Passing, Politics and Religion

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.¹ 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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1. 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. [↩]