Sexuality and Cultural Change: The Presentation of Sex and Gender in Pre- and Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema

Summary

Some aspects of sexuality have been allowed to be expressed in Iranian popular culture, albeit in limited forms. As limited and suppressed as they may be, however, representations, or even hints, of any issues related to sexuality, whether scientific or derogatory, play a role in the way cultural change unfolds. As recently as the last few months, there have been many controversies about the censoring of Nezâmi Ganjavi's poems in instances where the 12th-century poet refers to the female body, physical contact with men, and dance. Yet, despite the limited room for and the permissibility of sexual references, even the legal authorities and ruling elite do not shy away from using sexual obscenity to counter their opponents. Hadadian, a Muslim preacher recently compared a member of the Islamic Republic of Iran cabinet to a penis. Another, this time a devoted Muslim film director by the name of Salahsure, referred to cinema as a whorehouse. These incidents indicate that despite the legal, political, and cultural restrictions on the expression of sexuality, people may continue to think of sexual realities or fantasies as their mode of expression, however archaic and distorted they might be. Such exchanges become part of the discursive field where tensions between modern sexuality and the fundamentalist discourse on sexuality play out.

The controversy was even louder when the Iran Journal published one of its special supplementary issues entitled Khâtun on the question of the hejâb and veiling, insinuating that efforts to enforce the hejâb have backfired. Most of the objections against it claimed that pro-Ahmadinjad authors of the articles were attempting to score against the other ruling fundamentalist factions. However, most of the uproar was actually directed against the somewhat lax format of the articles, the photos, and the cartoons in which one could see women's exposed hair. Everyone, from the grand ayatollahs to members of the government and from the armed forces to the members of the parliament, felt obliged to participate in this much ado about nothing. Indeed, the whole nation was obsessed for a time with the topic.

Historically too, the expression of sexuality has always been determinative and yet highly problematic and destructive. Such contradictory qualities are nowhere more apparent than in Iranian film, particularly in the pre-revolutionary commercial movies.