A note on this article.[1]

"You can't force people into heaven, dear brother.
You are pushing so hard that they might fall off the other side into hell."
—Marmoulak [2]

"[W]e must abandon the idea of religion as being always and essentially the same, and as being dependent on a faith that is independent of practical traditions because and to the extent that it is transcendental."
—Talal Asad [3]

"In discipline, punishment is only one element of a double system: gratification-punishment. And it is this system that operates in the process of training and correction."
—Michel Foucault [4]

After its release in 2004, Marmoulak (The Lizard), a comedy directed by the well-known Iranian filmmaker Kamal Tabrizi, was screened in Iran for less than a month before authorities banned it. It had widespread success. Shortly after being banned the film was broadly distributed through bootleg copies and DVDs, and became one of the most popular Iranian films, selling a million copies both in Iran and abroad. In this comedy, Reza, a thief notorious for his ability to climb walls, is arrested during an armed robbery. After enduring the rigid disciplinary treatment of the prison administrator, who believes that the prison is a psychiatric institution charged with curing criminals by converting them into normal and respectable citizens, and facing the possibility of being sentenced to life in prison, Reza escapes by dressing as a Shia cleric, or akhund. Reza makes his way to Turkey with the help of an illegal underground network of smugglers who are supposed to fabricate a passport for him. Along the way, he is mistaken for the well-respected clergyman also named Reza, who is being sent to a city in Azerbaijan (not far from the Turkish border) to take spiritual leadership of the town mosque. In a comic turn and by focusing on Reza Marmoulak, the passer's character, the film brilliantly exposes and unsettles notions of respectability, masculinity, and class capital by interrogating the boundaries of normativity and criminality in what the Islamic State considers a pious, ethical, and religious citizen-subject. By passing as an akhund or mullah, Reza Marmoulak gains access to the menbar (a podium or pulpit in a mosque), from which he can address audiences while exposing the politics of knowledge and religion as cultural and symbolic capital. As Elaine Ginsberg argues, "passing is usually motivated by a desire to shed the identity of an oppressed group to gain access to social and economic opportunities."[5] In this case, through the genre of comedy the film displays hegemonic and subordinated models of masculinity as they relate to the discourses of respectability and criminality. I refer to respectability to talk about the ways in which masculinity is invoked in modern constructions of nationalism both secular and religious. The discourse of respectability also determines the boundaries of what is defined as normal and abnormal or what "symbolizes the nation's spiritual and material vitality" in Mosse's terms.[6] Disguised as an Akhund, Reza Mamoulak gains access to the religious speech from the podium of the Mosque.

The emergence of a gendered Islamic subject in the context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath provided a surface on which cultural and religious nationalists were able to write their own meanings of the Islamic nation.[7] However, after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the hegemonic masculinity of the citizen/subject became a site of tension and contradiction between the pious masculinity of the clergyman and the secular masculinity of the citizen.[8] This tension continues to be present in Iranian cultural and political spheres. The movie crosses the boundaries of religious and secular, respectable and perverse, and normative and criminal as significant components of hegemonic forms of masculinity under the Islamic Republic and exposes the modern nation-state as a disciplinary apparatus for regulating gender identities. Marmoulak, along with a number of Iranian films that depict passing as their central theme, has created a space for queering citizenship. By depicting gender passing and the display of masculinity and femininity as produced by both secular and religious modern disciplinary regimes of knowledge and power, these films enable an interrogation of respectability, criminality, and identity. In other words, the temporality of an Islamic citizenship defined by the convergence of secular and religious narratives in the performance of gender normativity is momentarily interrupted through the unreadability of identity. These films also challenge foundational narratives of body, religion, nation, gender, and citizenship and, more importantly, expose the process of subject formation as produced by cultural and social meanings and institutions, including the nation-state, religious and secular institutions, the media, and the prison industry.[9]

In this essay I am interested in the question of "the surface politics of the body," in Butler's terms, or what Foucault defines as the "body politic" or "a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes, and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge."[10] The body is displayed as the locus of social and cultural disciplining that contains a repertoire of receptivities and sensibilities from verbal communication to bodily responses, exposing Islamic normativity and criminality in the context of the Islamic Republic. Islamic notions of masculinity are influenced by the perceptions of the modern nation-state and the relationship between nationalism, masculinity, and respectability.[11] While the body as a cultural field has been extensively explored by a number of feminist and queer theorists, the stylization of gendered bodies through religious practices needs more scholarly attention. Religion and culture cannot be separated from each other and from the historical conditions within which they emerge, and it is impossible to understand Islam and gender without understanding globalization, colonialism, postcolonial formations, Westernization, religious and secular nationalisms, and citizenship.[12] Despite the tendency in the scholarship on Iran and Islam to disconnect religion from the cultural politics of knowledge and power, the politics of religion cannot be separated from body politics and gender performance in Iranian modernity and postmodernity.[13]

In this essay, I elaborate on the ways in which Marmoulak uses passing to focus on the character of the passer, the strategic employment of religious identity, and the moments of rupture where "the other" can be seen and heard. I argue that even though the narrative of the film does not move beyond the assimilation and integration of the outlaw and the criminal into the modern disciplinary society of the Islamic state, Marmoulak radically challenges a number of dichotomies prevalent in Iranian cultural and political spheres, including secular versus religious, mokkalla (a man with a hat) versus moammam (a man with a turban), religious culture versus popular culture mazhabi versus ghair-e mazhabi, and respectable versus criminal mohtaram versus mojrem.

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]

"Don't Worry, Just Pretend": On Being a Marmoulak

Marmoulak, or the lizard, serves a couple of symbolic purposes in the film, referencing the lizard's ability to climb walls and its facility for metamorphosis and camouflage (see Image 1 below). This is not to suggest that the film director or scriptwriter of Marmoulak—or any of the other Iranian films that use passing as a significant component of the narrative—definitely thought about the concept of passing theoretically. In her discussion of teletechnology as both an environment and a set of objects other than human agency, Patricia Clough questions the normative idealization of thought as rational and the "non coincidence of the subject with consciousness" by mapping the unconscious thought of teletechnology.[20] Her critique opens up space for the conceptualization of the thought outside subjectivity by giving it its own movement, intensities, and effects.

Image 1 Marmoulak (the Lizard) refers to Reza's ability to climb walls and to camouflage.

The film starts with the sound of a siren and policemen commanding Reza to stop climbing a wall. The scene visually displays a number of important issues. First is the interpellation of the subject/Reza by the shouting of the policemen as he is stopped from climbing a wall. As a subject, Reza is predisposed to identify the call of the policeman. Second is the significance of the wall as indicative of spatial divisions that are regulated, controlled, and policed by the disciplinary and security apparatuses of the modern state that distinguish between the legal versus the illegal, the normal versus the abnormal, and the law abiding versus the criminal subjects. Third is the portrayal of Reza, or the performative subject, perceived by the others as well as social institutions.[21]

The film continues with a scene where a pigeon is trapped in a prison's security wires becoming the subject of the prisoners' concern. Everyone, from the guards to the prisoners, is looking for a way to save the pigeon when Reza reveals that he could climb the wall and rescue it. The prison administrator arrives at this moment and promises Reza a week of relief from prison work if he climbs the wall. To the cheers and applause of the prisoners and the guards, Reza skillfully climbs the wall and exposes his ability to escape the prison. He also gets a chance to glance at life beyond the prison walls. However, instead of relieving Reza from prison work, the administrator puts Reza in solitary confinement and enhances the security of the prison walls to prevent Reza from escaping. Reza then becomes the object of prison administrative surveillance and looses any possibility of escape. However, in the very brief moment while he is saving the pigeon, the temporary division between the surveyor (the prison guards) and the surveyed (the prisoners) is collapsed, threatening the order of the prison while providing Reza an opportunity to view street life beyond the prison's wall. This is a crucial moment in which the film screens the limits of visibility and the potentiality of being a marmoulak. When Reza returns to his prison cell, we hear the voice of another prisoner singing a famous popular song by the beloved Iranian pop singer, Marzieh, making allusions to crying as both a display of sadness as well as a mirror reflecting the shadow of the lover.

"My teardrops fell, my eyes became seas
In my teardrops your shadow appeared"

In this emotionally charged moment where the subject fails to hide her/his grief, the shadow of the lover appears in the tears leaving no space for inhibition. Desperate to escape from the prison, and singled out by the prison administrator who uses every opportunity to humiliate and punish Reza, he is injured and taken to the hospital. Overcrowding in the prisoner section sends him to the regular ward, where he ends up sharing a room with a clergyman. In one of his conversations with the Akhund, who happens to be called Reza and who shows a great deal of kindness and compassion towards Marmoulak, the clergyman talks to him about each individual's path to God (an idea influenced by Sufi teachings of Islam) and provides space for the discourse of religion to include the outlaw and the criminal. In a conversation with the clergyman, Reza claims that his destiny is eternally doomed, thus showing his skepticism of religion and the idea of heaven and earth. The clergyman responds by saying that "there are as many ways to reach God as there are people." This statement saves Reza and is repeated throughout the film wherever religion converges with discourses of normativity and respectability.

While Reza assumes that this statement is part of Islamic religious teachings, the clergyman expands on it by reading a passage from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, arguing that indeed the idea goes beyond religious teachings. Linking the secular and the religious, the clergyman recites a passage that describes a conversation between a fox and a prince, where the fox defines taming or domestication as making someone love you. Again, the film alludes to the compliance of religion and secularism with a society that integrates its citizen-subjects by regulating them through either compliance or confinement. The machinery of the modern state produces docile bodies through disciplining and self-disciplining practices of domestication/education or punishment and incarceration. While the film exposes the failure of modern disciplinary practices and calls for affective attachment through the desire for love, life and hopefulness, it nevertheless conveys a concept of religion as a mechanism of control that includes the voluntary submission of its subjects.

This sequence also activates the Sufi teachings of Islam, especially Rumi's well-known poem on the conversation between "Moses and the Shepherd." Moses hears a shepherd talking to God in his own language, telling him that he wants to comb his hair, fix his shoes, wash his clothes, and pick the lice out of his hair. Moses gets angry and blames him for using blasphemous language to talk to the creator of the world. The shepherd tears off his clothes and cries out about how sad, sorry and repentant he is. A sudden revelation comes to Moses and reminds him that his mission is to unite, not separate God from his creatures. Moses is told that God has given each being a unique way of seeing and knowing, and what may be wrong in one person's views may be right for another. Repeating the passage "there are as many ways to reach God as there are people" throughout the film effectively counters the state-based disciplinary notion of religion and its complicity with the modern disciplinary practices of mental institutions and the prison-industrial complex, as advocated by the prison administrator. The film ends with the voice of Reza Marmoulak claiming a relationship with God as direct and unmediated, reminding the audience of the teachings of Sufism:

God is the heaviest dude in gentleness.
The heaviest dude in kindness
The heaviest dude in friendship
The heaviest dude in forgiveness.

This statement also emphasizes the hybridity of Islamic discourse and its modernity and mélange with the discourses of the disciplinary state. In this context secular and religious discourses converge and bring together the voice of the prison administrator with the European work of literature, the Hollywood film industry and the teaching of the Islamic religion to sustain a modern disciplinary society.[22] For Reza the clergyman, a modern/modernized religious apparatus cannot be a domesticating machine if it does not become inclusive of all the desiring subjects.

Gozar, Taqlid, and Governmentality

The first time the audience is exposed to passing is when Reza enters the prison's prayer room and learns from the other prisoners that he does not need to be religious; he just needs to know how to pray properly to appease the prison guards as a coping mechanism for being disciplined. The film implicitly alludes to the centrality of appearance and performance as modern sites of citizenship, gender identity, inclusion, and exclusion. Indeed, taqiyyah, meaning concealment or dissimulation of one's belief,[23] has a long history in Islamic minority/majority relations. In Iranian culture taqiyyah has become an important strategic tool to justify religious, cultural, and political performance. This idea has also been combined with another concept, that of using a kola share or a jurisprudence hat, which would justify transgression from the rule of law (Islamic Sharia) through the reference to religious jurisprudence. Anyone can put this hat on while trying to justify his/her unlawful acts of transgression with the rule of law. These concepts have consistently created a flexible and ambiguous situation where one can negotiate the rule of law, or a space where the rule of law can be stretched and revised. However, the distinction between the performer and the believer has made Iranians more culturally aware of the gap between what is said and what is done in practice. The testing of this gap has been crucial in the Iranian political sphere and the politics of citizenship.

The plot develops when Reza Marmoulak steals the clergyman's garb and turban and escapes the hospital by passing as an Imam, an akhund or mullah. The body of the new character becomes a surface on which the boundaries of masculinity and respectability can be both regulated and transgressed. While Reza's beard, along with his garb and turban, immediately gives him the appearance of an akhund, his lack of knowledge of the rituals, especially in performing namaz-e jama'at (prayer in the company of others as opposed to solitary namaaz), puts his disguise in jeopardy. When a group of travelling men ask Reza to perform a namaz-e jama'at at the prayer house of the train station, Reza manages to conceal his lack of knowledge by mimicking vudu (the preparation for the prayer, including the ritual of washing the face, hands, and feet before prayer) and by making up words that sounded like prayer.

The film goes beyond the dichotomy of tradition and modernity by depicting religion not as the opposite of modernity and progress, but well integrated within the modern nation-state. In addition to the visual representation of trains, taxis, TVs, and telephones, a conversation between Reza and his smuggler friend to arrange for a fake passport to allow him to leave Iran reveals the influence of new media technologies and transnational film industry. In this scene, the audience is exposed to a discussion on one of the public TV channels between a religious figure and a show host on the capabilities of the Internet. Reza repeats the words—Internet, chat, and multimedia—to mimic words that he thinks are used by religious people. His friend advises him to not listen to that particular akhund and try to instead mimic the real clergymen who do not speak in those terms. In response, Reza changes the channel and another clergyman appears, this time discussing the movie Pulp Fiction.

Image 2 The film depicts the convergence of religion and new media technologies by showing how the religious clergy men are informed about and engaged with the new media including the Hollywood film industry.

The film depicts religious spaces as integrated in the urban landscape, as seen in the prayer house at the train station and the mosque in the middle of a neighborhood. What divides the space are class and gender relations. The religious space mediates different classes to a limited extent. To reach out to the poor, the film offers two options: either the mosque becomes more receptive to marginalized classes, or the Imam should visit the poor in their homes. Reza takes up both by making the mosque more receptive to a diverse group of people and using the justification of visiting the poor at their homes to connect with the smugglers.

Passing could be translated as gozar in Farsi, and McClintock describes it as the "masking of ambiguity: difference as identity."[24] As Linda Schlossberg notes, passing is a highly charged site for anxieties regarding visibility, invisibility, classification, and social demarcation, and for the creation and establishment of an alternative set of narratives or a novel way of creating new stories out of unstable ones.[25] Passing also refers to the transgression of boundaries of highly stigmatized identities[26] and the strategic use of identity.[27] Passing should be understood in relation to similar concepts such as mimicry (taqlid) and ambivalence (doganegi). In his discussion of colonial mimicry, Homi Bhabha refers to the discourse of mimicry as "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continuously produce its slippage, its excess, its difference."[28] In the case of Marmoulak, more than anything else, passing provides space for the sexualized masculinity of the criminal and the outlaw to not only be seen, but heard as well. I argue that passing, mimicry, and ambivalence are not limited to the colonial context, but also expose problems of normativity and criminality that are at the core of modern disciplinary regimes of knowledge and power in the context of both colonial and postcolonial formations. I employ the concept of passing by broadening it and taking it into the context of political and cultural citizenship. Passing and mimicry in this context continue to create space for what Bhabha calls "at once resemblance and menace"[29] given the continuous reliance of postcolonial nation-states on discourses of normativity and respectability, as well as gendered subjects.

To perform respectability through masculinity, the film shows how a religious act is achieved through the display of an ethical and disciplined subject position who leads a virtuous life by resisting temptation. Here, the pious masculinity of the clergyman converges with the secular masculinity of the citizen as they are both subjected to the rule of law and the disciplinary order of the nation-state (both secular and religious). The abstract ethic of either a pious or secular masculinity is transgressed by the hyper-masculinity of Reza, who follows mundane pleasures along with a situated notion of what is just or unjust through a perverse and forbidden exercise of power. For example, when Reza takes the train to a border city, a mother and daughter share a cabin with him. To his pleasure, once Reza settles into the cabin the mother confides in him about her daughter's marriage problems. However, as soon as the mother falls sleep, Reza starts flirting with the daughter.

Here language leads to Reza's most challenging moment of mimicry when he struggles to transform his flirtatious and sexualized thoughts into the language of sympathy and compassion. The film shows how the mediation of proper language is the pre-condition for entrance of the subject into the world of normative masculinity. Also, his position as a respectable clergyman becomes a limit to his desire to share the train cabin with the two women; to Reza's great regret and in spite of his insistence on the women staying, a fellow traveler moves the women to another cabin to give Reza more space. It should be noted that while the film challenges notions of criminality and respectability in both secular and religious discourses through an interrogation of the pious masculinity of the Islamic clergyman and the sexualized hyper-masculinity of the thief, it does not question heteronormative citizenship. Instead, the film reinforces heteronormativity by constructing the sexualized masculinity of the thief as heteroerotic.[30]

In the context of Iran, where there is a close link between the embodied performance of identity, the politics of appearance, and dress code in the formation of gendered notions of citizenship, an investment in visual and visible modes of representation is crucial for issues of governmentality. I refer to governmentality in its Foucauldian sense to talk about technologies of domination of others and those of the self. As I have argued elsewhere, the regulation of citizenship through visual media has been critical for both the project of modernization and modern nation-state building in Iran, as well as for the establishment of an Islamic state. The performance of religiosity and secularism, masculinity and femininity, and modern and traditional has been an integral part of these forms of embodied citizenship.[31] For example, the instance of forced unveiling or veiling as a site of performance of modern forms of gendered citizenship is a good illustration of this situation.[32] The concept of imitation or taqlid is not foreign to Shia Islam because of the legitimacy of practicing taqlid to follow a religious leader in legal and spiritual matters. The use of garb and appearance in the film not only makes the body a surface for mimicry and imitation, but also legitimizes the authority of the passing subject to perform religious practices.

Passing is specifically significant in Iranian movies given the importance of filmic space as an alternative site for cultural struggle, and it has facilitated critical reflection on social issues. Information technologies have become an important part of what Foucault calls "the art of government," especially in regulating both discipline and sovereignty.[33] In other words, governmentality refers to the connection between power as the regulation of others and as a relationship with oneself, linking ethics and politics. Indeed, the regulation of citizen-subjects through visual mediums has been central to regimes of modern and postmodern governmentality and cultural citizenship.

Through passing, Reza Marmoulak's character deconstructs rigid dichotomies and binaries that have long influenced modern Iranian political discourses. The film also transgresses the boundaries of secular and religious, sacred and popular, modern and traditional, and pious and criminal by juxtaposing and converging linguistic and performative disciplinary practices. While passing does not deconstruct subject positions or gendered and religious citizenship, it does provide space for a critique of what stabilizes meaning and the body historically, enabling the intervention of the investigating subject of passing by unsettling modern notions of both respectability and criminality.

Performing Respectability through Masculinity

Reza Marmoulak continues to disguise himself after he is mistaken for a clergyman sent to give the sermons in a small-town mosque. Masses of disenchanted people begin flocking to the mosque to listen to him. After escaping from prison and passing as an akhund, Reza Marmoulak moves in and out of a respectable masculinity by exposing what is codified as pious manliness in the Islamic Republic, bringing its contradictions to the surface. Respectable masculinity in Iran shifts between two forms of masculinity: the pious masculinity of the clergyman performed through religious appearance, and the decent masculinity of the citizen-subject performed through its submission to the disciplinary practices of an Islamic state such as Islamic appearance. Indeed, the juxtaposition and division between these two forms of masculinity—pious and respectable—versus a hyper-sexualized masculinity have, as I mentioned above, been a source of tension and contradiction in the Iranian political sphere. As I pointed out earlier, Reza Marmoulak's hypermasculinity begins to come into focus when he encounters the mother and daughter on the train. His interactions with the women do not end, however, when they move to another car. It turns out that they happen to live in the same town where he is supposed to settle, and where he continues to disguise his flirtation with the daughter as compassion.[34]

The film strategically visualizes Reza's hyper-sexualized masculinity and the clergyman's respectable masculinity by showing Reza's body in particular locations and its proximity or distance from other bodies (both male and female). The hyper-masculinized body of Reza the thief illustrates an enormous capacity for both bodily pleasure and strength beyond moral rules and regulations, and beyond the boundaries of what is permitted or prohibited. The film exposes these capacities through a number of visual and textual strategies including gender mixing (whenever Reza Marmoulak comes into contact with the young married woman with the violent husband); bodily potentiality and strength (when Reza tries to discipline the violent husband); pleasure (displayed when Reza listens to music); and finally, illicit language (Reza's use of a vulgar and sexualized language). For example, one day, Reza Marmoulak is called on by people in the neighborhood to intervene as the husband batters his wife. At this point, Reza Marmoulak becomes emotional (after all, he is sexually attracted to the young married woman), abandons his respectable masculinity as the clergyman, and turns into the hyper-masculine thug, climbing the wall and beating the husband to teach him a lesson about respecting his wife. In the absence of any institutional support for battered women and domestic violence in the Islamic Republic, Reza's hyper-masculinity becomes more useful in containing and taming the violent husband.

By employing passing as a narrative strategy, the film challenges notions of identity as predetermined and shows respectability, criminality, and masculinity to be defined by modern notions of class, nation, religion, and gender. While foundational narratives of identity continue to be central in distinguishing the religious from the secular, the criminal from the pious, and the clergyman from the common man, in addition to constructing hegemonic forms of masculinity in relation to subordinated forms of masculinity, the insinuation of passing in the movie opens up space for an interrogation of visibility, performativity, masculinity, and respectability.

Linguistic Shuffling: The Thug and the Cleric

One significant aspect of the film is how Reza Marmoulak's regularly switches and combines linguistic registers. The film not only demonstrates the dependency of the visible on speech, in Rancière's terms[35], but also turns speech into the visible by exposing the speech act as a site of political and cultural regulation. The comedy genre enables the comingling of the vulgar and sexualized language of the hyper-masculine thug with the linguistic norms of respectability (depicted as specific to the hegemonic masculinity of citizens) in Iran. The use of two linguistic forms in one hybrid sentence connects class codes and the presence of a veiled language for men within the continuum of modern patriarchal respectability. The possibility of using language as both revealed and hidden, and the audience's participation in filling in the blanks of the vulgar and abjectified language of the thug, expose the playful and light aspect of the kooche va bazaar language and unmask the gendered and classed nature of linguistic competency and its boundaries. In many instances in the film, Reza starts a sentence in a vulgar language—a sexually explicit speech that crosses the boundaries of male honor and modesty—but turns it immediately into a normative one, suppressing specifically sexual connotations. For example, in his interactions with the young woman he alters his flirtatious words into a modest language. Or he starts saying the "F word" but changes it into a greeting. This linguistic strategy not only reveals the boundaries of certain forms of masculinity and its connection to both sexuality and violence, but also exposes the normative convergence of religion, gender, and class in producing a disciplined and respectable masculinity within language. The concomittent presence of a vulgar but sexually charged language and a respectable and modest language conceals and reveals modern investment of patriarchy in regulating sexuality.

While normative language, or, in this case, a few meaningful phrases that Reza has learned through his encounter with the clergyman, enables him to give his public sermons at the mosque by simply repeating and expanding on a few significant statements, including the phrase borrowed from Le Petit Prince, Reza also exposes language as a kind of symbolic capital through which one can exercise power over others. In this context, the class privileges of those with a religious or secular education are exposed. Here religious education is depicted as symbolic capital rather than a set of beliefs, the closest thing to a modern education that is denied to the lower classes.[36]

While religious and secular education is the clergyman's symbolic capital, popular culture and kooche va bazaar is where Reza Marmoulak and masses of lower-class Iranians get their inspiration. We see this played out in an important sequence of the film in which Reza Marmoulak is eating dinner with a group of people after giving his sermon at the mosque. There he allows a young man to sing a popular Turkish love song in the mosque and he uses the concept of "tilawat" that is used for the recitation Qur'an to allow the singing of the popular song.

So there is no dust when the savior [my lover] comes
So he/she comes and goes in such a way[37]
That realizing his/her presence needs no words
He/she has left and I am left alone
He/she whose beauty is unmatched
I have lit the samovar and
Added sugar cubes to my tea
And I am waiting
I am waiting
I am waiting

The group of men is both surprised and pleased that the clergyman gave the young man permission to sing this well-known Turkish love song. In this scene, we see the space of the mosque and the space of kooche va bazaar converge to create a place for both religious prayers and popular songs. Sara Ahmed argues that, "passing as phantasy of becoming the other involves an apparatus of knowledge that masters the other by taking its place."[38] The apparatus of knowledge in this case includes secular and religious education for Reza the clergyman and popular culture for Reza Marmoulak. In one of the last scenes, Marmoulak's access to the podium when he is invited to give a sermon for male prisoners enables him to articulate his ideas vis-à-vis the contradictions of a modern nation-state that combines modern disciplinary technologies, including the prison industrial complex, with religious discourse to punish its most vulnerable citizens.

After the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Iranian popular culture was suppressed and replaced by Islamic values. A number of well-liked entertainers, including dancers, singers, and musicians, were forced to either give up their careers or leave the country for diasporic cosmopolitan cities in North America or Europe, especially Los Angeles. In Iran, the battle over the space of popular culture continues to be at the center of cultural and political negotiations, especially for women entertainers who have been banned from public singing and dancing (except performing for a women-only audience). While after the Islamic Cultural Revolution, film, television, and theater have become legitimate and respectable spaces for women as performers, actresses, and directors, the struggle over popular culture and what is permitted or prohibited continues. With the massive investment of young Iranians in cyber culture, including email, blogging, and Facebook, the struggle over popular culture has been extended to include new spaces of political and cultural citizenship.[39]

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]