Beards without Mustaches

Drawing from a rich variety of artistic and literary product from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking guide rereads and rewrites the annals of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic sex system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a powerful demonstration for the centrality of sex and sexuality toward shaping of contemporary tradition and politics in Iran and of just how alterations in some ideas about sex and sex impacted conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, relationship, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative conversation of Iranian feminism and its role for the reason that country's present tradition wars. And providing an essential new point of view on Iranian record, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates exactly how using gender as an analytic category can offer insight into structures of hierarchy and power and therefore to the organization of politics and personal life.

Variety of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Component I. Beauty, Admiration, and Sexuality
1. Early Qajar
2. Nineteenth-Century Changes
Part II. Cultural Labor of Sexuality and Sex
3. The Eclipse associated with (Fe)Male sunlight
4. Vatan, the Beloved; Vatan, mom
5. Ladies Veil and Unveil
6. The Tragedy of Romantic Wedding
7. Crafting an informed Wife and Mom
8. Ladies or Wives associated with Nation?
Epilogue: Feminism and Its Load of Birth
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Credits
Index

Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of scientific studies of Women, Gender, and sex at Harvard University, is author of the storyline regarding the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (1998), among various other publications.

“Breaks brand new ground both in viewpoint and subject matter.”—Intl Journal Of Center East Stds (Ijmes)

"this really is an exceptional book. It rereads the storyline of Iranian modernity through lens of gender and sex in ways that hardly any other scholars have inked."—Joan W. Scott, author of