Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges by Stephan F. Miescher

Author:Stephan F. Miescher [Miescher, Stephan F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119052203
Amazon: 1119052203
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Published: 2015-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

Fashioning Politics

7

Dressed for Success: Hegemonic Masculinity, Elite Men and Westernisation in Iran, c.1900–40

Sivan Balslev

From the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, men of an emerging western-educated Iranian elite used knowledge, practices and objects originating from the West to reach and hold a hegemonic position in their society. This article traces the appropriation of western education, clothes and manners and explores how these became essential components of a new hegemonic masculinity in Iran.1 In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of these imports for constructing gendered social identifications, as well as the role of the Iranian state in enforcing such constructs. Knowledge, appearance and manners were not the only western imports to be appropriated by the new hegemonic masculinity. Modern perceptions of patriotism, new approaches to love and sexuality and different images of male beauty were all incorporated into this model. Education and appearance, however, were strongly associated with the debate on westernisation, and are therefore the focus here.

This article explores the history of masculinities in Iran and positions masculinity as central to understandings of nationalism, social distinction and modernisation. Masculinity studies are currently under-represented in historical scholarship on the Middle East. Despite the fact that historians of the Middle East have become more attentive to masculinity since the mid-1990s, recognising its importance as the indispensable second half of gender studies, very few publications to date have been dedicated to the history of Middle Eastern masculinities.2 These include Wilson Chacko Jacob's study of Effendi masculinity in Egypt and two interdisciplinary volumes on Islamic and Middle Eastern masculinities.3 In the field of Iranian history, Joanna de Groot called for the consideration of men as gendered subjects as early as 1996, and some steps have been taken in this direction during the last decade.4 Afsaneh Najmabadi has written on male sexuality and the disappearance of boy-loving in late-nineteenth-century Iran. Joanna de Groot considers the masculine gendering of Iranian nationalist discourse. Minoo Moallem incorporated some aspects of masculinity studies into her research on Islamic fundamentalism and patriarchy.5 Shahin Gerami also studies masculine identities in post-revolutionary Iran, but from a sociological perspective.6 This article focuses on the historical construction of Iranian masculine identities and draws on the theory of hegemonic masculinity as a primary perspective from which to survey changing power relations within Iranian society.

During the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, western-educated elite men created and promoted a new model of Iranian masculinity by means of mass communication, cultural production, modern education and governmental reforms. These men were educated in Europe or in western-style institutions in Iran, instead of in religious institutes of higher education. They traded traditional Iranian garments for western-inspired attire; supported new ideologies such as nationalism and constitutionalism, as well as new notions regarding women, sexuality and marriage and adopted western (mostly French) words in order to express these ideas. The new model of masculinity, based on the experiences and views of this new cohort, competed with earlier and co-existing models that were based

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