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.
Bibliography
Ahmed, S. (1999). “‘She’ll Wake Up One of These Days and Find She’s Turned into a Nigger’ Passing through Hybridity.” Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 87-106.
Asad, T. (2001). Reading a Modern Classic: W.C. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion. Religion and Media. H. D. V. a. S. Weber. Stanford, Stanford University Press: 131-147.
Berlant, L., Ed. (2004). Compassion. The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. New York and London, Routledge.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York, Rotledge.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and The Subversion of Identity. New York Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York and London, Routledge.
Castelli, E. A. (2001). Women, Gender, Religion: Troubling Categories and Transforming Knowledge. Women, Gender, Religion. A Reader. E. A. Castelli. New York, Palgrave: 3-25.
Clough, P. T. (2000). Autoaffection. Unconcious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press.
Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and Power. Stanford, Califronia., Stanford University Press.
Deleuze., G. (1995). Negotiations 1972 1997. New York, Columbia University Press.
Faubion, J. D., Ed. (1994). Michel Foucault. Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 3. New York, The New Press.
Fischer, M. J. M. (2001). “Filmic Judgment and Cultural Critique: The Work of Art, Ethics, and Religion in Iranian Cinema.” Religion and Media. H. D. V. a. S. W. (Ed.). Stanford, Stanford University Press,: 456-486.
Fischer, M. J. M. a. M. A. (1990). Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition. Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press.
Foucault, M. (1979). Disicpline and Punish. The Birth of The Prison. New York, Vintage Books.
Freeman, E. (2005). “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography.” Social Text (84/85): 57-68.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma. NJ: Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs.
Johnson, C. (2002). “Heteronormative Citizenship and the Politics of Passing.” Sexualities 5(3): 317-336.
Khiabany, A. S. a. G. (2010). Blogistan. The Internet and Politics in Iran. New York, L.B. Tauris.
Lahiri, S. (2003). “Performing Identity: Colonial Migrants, Passing and Mimicry Between The Wars.” Cultural Geographies 10(2003): 408-423.
Lovell, T. (2000). “Thinking Feminism with and Against Bourdieu.” Feminist Thoery 1(1): 11-32.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York and London, Routledge.
Moallem, M. (2005). Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Moallem, M. (2008). Governmentality, Masculinity and Iran-Iraq War Movies. Conference Paper, Middle Eastern Studies Association. Washington DC.
Mosse, G. L. (1985). Nationalism and Sexulaity. Madison, Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press.
Najmabadi, A. (2005). Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards. Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
Negri, A. (2011). Art and Multitude. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press.
Jakobsen, J.R. and Pellegrini, A. Ed. (2008). Secularisms. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
Rancière, J. (2007).The Future of The Image. London and New York, Verso.
Renfrow, D. G. (Fall 2004). “A Cartography of Passing in Everyday Life.” Symbolic Interaction 27(4): 485-506.
Robinson, A. (Summer 1994). “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest.” Social Inquiry 20: 715-736.
Roy, P. (1998). Indian Traffic. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press.
Schlossberg, L. (2001). Rites of Passing. Passing. Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion. M. C. S. a. L. Schlossberg. New York, New York University: 1-12.
Schlossberg, M. C. S. a. L., Ed. (2001). Passing. Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion. New York, New York University
Shakhsari, S. (2010). Blogging, Belonging, and Becoming. Cybergovernmentality and the Production of Gendered and Sexed Diasporic Subjects in Weblogistan. Stanford Stanford University.
Shay, A. (2000). The 6/8 Beat Goes On: Persian Popular Music from Bazm-e Qajariyyeh to Beverly Hills Garden Parties. Mass Mediations. New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. W. Armbrust. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California at Berkeley: 61-87.
- 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. [↩]
