Passing and Cross-dressing in Iranian Cinema

Dr. Roshanak Kheshti

My name is Dr. Roshanak Kheshti and I have been asked by Arsham Parsi to contribute to the English language column in Cheraq magazine. I am an anthropologist and my work focuses on music, film, sexuality and gender. I am delighted to have the opportunity to share my thoughts with you and I appreciate any and all feedback you have for me about the content of this and any future columns. I am currently working on the subject of “passing” and “cross-dressing” in Iranian cinema and I would like to share some of the questions that I am exploring with you.

As I am sure many Cheraq readers are aware, there is a recurring theme (or what is called “trope” in film or literary studies) within Iranian cinema in which a protagonist is faced with a predicament in which he or she must pass as the “opposite” gender in order to survive, find work, move through a border or checkpoint or go to a soccer match. Some of these films are: Davoud Mirbagheri’s Adam Barfi (1999), Maryam Shahriar’s Dokhtaraneh Khorshid (2000), Hamaya Petracian’s Dokhtar-e Tondar (2000), Majid Majidi’s Baran (2001), Nahid Rezaie’s Khab-e Abrisham (2003), Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006), and Angelina MacCarone’s Unveiled (2005) (if you know of any other titles that I have not mentioned please let me know). The success or failure of “passing” is often central to the plot and contributes to the film’s comical nature (Adam Barfi) or to its suspense (Unveiled). In either case, the success or failure of “passing” within the film’s diegesis (the world represented inside the film) plays off of the audience’s omniscient view of the “passing” character’s transformation from one gender to another.

In Iranian cultures, moving from one gender to another means moving from certain gendered spaces to other ones. One area of interest for me, considering the ubiquity of the “passing” trope, is the audience’s participation in “passing” as witnesses to the movement of these characters through and into spaces that are usually forbidden to them. Do audiences experience pleasure in witnessing this gender trespassing? If so, which audiences? Though the audience is aware of the “passing,” many of the other characters in these films are not. Does this make the audience complicit in this gender trespass? What is the power of this movement across carefully demarcated gender lines?

            In addition to these films, there have recently been many documentaries like Negin Kianfar’s The Birthday and journalistic exposés like “Inside Iran’s Secret Gay World” (CBC) or articles like Caroline Mangez’s “Iran’s Transsexual Revolution” where she proclaims that Iran is the “transsexual capital of the world” (Independent UK).[1] Iran’s tabloids and their readers have grown accustomed to reading sensationalist articles about transsexuals just as the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV did a segment called “Sex Changes in Iran” on July 2, 2005 and, after Ahmadinejad’s now infamous statement on homosexuality made during a speech at Columbia University this past fall, youtube.com and other online video databases are replete with grassroots and home-made responses either for, against, or mocking transsexuality and/or homosexuality in Iran.

            When taken together, representations of gender “passing” and “cross-dressing” in recent Iranian cinema and the widespread media blitz on transsexuality and homosexuality in Iran create an unprecedented scene for Iranian LGBTQ politics. But is this a new consciousness for Iranians, or the Iranian nation-state? How can we make sense of this recent global obsession with Iranian sexuality when the historical record documents Iranians having homosexual sex for at least several hundred years and undergoing sexual reassignment surgery since the second half of the twentieth century (see Afsaneh Najmabadi’s forthcoming work on transsexuality in Iran or that of British Orientalist Sir Richard Burton who wrote on homosexuality among Muslims in the 19^th century)? Certainly, not all of the attention has been negative, but what we need to be suspicious of is the opportunistic appropriation of human rights discourses by institutions and nations who have political ambitions for Iran that in fact have little to do with an investment in LGBTQ civil rights.

A lesson to be learned from global feminist movements, after the passing of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) by the UN General Assembly in 1979, is that the globalization of politics does not always retain the social justice and civil rights components that activists envision. CEDAW went on to set a standard for determining access for developing nations to UN development aid through agencies like the World Bank and the IMF, forcing structural adjustment policies that imposed cultural protocols much like colonialism did to its colonies. Is gay rights the next feminism? If it is, how can we practice an activism that is savvy, one not easily appropriated by forces that operate with hidden agendas and ulterior motives?

Dr. Roshanak Kheshti is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Any comments or inquiries regarding this article should be sent to rkheshti@hotmail.com.