles along with the largest diasporic Iranian community outside Tehran. He notes that even in the diaspora, especially among the middle classes, the historical genre of mardomi music—popular music—is perceived as backward and vulgar (2000, 80-84). However, while in the diaspora, this genre continues to be produced and consumed; in Iran it is either being replaced by new genres of urban music, including rap, or widely distributed and consumed through illegal networks and the informal market. [Return to text]

18. In Shia Islam, Karbala parable refers to the martyrdom of Mohammad's grandson Imam Hussein and his family in their struggle against the oppressive rule of Umayyad Caliphs. For a politicization of the tragedy of Imam Hussein and the Karbala parable see Michael Fischer, 2002 and Moallem, 2005. [Return to text]

19. While satire has a long tradition in classic Iranian literature and culture, political satire as a literary, journalistic, and artistic genre has had a much harder time surviving formally under both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic. In the early 20th century and around the time of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, most satirists wrote their works in the form of poetry. There has been a revival of public poetic satire in recent years in Iran. Also, in addition to films, stand-up comedy has become popular both in Iran and among the diasporic communities in the United States and Europe. Jokes, political cartoons, satirical poetry, and political humor continue to circulate among Iranians both in Iran and the diaspora, regardless of political censorship. The politics of this circulation and the content of this cultural production are complex and require careful analysis beyond the limits of this essay. [Return to text]

20. Clough, 2000, 2-5. [Return to text]

21. I refer to interpellation to talk about the hailing of the subject and its subjugation to the rule of the Islamic state (In its Althusserian terms). I also refer to Butler's definition of gender performance as an act that is done partially without the subject's knowledge but always done with or for another. In other words, the subject does not preexist the act (Butler, 1999, 2004). [Return to text]

22. This is indeed the postmodern where modern has detached itself from modernization as stated by Negri(2011, 5). Here the anterior time of religion in what Elizabeth Freeman (2005, 57) calls the chronopolitics of modernization and development converges with the secular time of the nation-state putting both notions of secular and religious into crisis. [Return to text]

23. The word al-taqiyya literally means "concealing or disguising one's beliefs, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions, and/or strategies at a time of eminent danger, whether now or later in time, to save oneself from physical and/or mental injury." A one-word translation would be "dissimulation" (from A Shi'ite Encyclopedia, Chapter 6.b, Version 1.5: www.al-islam.org/encyclopedia/chapter6b/1.html. [Return to text]

24. McClintock, 1995, 65. [Return to text]

25. Schlossberg, 1-4. [Return to text]

26. Goffman, 1963. [Return to text]

27. For an astute analysis of Goffman's views on passing and everyday negotiations, see Daniel G. Renfrow, 2004. [Return to text]

28. Bhabha, 1994, 86. [Return to text]

29. Ibid. [Return to text]

30. For an insightful analysis of heteronormative citizenship and the politics of passing, see Carol Johnson, 2002. [Return to text]

31. Parama Roy argues that in the colonial context, citizenship, and nation-ness are generated and consolidated by an endless circuit of exchange and impersonation between Anglo-Indian and other Indian men (1998, 88). I would add that indeed this circuit continues in the context of the nation-state between respectable and criminal men. [Return to text]

32. For an analysis of gendered citizenship in the context of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, see Moallem, 2005. For a historical analysis of gender formations in Iran, see Najmabadi, 2005. [Return to text]

33. According to Foucault, the art of government strives for the essential continuity between the art of self-government, the art of properly governing a family, and the science of ruling the state (1994, 206). [Return to text]

34. By replacing compassion with sexual playfulness, Reza's interactions with the women is redefined as based on religious values and the benevolence of the mosque clergy man. For a fabulous discussion of compassion see Berlant, 2004. [Return to text]

35. Rancière, 2007, 113. [Return to text]

36. Indeed, going to religious school has been a way for the rural and lower classes to get a free education. [Return to text]

37. Var could be either feminine or masculine but in the subtitles this has been translated as "he." [Return to text]

38. Ahmed, 1999, 99. [Return to text]

39. For a recent study of the internet in Iran sees Bolgistan by Sreberny and Khiabany, 2010. For a detailed study of Iranian bloggers see Sima Shakhsari, Blogging, Belonging, and Becoming. Cybergovernmentality and the Production of Gendered and Sexed Diasporic Subjects in Weblogistan, PhD Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, 2010. [Return to text]

40. A great example is the last two presidential elections in Iran, where reformist clergy have had a much harder time proving their support of reformist politics. The homogenizing discourse of constructing all clergy men as traditional, conservative, and anti-modern goes against the opening of the religious discourse to various forms of interpretation, from conservative to liberal and radical, while undermining and dismissing the conservative agenda of non-clergy political elite. [Return to text]

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