Afsaneh Najmabadi, "Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran" (Duke UP, 2013)

Summary

In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, explores shifting meanings of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. By brilliantly combining historical and ethnographic inquiry, Najmabadi highlights the complex ways in which biomedical, psychiatric, and Islamic jurisprudential discourses and institutions conjoin to generate particular notions of acceptable and unacceptable sexuality. Moreover, she also shows some of the paradoxical ways in which state regulation enables certain possibilities and spaces for nonheteronormative sexuality in Iran. In our conversation, we talked about problems of translation involved in using Western categories in Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Iranian context, the certification process for sex change applicants in Iran, shifting conceptualizations of transsexuality overtime, continuities and ruptures seen in nonheteronormative masculinities in Tehran before and after the 1979 revolution, and the category of the narrative self. This multilayered book is at once lyrically written and theoretically exhilarating. It will be of much interest to students of gender and sexuality, Islamic law, religion and science, and of contemporary Iranian society. It will also make a wonderful choice for graduate and upper lever undergraduate courses on the same subjects.

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SherAli Tareen

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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