In Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography: Desirous Bodies, Staci Gem Scheiwiller foregrounds the representation of bodies and desire in Qajar photography as a lens through which to read questions of gender, sexuality, and race in nineteenth-century Iran. Methodologically, Scheiwiller has extensively used a rich collection of images from archival sources in Iran, Europe, and the United States alongside secondary works on Qajar photography. Theoretically, the text employs Homi Bhabha’s work in postcolonial theory, while engaging productively with Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005). Scheiwiller reads these photographs through the prism of desire, and justifies this approach against possible neo-Orientalist accusations of “framing the Middle East in terms of sexuality,” with “two points: (1) photographs illustrating persons revolve around interpretations of the human body; and (2) if the body is the main focus of particular...
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Book Review|
March 01 2020
Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography: Desirous Bodies
Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography: Desirous Bodies
. Scheiwiller, Staci Gem. London
: Routledge
, 2017
. 240 pages. isbn 9781138201293
.
Farshid Kazemi
Farshid Kazemi
FARSHID KAZEMI is a postdoctoral fellow in the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. He holds a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on Iranian cinema and psychoanalysis. He has published several articles and book chapters on Iranian cinema and psychoanalytic film theory/feminist film theory, and on Iranian and Islamic studies more broadly. Contact: [email protected].
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Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (2020) 16 (1): 62–65.
Citation
Farshid Kazemi; Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography: Desirous Bodies. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 March 2020; 16 (1): 62–65. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-8016505
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