-
-
Did you know that when you create a Reading List, it can be marked public or private?
-
Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran
- Author(s): Afsaneh Najmabadi
- Published: 2013
- Pages: 450
- Illustrations: 22 photographs (incl. 2 in color), 2 tables
- Series: Experimental Futures
- Series Editor(s): Michael M. J. Fischer, Joseph Dumit
-
- 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, Styles of Cognition 231
- 8. Professing Selves: Sexual/Gender Proficiencies 275
- Appendix: Glossary of Persian Terms and Acronyms 303
- Notes 305
- Works Cited 373
- Index 391
-
"Professing Selves is one of the best recent works on contemporary Iran. Arguing that transsexuals' legal and psychiatric negotiations reveal more general processes of proceduralism, negotiation of legal categories, and state formation, Afsaneh Najmabadi challenges the lumping of transsexuals and homosexuals as identical human rights issues, and argues that poorly targeted universalistic campaigns can damage the conditions of life for the people they are intended to help. She works refreshingly at the level of real lives, jurists, and psychiatrists."—Michael M. J. Fischer, author of Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry
"In this important, timely, and erudite work, Afsaneh Najmabadi brings her nuanced understanding of multiple discourses and institutions in Iran to bear on the recent and remarkable visibility of transsexuality in that country. Professing Selves is likely to have a wide-ranging appeal—to historians, Middle East specialists, sexuality and gender scholars, and social scientists interested in issues of state formation and biopolitics. It will be the definitive text on its topic for a long time to come."—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History
Permission to Photocopy (coursepacks)
If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;
If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Permission to Reprint
If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Images/Art
Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to permissions@dukeupress.edu.
For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.Subsidiary Rights/Foreign Translations
If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact permissions@dukeupress.edu. Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.
Disability Requests
Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here.
Rights & Permissions Contact Information
- Email: permissions@dukeupress.edu
- Email contact for coursepacks: asstpermissions@dukeupress.edu
- Fax: 919-688-4574
- Mail:
Duke University Press
Rights and Permissions
905 W. Main Street
Suite 18B
Durham, NC 27701
For all requests please include:- 1. Author's name. If book has an editor that is different from the article author, include editor's name also.
- 2. Title of the journal article or book chapter and title of journal or title of book
- 3. Page numbers (if excerpting, provide specifics)
- For coursepacks, please also note: The number of copies requested, the school and professor requesting
- For reprints and subsidiary rights, please also note: Your volume title, publication date, publisher, print run, page count, rights sought
-
Description
Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials—which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being—grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.
About The Author(s)
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 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.
