Week 7 Readings

I struggled to see the explicit connection between Islam and homosexuality. Are pre-modern Islamic homosexual practices/perspectives in Iran exclusive to Islam or representative of a larger non-Western region? Despite this confusion, I found both of the readings, particularly Najmabadi’s chapters, deeply engaging. They had me thinking that perhaps the Western world exaggerates the definition of a woman through the use of certain appearances or behaviors in order to create society’s fine line between men and women. For example, Najmabadi states that “Notions of beauty were largely undifferentiated by gender in early Qajar Iran; that is, beautiful men and women were depicted with very similar facial and bodily features”. Who, then, (among the west's man or the woman binary) had to subject themselves to certain changes in order to implement the Western gender binary? Perhaps Western womanhood is designed (through cultural products and behaviors) to perpetuate that binary. After all it is much easier to think of the performance of womanhood than manhood. This would then connect the modern idea of marriage, and a woman confined to her home, with the repression of homosexuality. Both are binaries constructed by the Western “modern” world. Murray points out that pre-modern world recognized the variety of sexual practices as not defining to the individual but simple sexual practices or interactions.

In thinking about how the West creates this binary, Najmabadi’s article informed us of who is labeled and marked . Najmabadi explains, “Yet sexual preferences, at least for men, did not go unnoted…. individual men were explicitly marked as woman-lovers or amrad-lovers” (p. 20). This would never be the case in the west. In the West, the penetrated would be labeled/marked and even accused of temptation and persuasion of the penetrator.