Professing Selves

Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran

By: Afsaneh Najmabadi

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Hardcover | 27 December 2013

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Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials-which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being-grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.

Industry Reviews

"Professing Selves is one of the best recent works on contemporary Iran. Arguing that transsexuals' legal and psychiatric negotiations reveal more general processes of proceduralism, negotiation of legal categories, and state formation, Afsaneh Najmabadi challenges the lumping of transsexuals and homosexuals as identical human rights issues, and argues that poorly targeted universalistic campaigns can damage the conditions of life for the people they are intended to help. She works refreshingly at the level of real lives, jurists, and psychiatrists." - Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry "In this important, timely, and erudite work, Afsaneh Najmabadi brings her nuanced understanding of multiple discourses and institutions in Iran to bear on the recent and remarkable visibility of transsexuality in that country. Professing Selves is likely to have a wide-ranging appeal - to historians, Middle East specialists, sexuality and gender scholars, and social scientists interested in issues of state formation and biopolitics. It will be the definitive text on its topic for a long time to come." - Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History

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