Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith: Transsexuals in Iran

A talk by Afsaneh Najmabadi This event is open to the Stanford Community.

The contemporary visibility of transsexuals, and with it the preoccupation with distinguishing among various gender/sex categories -- especially to separate the transsexual from the homosexual -- has been enabled by bio-medical, psychological, legal, and jurisprudential discourses that emerged between the 1940s and the 1960s. These discourses converged in the post-1979 period to sanction transsexualism. The resulting Islamicized modernity has meant that medical authorities worked with specialized clerics to make transsexualism an officially tolerated category of existence. This complex nexus has authorized a category of non-normativity as a legitimate acceptable category -- a process partly based on transsexuals’ own actions and driven by their activism, therefore constituting as well self-definitions and self-productions. 

Afsaneh Najmabadi is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. With Kathryn Babayan, she co-edited Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Middle Eastern Monographs, 2008). Her latest book, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2014) was a finalist for Lambda Literary Award in 2014, received the 2014 Joan Kelly prize from the American Historical Association for best book in women’s history and feminist theory, and was a co-winner of 2015 John Boswell prize, LBGT History, American Historical Association.

Najmabadi leads a digital archive and website, Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran. The project has been awarded three two-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and w