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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