Passing, Politics and Religion

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 West¹; 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 constructions².

There are also a number of more recent movies that continue to employ passing to discuss issues of citizenship.³ 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.⁴ 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 parable⁵, 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.⁶

1. Moallem, 2005, 125-49. [↩]
2. Moallem, 2008. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. 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. [↩]
5. 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. [↩]
6. 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. [↩]