The current historiographical narrative of the Iranian-European cultural encounter in the nineteenth century is pivoted around the notion of European gender heterosociality and the public visibility of the European woman as key cultural markers. This narrative is an already-heteronormalized narrative of the process of heteronormalization of love and the feminization of beauty in Iran's long nineteenth century.

I came to this conclusion towards the completion of my manuscript, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. The argument turned out to be more radical for my own work than I had anticipated. I ended up reconceptualizing and re-writing the entire manuscript. Indeed, I had to re-read my sources. As part of that process, I became first intrigued and then obsessed by a remarkable amnesia and the work of that amnesia in conceptualization of gender of modernity. Simply put: gender of Iranian modernity has been configured around a takenfor-granted binary of man/woman. This configuration has worked to screen away other nineteenth-century gender positionalities and has ignored the inter-related transfigurations of sexuality in the same period. Eve Sedgwick's proposition that “an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition,” is as pertinent to any study of Iranian modernity. Transformations of gender are deeply inter-articulated with those of sexuality. In this paper, I will map out some of the key links in this process by looking at several familiar cultural markers of Iranian modernity and suggest ways in which they could be re-read productively through a Sedwickian lens.

Who is a farangīma’āb?

Since the late-nineteenth century, a great deal of cultural criticism in Iran was focused on the figure of farangīma’āb, the Europeanized male dandy. For a whole historical period the prime figure of modernity's excess was not female. The so-called Westoxicated woman did not occupy her position as the central demon of gharbzadigī [Westoxication] until the 1960s and ‘70s. In the earliest writings of Iranian modernists, even as late as the 1920s, woman signified backwardness.