Professing Selves - Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran permits, and even partially subsidizes, sex reassignment surgery. Based on historical and ethnographic research, Afsaneh Najmabadi examines what transsexuality means in postrevolutionary Iran.

List of contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. Entering the Scene 15

2. "Before" Transexuality 38

3. Murderous Passions, Deviant Insanities 75

4. "Around" 1979: Gay Tehran? 120

5. Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith 163

6. Changing the Terms: Playing "Snakes and Ladders" with the State 202

7. Living Patterns, Narrative Styles 231

8. Professing Selves: Sexual/Gender Proficiencies 275

Glossary of Persian Terms and Acronyms 303

Notes 305

Works Cited 373

Index 389

About the author

Afsaneh Najmabadi is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity and The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History. She is a coeditor (with Kathryn Babayan) of Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire.

Product details

• Authors: Afsaneh Najmabadi
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 16.12.2013
• EAN: 9780822355571
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-5557-1
• No. of pages: 277
• Series: Experimental Futures; Experimental Futures: Technolo
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories