Current histories of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1909) frequently begin the story of the revolutionary years with 11 December 1905. On that day the bastinado was inflicted on three Tehrani merchants, Sayyid Hashim Qandfurush, Hajj Ahmad Qaysariyah, and Sayyid Isma'il Charmfurush, on orders from ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah, governor of Tehran. This incident, we are told, led the two leading Tehran clerics, Sayyid Muhammad Tabataba'i and Sayyid ‘Abdallah Bihbihani, to stage a protest sit-in with their supporters in the Shah ‘Abd al-'Azim shrine and demand the dismissal of ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah and premier ‘Ayn al-Dawlah, as well as the institution of a house of justice. A month later, the sit-in ended successfully: though ‘Ayn al-Dawlah remained premier, ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah was dismissed and a royal decree to establish a house of justice was issued. Some months later another incident set off the next round of the contest.

Several works in Persian and English have detailed Iranian women's participation in social, political, and literary activities of the Constitutional Revolution. The present essay attempts to look critically at the discourses that informed, and were in turn rearticulated and transformed by, these activities. It will be argued that in the early years of the 20th century the very concept represented by the word zan was a contested one; that its homonymic ambiguity (meaning both woman and wife) signified the ambiguity of womanhood itself. Further, it will be argued that this ambiguity resided in the integration into the Constitutionalist language of two conflicting discursive elements regarding women—a contestatory rearticulation that charted the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of defining a new womanhood.

In recent decades, Iran has witnessed radical transformations concerning the conceptualization of and procedural standards for changing sex. Psychologists, medical and legal practitioners, law enforcement officials, and scholars of fiqh have debated the advisability (in debates among health and legal professionals) or the permissibility (among scholars of fiqh) of sex-change. This article asks what historical transformations of the concept of jins/genus have informed the debates and enabled the contemporary dominant concepts and practices that shape them. How has jins come to mean sex and how does this matter? The article first maps out the historical genealogy of these reconfigurations. What were some of the 19th- and pre-19th-century concepts that could be considered disparate precedents to this cluster around sex/jins? It then reviews some of the late-19th- and 20th-century reshaping of biomedical knowledge and marital practices that have contributed to the contemporary meanings of jins.

Modern nations have often been explicitly imagined through familial metaphors. In particular, the construction of the national community as a brotherhood (a fraternity) has pointed both to the centrality of male bonding in the production of nationalist sentiment and to the exclusion of women from the social contract. Within that contract not only were women “subject to men's power; it also implied complementary bonds between men;… women had no place in the new political and social order except as markers of social relations between men.”

Hunt's observation recalls Sedgwick's analysis of how male bonding is mediated through the figure of woman. In nationalist discourse representing the homeland as a female body has often been used to construct a national identity based on male bonding among a nation of brothers.

For the past seven years, Iran has been in the grip of a literary event. A novel, Bamdad-i khumar (The Morning After), written by a hitherto unknown woman, Fattanah Hajj Sayyidjavadi, (b. 1945), became an overnight best-seller and has so remained. From the start, the book has generated heated debates over its literary and socio-cultural merits. Most critics and readers have very strong opinions about the novel. One reader, another first-time writer, was so deeply angered by what she considered to be the novel's exaggerated female-centeredness and its unfairness to men that she decided to rewrite the novel through the voice of its male anti-hero.

Frontier Fictions begins with the now famous scene of Muhammad Riza Shah's departure from Iran on 16 January 1979. It recalls his father's departure thirty-seven years earlier, and the similar reported stories, that each monarch “departed with a box of Iranian soil tucked away in their belongings”(3).

Qajar Iran (1785-1925) began with notions of beauty that were largely gender-undifferentiated; that is, beautiful men and women were depicted with very similar facial and bodily features. Sometimes the only way one can tell who is male or female is through style of headgear. Other times it remains very difficult to tell if we are looking at a man or a woman.

In written sources, the same adjectives, such as moon-faced (māh ṭalᶜat), rose-faced (gul rukhsar), cypress-statured sarv qāmat or sarv qad), ruby lips (laᶜl lab), bow-eyebrows (kamān abrū), or alternatively crescent eyebrows (hilāl abrū), black-scented hair (mushgīn mū), narrow-waist (miyān bārīk or kamar bārīk), narcissus-eyed (nargīs chashm), etc., are used to describe male and female beauty.

In a Beautiful Essay, Titled “Justify My Love,” Daniel Boyarin writes, “From almost the first sentence in my first preparatory course in reading the Talmud, I was charmed—in the full antique sense of the word.” So much so that he did not notice that “they [the characters central to the Talmudic narratives] were all men, or that the texts were primarily addressed to me just because I was a Jewish man. I failed to see the exclusions and oppressions that those facts encode and mystify.” Gradually, feminist awareness of these oppressions and exclusions, Boyarin explains, made his life disturbing and untenable, eventually producing a new endeavor, which he calls “to justify my love, that is, both to explain it and to make it just.”

The dilemmas eloquently written about in this essay are in many ways those I have navigated since, as a teenager, I fell in love with the seduction-temptation episode in the Joseph/Yusuf story.

Some of the classical commentaries on the sura Yusuf tell us that one day the Prophet Muhammad was reciting Qurʾanic verses for his companions. Bored and weary, they said, “‘O Prophet of Allah! What if you told us a story, what if God Almighty would send a sura that did not contain commandments and prohibitions, and that sura would be a story that soothed our hearts?' God, Mighty and Exalted, said, ‘I will narrate to you the best story.’”