Roshanak Kheshti 

Department of Gender and Women’s Studies

UC Berkeley

(Estados Unidos/Iran)

This paper explores the historical emergence of Iranian national cinema on the world stage in the 1990s arguing that the contemporary moment, replete with the super saturation of images of queer Iran, has processually been arrived at through the narrative and tropic devices introduced by filmmakers in the past twenty years, and more importantly, sanctioned by censors in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance through the censorship of representations of femininity and women’s bodies. Some Iranian filmmakers sidestepped censors by deploying the trope of the cross-dressing protagonist. This narrative device became popular among filmmakers who desired entrée into the burgeoning Iranian National Cinema industry enjoying popularity in North America and Europe beginning in the mid-90s, a period in which representations of Iran and Iranians were projected on the transnational screen that resonated with a world audience because of, as Michael Fischer has proclaimed, “a poesis that speaks to the contemporary condition” (2004: 2). 

The emergence of this popular trope coincides with US imperial expansion in the Middle East, the spectacular framing of Iran as “transsexual capital of the world” (Mangez, 2005), and the increased scrutiny of Iran’s human rights violations against homosexuals. This paper attempts to map these seemingly disparate formations in a cultural geography that links their emergence arguing that each contributes to what Minoo Moallem has referred to as Iran’s post-revolutionary postmodernity. If, as Teshome Gabriel has stated, third cinema highlights contexts and not individuals, then Iranian cinema as “third cinema” portrays a cultural context that grapples with various repressive presences and utilizes cinematic devices to expunge, interrogate, and elaborate upon these. As is the case with other third cinematic traditions, these intersecting presences can be imagined as forms of cultural, social, aesthetic and political censorship and oppression that are at various levels both local and global. 

Scholars of Iranian cinema have extensively explored the trope of cross-dressing or passing and this has left queerness in Iranian cinema under-theorized (Minoo Moallem has thus far been the only scholar to recognize the ubiquity of this trope, though she only offers cursory attention to the topic). My paper looks to the tropes of "passing" and "cross-dressing" as queerness in Iranian cinema, themes under-theorized in scholarly work on this topic. Returning to the “new Iranian cinema” archive, this paper reads the queer tropic device of the cross-dressing or “passing” character as a figure that portrays queerness as a liminal space of survival. 

Through the analysis of films like Davoud Mirbagheri’s Adam Barfi (1999), Maryam Shahriar’s Dokhtaraneh Khorshid (2000), Hamaya Petracian’s Dokhtar-e Tondar (2000), Majid Majidi’s Baran (2001), Nahid Rezaie’s Khab-e Abrisham (2003) and Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006), I examine the strategic deployment and performance of gender in Iranian cinema in an effort to better understand the relationship between the performance and performativity of gender more broadly in post-revolutionary Iranian society.

About Roshanak Kheshti 

Roshanak Kheshti is current University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and women’s studies from the University of California Santa Cruz. In 2008 she will be Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California San Diego.